Shylock In Drag?
Salkin, Jeffrey
SHYLOCK IN DRAG? On JAP jokes and other modern vulgarities JEFFREY SALKIN Ten years ago, I wrote a song called "Jewish American Princess." It was a short, satirical piece in the Tom Lehrer...
...The Midrash (Bereshit Rabbah 80:7) also tells us that when Shechem seduced Jacob's daughter Dinah (Genesis 34), he did so by offering her riches and status: "See how much money your father spent for one field—so much the more will I give you...
...Or bodies...
...It is she who is blamed for what we see in the mirrors...
...As one Jewish woman in Miami commented, "No one ever talks about Latin American Princesses...
...Gentiles believe it, too...
...Its lyrics, snidely referring to girls with chats around their necks, are buried in an old notebook of songs...
...She gave birth to all the plagues that would beset humanity...
...She says, "Over my dead body...
...The lucky designee threw bagels to the crowd...
...A friend told me that a southern boy from Jacksonville was amusing guests at a party with horror stories about JAPs...
...When he tried to subjugate her, she uttered God's Ineffable Name and fled to the Red Sea, where she coupled with demons and produced more than a thousand demon children a day...
...This is how we shall know her: materialistic, status-conscious, pampered, bitchy and sexually repressed...
...It is time for the Jewish community to recognize the denigration of Jewish women for what it is: kosher sexism, pure and simple...
...Anti-Semitic image-makers, from Czarist tracts to Der Sturmer, delighted in drawing ugly, repulsive Jews—and they always went for the nose first...
...If those adjectives fit anyone in Jewish lore, they fit Lilith...
...It is surely also rooted in the inability of Jewish men and women to see each other behind the barbed wire fence of stereotypes and cliches...
...He was talking about kikes...
...She could harm newborn infants, and therefore amulets against her were devised...
...Cosmetic surgery was probably invented by Jews in the Hellenistic period who wanted their foreskins restored, so as to look more acceptable to the gentile majority...
...Render it sexless, frigid, fat and ugly...
...Who is Lilith...
...According to rabbinic legend, Lilith was Adam's first wife...
...Aggressive...
...They're all JAPs," she said...
...She'll be wishing that the Bloomingdale's girl had not been too tired...
...and ultimately, scapegoat...
...She demands respect...
...Thank God my son is too good for them...
...That's the game Jews have played for generations—the good Jews vs...
...It is a pernicious marriage of racism and misogyny...
...Of course...
...A true story: Someone told me about a friend of hers who recently converted to Judaism...
...It has been almost ten years since I have sung that song...
...Claiming that she was created out of the same clay as her husband, she demanded equality with him...
...A. A vulture picks your pones after you're dead...
...As Anne Roiphe has said in her book Generation Without Memory: Some Jewish men need only look at a Jewish girl and they hear the ghetto gates slamming shut...
...It spoke about life in private schools, exclusive clubs and suburbs, and how to dress, talk and act to fit the part...
...Klein's work has revealed incredible tensions between Jewish men and Jewish women...
...It is not only the result of living in an open society in which ethnic groups mix and mingle at will...
...And their daughters prove it...
...There was even a float for "JAP of the Year" in a mock Orange Bowl parade in the Coconut Grove section of Miami...
...I sang it at numerous coffeehouses, both in college and summer camp...
...Jeffrey Salkin is Assistant Rabbi at Temple Israel of Greater Miami and co-author of "What Makes Harold Run...
...It had never occurred to her that the woman had refused for such a simple reason...
...For only a Jewish prince worth his salt—as the mother believed her son to be—would call a woman for a date at such a late hour...
...moment, June 1982...
...And we have allowed (taught...
...I'm talking about those Jewish women from New York...
...They are deeply rooted in antiquity, and have lived within our people's psyche for centuries...
...We have lived with the images for years...
...Because in the last few years, the JAP joke has replaced the Polish joke as the guaranteed laugh-getter at social gatherings...
...Jewish money is an embarrassment to Jews—and a confirmation of gentile suspicions...
...She refused, explaining that she was too tired from "shopping all day at Bloomingdale's...
...Often I think about it, wondering why it was forced into early retirement...
...She is seductress, temptress, castrator...
...Las Vegas one-liner: A Jewish guy tries to have sex with his ex-wife...
...It is the Jewish woman who is blamed for reminding us of our past...
...The stereotypes are pervasive and powerful...
...He replies, "Wonderful...
...Because there are now two trade paperbacks on the market with such titles as The JAP Handbook—which is not to be confused with The Official JAP Handbook...
...In short, Preppy is in...
...Q. What's the difference between a JAP and a vulture...
...We must ask: Why is the intermarriage rate in this country so high...
...Or hair...
...What is the difference between Preppy and JAPpy...
