I’m sure many of you have seen this Onion article:
Area Man Saddened To Realize Short Jewish Women With An Interest In Theater His Type
CHICAGO—While reminiscing about his romantic past Monday, area resident David Simms was shocked and a little saddened to realize that short women belonging to the Jewish faith and possessing an active interest in the world of theater have always been, and will always be, his type.
“God, how did I never notice it before?” said Simms, taken aback by his unexpected discovery. “Rachel, Sarah, Devorah—Miss Katzenberg, the weekend director at the Israeli Arts Center—it’s all so obvious now.”
“Squat, theatergoing Jews,” added Simms, shaking his head in confused wonder. “I’m totally into squat, theatergoing Jews.”
Okay, there’s enough offensive stuff in here to warrant a whole other blog post – the humor in the article is all based on presenting Jewishness, shortness, and (implied) fatness as undesirable – but that’s not what caught my eye. Notice the wording in the first paragraph:
hile reminiscing about his romantic past Monday, area resident David Simms was shocked and a little saddened to realize that short women belonging to the Jewish faith and possessing an active interest in the world of theater have always been, and will always be, his type.
So Jewishness is clearly a matter of religion, right? Not ethnicity, race, or culture? Hmm. Take a look at these snippets from the rest of the article:
“I always just thought I liked brunettes, or was, you know, a ‘breasts’ man…. I’m going to fall madly in love and raise a beautiful family with a short, curly-haired theater buff….” As long as his date is at least half-Jewish, appreciates some form of live performance, and can be picked up off the ground with relative ease, Simms said, he would be willing to see where things go.
Despite the article’s initial implication that a Jewish identity is based solely on faith, it goes on to describe Jewishness in physical and genetic terms. Simply put, the article can’t help but contradict itself.
I bring this up because this exact contradiction has been around for decades and decades. Jews and non-Jews constantly fluctuate between religious and ethnic terms to describe Jewish identity – very often, as in this case, in the same publication. Hell, whenever I try to talk about my half-Jewish identity, or describe anti-Semitism in the context of broader systems of oppression, I can’t help but resort to terms like “biracial” and “racism,” even while I maintain that Jewishness isn’t a race. It’s not the fault of individual writers; the blame lies with an astonishingly limited vocabulary to describe our identity. Do I call myself “biethnic?” What elegant variation should this writer have come up with besides “belonging to the Jewish faith?” (The article uses “Jewish persuasion” later on, which is just as bad.) “Jewish culture,” maybe? I have a feeling that readers would have been mildly confused by that – and then gone off pick up a bagel and the latest Philip Roth novel.
(Also, I should note that I think “tiny, artsy” Jews are hot. Just sayin‘.)
(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)
Um…
Are we being a little over-serious and humorless here?
Completely.
Evan, you’re right. Forget everything I said.
Ha. Ha. Ha.
:)
I would add that I had a similar epiphany, except that it wasn’t an epiphany, because I’m a WASP-y gay guy who wears the fact that he has a thing for artistic guys with some sort of Jewish-ness in the mix right on his sleeve…
Okay, wait, now I’m confused – was your first comment a joke? (Sorry if I misinterpreted!)
Not really, there’s two ways to be Jewish. One is to convert, the other is to be an ethnic Jew. Articles doesn’t seem to parse it very carefully though. I’ll bet they wrote short women belonging to the Jewish faith because it sounds funnier than short Jewish women. At least to me.
My point is that it’s The Onion.
Don’t overthink it.
Yeah, come on, Julie, what are you doing analyzing something that’s funny?? If something is funny, it is automatically beyond analysis, it’s like it casts an anti-analysis spell around it, and if you try to analyze it, your analysis bounces off, and sticks to you. Nyah, nyah.
Or something.
Or in other words, Evan, you fail at logic. If you’d like to try not failing at logic, please come up with an actual argument. See also: Joe.
(Although I don’t agree with you, Joe — the interstitial nature of the Jewish identity, which exists as culture, religion, and ethnicity, is exactly Julia’s point. We don’t have a vocabulary to describe that kind of mixed nature of identity, which means that conversations about who are “real” Jews often become bizarre, tangled and insulting.)
I think you’re missing the point if you think the humor revolves around implying that the listed traits are unattractive.
The joke is the realization on the part of the guy that contrary to his belief that he’s interested in a broad variety of women, he’s actually got one very specific type of woman that’s the only kind he’s interested in — but then his failure to realize that, as pointed out at the end of the article, that type is women who are exactly like his mother.
