Manishevitz and Sake, the Kaddish and Sutras: Allen Ginsberg's Spiritual Self-Othering

This essay explores Allen Ginsberg's conflicted relationship to his given Jewishness. Ginsberg dealt with his ambivalence to his "endowed" identity through "transpiritualism," the adoption of marginalized spiritual identities as his own. Ginsberg's transpiritualism was quite complex, however, for he did not simply slough off an endowed Jewish identity for an appropriated or acquired Buddhist identity. Rather, Ginsberg crafted a spiritually complex, hybridized identity and thus escaped the "given" or "endowed" identity he experienced as limiting and claustrophobic. Exploring the psychological, cultural, historical, and aesthetic causes for transpiritual self-othering, I attempt to contextualize Ginsberg's work in the culture of 1950s America.