The ontology of Yentl: Umberto Eco, semiosis, mimesis, closets and existence, and how to read “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy”

Abstract Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” (Singer, I. B. 1962. Yentl the yeshiva boy. Commentary Magazine. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/yentl-the-yeshiva-boy-a-story/ (accessed 25 March 2017).) needs to be read in the light of traditional Jewish sources. The question is, how does it stand up to modern hypotheses of gender construction? Yentl was originally published in Yiddish and was translated to English in the latter half of the twentieth century. We will see that the context within which to understand the story properly is encoded in the story itself, as Umberto Eco explains in his The Role of the Reader and The Limits of Interpretation. We will see how the concept of a person’s gender, as a construction by social norms, is viewed within mainstream Jewish thought. Some textual issues and contemporary ideas of gender are applied to the story. Finally, the feature film Yentl (Streisand, B. (dir.). 1983. Yentl [film]. Los Angeles: United Artists Films.) is also compared the short story on which it was based as an example of translation and re-interpretation.