Doubled Up With Laughter

Look out for my piece on Jonathan Ames in the forthcoming Jewish Quarterly.

For your delectation, a paragraph from an early draft of the essay:

‘The Jew,’ says Weininger ‘is ready to be witty only at his own expense or on sexual things.’ An uncharitable critic might say the same of Ames. Send him on an assignment, as GQ did, to cover the gentrification of New York’s Meatpacking district and he’ll tell you of an encounter there thirteen years earlier with a transsexual streetwalker. Give him a column in the New York Press and he’ll tell you about the trouble he had with his undescended left testicle when he was a preteen or the nice French woman doctor who broke his heart when she smiled as she dipped and redipped his penis in a brown liquid to help him get rid of a genital wart or the Mangina, a prêt-a-porter prosthetic vagina for men (a more potent symbol of emasculation, you couldn’t hope to find) created by his performance artist friend Patrick Bucklew (a.k.a. Harry Chandler). Ames, by Weininger’s lights, is emasculated as soon as he even picks up his reporter’s notebook. ‘The congruity between Jews and women,’ he writes, ‘further reveals itself in the extreme adaptability of the Jews, in their great talent for journalism.’