...In America, the Jewish woman has sought rhinoplasty as a way of negotiating with the WASP/American standard of beauty...
...When all else fails, go for the body...
...Judith Weinstein Klein, has pioneered the use of ethnotherapy as a technique for individuals of marked ethnic roots to become more comfortable with their backgrounds...
...For if the laughter wins, it will drive a wedge between our sons and daughters that will shatter our community...
...So it has been told for generations, wherever Jews have had the good fortune of living in comfort, all the way back to our sacred literature...
...Both books teach their readers that Jewish women are to be laughed at, and that Judaism itself is to be ridiculed and vulgarized...
...the bad Jews...
...The nose job...
...Old money is good...
...And expect her to be instantly available...
...A week after the mikveh, she was in the hospital getting a nose job...
...Beneath all the laughter, there are layers of anger and self-hatred that have chosen a perfect scapegoat: the Jewish woman...
...Consider: The Preppy Handbook preceded The JAP Handbook onto the shelves by several years...
...How boring...
...My son doesn't need that sort of thing...
...WASP money is good...
...Stories, stories...
...Case closed...
...We create and pass down our own legends about Jewish women...
...Gentiles to play the same game: "It's those Jews we don't like...
...Self-destructive...
...We have giggled through the Borsht Belt repartee, seen the JAP in countless movies, television shows, books and magazines, on T-shirts and bumper stickers...
...She takes control of the power of naming...
...the mother told me...
...And so the legends about Lilith grew...
...Devouring...
...She is the Jewish Bitch Goddess, who personifies every fear with which men— Jewish men—have wrestled over the centuries...
...Rosh Hashanah is the day of remembrance . . . remembering if anyone is wearing last year's Loehmann's...
...She told me her son's tale of woe, a tale that had caused him to write off Jewish women as potential partners...
...The mother tells that story now...
...She is the devouring mother...
...In the Midrash (Pesikta De-Rav Kahana 17:6), it states that when Jerusalem was invaded by the Babylonians, the daughters of Zion adorned themselves like harlots, with painted eyes and lavish jewelry, in order to attract foreign soldiers of high rank...
...Several years ago, a woman in my student congregation in New Hampshire told me that her son, a junior at Columbia, was "fed up" with Jewish women...
...Instead, pride emanated from her voice...
...Simply put—the seemingly uncrossable frontier of status that separates old WASP wealth (and those who choose to affect that identity) from new Jewish wealth...
...Hence, Jewish women have grown up with the idea that there is something wrong with their faces...
...In five years, though, she will be wringing her hands before another student rabbi and asking him or her if there is anything that can be done about her son's impending intermarriage...
...Her grotesque fecundity is a satire of male expectations...
...The mother was surprised to hear that what her son does need is a good mini-course in etiquette...
...But by believing that the only American Princesses are Jewish, it provides a tremendous opportunity to recast the old money-grubbing Jew stereotype—Shy lock in drag...
...And yet, the libel would have us believe that only Jewish women are status-conscious, and that there is something acutely endemic to Jewish life that creates princesses...
...It never failed to bring laughter—or at least knowing smiles...
...The Jews are out to get rich...
...New money is not...
...Thank God he'll have other, richer social opportunities...
...Preppy" has become a code-word in the fashion industry...
...The American Jewish Committee's Institute of Pluralism and Group Identity, through the work of Joseph Giordano and Dr...
...The prophet Amos (4:1) castigated materialistic Jewish women: "Hear this word, you cows of Bashan on the hill of Samaria/ Who defraud the poor/ Who rob the needy/ Who say to your husbands/ 'Bring, and let's carouse.'" There are similar references in rabbinic literature...
...She is not only a demon, but she is a state of mind...
...Apparently he called a woman late one afternoon and asked her out for that evening...
...And hence, we are conspirators in our own disappearance...
...Because I have come to realize that it's not funny, that's why...
...And we believe it...
...The myth ignores the fact that the tendency to consume is widely manifest in American middle-class society, particularly among those ethnic groups that have prospered only within the last generation...
...The unspoken message was: "My husband, nebbach, had to marry a Jewish woman...
...It was a short, satirical piece in the Tom Lehrer tradition: ostensibly a love song to one whose affections were unattainable...
...Jewish men perceive Jewish women as devouring, aggressive and self-destructive, and the women see the men as boring, dependent, selfish and egocentric...
...When she finally protested, he turned to her and said, "Oh, you're okay...
...Just like old times...
...It is time for us to expose the ugliness that masquerades as humor...
...Ornamented, she would seduce men and at their weakest moment, kill them with a sword and cast them into the netherworld...
...The calumny is repeated then: Jewish women are materialistic carnivores...
Vol. 8 • March 1983 • No. 3