I think almost everyone knows at least person (of either gender) like this, and the familiarity of that archetype is where the humor springs forth from. If I had to hazard a guess, the specific traits they picked were chosen to maximize the number of different ways they could refer back to the same list of traits without repeating words.
Well Evan, I think you’re underanalyzing Jule’s post which is using the Onion’s article as a jumping off point for a rather interesting socio-linguistic discussion. But that’s okay, it’s the internet. Don’t bother to think before you post.
I understand this issue only too well. I’m Jewish. I’m an atheist. Those two statements obviously make no sense and yet I’ve never had anybody argue with me about them (well, except my mother). I think that because Jews have spent centuries being marginalized, we’ve focused on family and community which has in turn led to the creation of a very strong cultural ethos. All my grandparents came to America from shetls in the Pale as did many of the other grandparents of my friends. And those who didn’t, came from somewhere else in Eastern Europe. I can still remember my shock at 13 when I first met a Jewish grandparent (a Sephardic Jew whose family had been here since colonial times) with an American accent.
So abandoning belief in religion and supreme beings was relatively easy, abandoning the table at Passover impossible.
AndiF, I am also a firm atheist and a Jew, though I am still figuring out exactly how to work that out in practice ;)
Charlequin said it best: the whole article revolves around the punch line at the end.
I think the point is that many Jewish stereotypes are so bizarre that in many cases the picture they paint is kind of… odd and a little bit silly, and not terribly impressive. And certainly not sexy.
So it’s pretty easy to paint a gag with that. Some people would get a giggle out of the very idea of a Jewish basketball player, for example.
So yeah, saying “I’m into Jewish women? Wierd” highlights the absurdity of this, because of the unspoken understanding that Jewish women aren’t sexy… they’re odd, strange little people.
And really, I think all our terms for racism, anti-semitism, etc. are ignoring the fact that it’s about culture. Race just makes the culture assumed. Most modern anti-black bigots don’t hate black people for being black, they hate black culture and assume that any black person is a part of black culture. That’s why Barack Obama gets a pass from some of them – because he obviously isn’t from “the hood” and all.
I mean, what do you call the days of NINA signs? Was that about racism? About anti-Catholicism? Or was it just that people hated the Irish as a culture?
Same with Jews. The religion and ethnicity are simply indicators – the actual hatred and stereotypes are generally directed at the culture and community.
Silenced, I think you’re wrong. If anti-semitism were about culture, then we wouldn’t have assimilated Jews being rooted out at various periods in history as if they were secret infiltrators.
Also, I think your comments on the stereotype of Jews as “odd, strange little people” are themselves… strange. At best, it’s a partial representation of the Jewish stereotypes, which have included both descriptions of Jewish men and women as hideous, and also descriptions of “Jewesses” as gorgeous seductresses of good Christian men.
I’m not getting a strong sense that you have a historical or in-depth understanding of anti-semitism, and you might want to defer to some of the Jews in this thread (or making this post).
Of course I’m not talking about historical things, since The Onion is not a historical work.
I’m talking about the contemporary ideas, where the Jewish stereotype is Seinfeld.
A lot of the jokes in the Onion piece are definitely about shortness being generally considered unattractive.
I’ll give the Onion some points for allowing that male sexuality isn’t nearly as simple as the mass media implies. It seems to be balancing between “he is ridiculous– why doesn’t he prefer cheerleaders?” and “you people are idiots for not noticing that he’s ordinary”.
Yeah, Jewishness is complicated, even if we limit the discussion to American Ashkenazi Jews.
Andif, I don’t think the Jewish focus on practice rather than faith is a result of being marginalized. As far as I can tell, making faith central is a feature of a lot of Christianity, but isn’t the default for religion.
Silence is Foo, I think ethnicity is very important, but in the modern world, there’s an overlay of actual racism and religious bigotry. Imho, white racists obsess about what they don’t like about black culture because it’s an excuse to hate black people, and the folks who voted against JFK wouldn’t have felt better about him if he’d been an Italian or Spanish Catholic.
Okay, but that’s still only a narrow band of the Jewish stereotypes that exist. When you describe that, and then say that Jews should be interpreting all writing about American Jewish stereotypes in that context, it’s leaving out a significant amount of experience that colors and alters the discussion. It’s like listening to one person talking when we’re in a room of ten people talking — the words spoken by the one person may be significant, but they’re not the whole conversation.
@mandolin
– yes, it is a narrow band. But it’s the kind that you can use without being lambasted as an anti-Semite, so it’s popular in mainstream comedy.
Dial it back a couple of notches, please. Thanks!
Sorry Amp. I really only meant it as a snarky rephrasing of Evan’s comment.
Nancy, I’m not really talking about either faith or practice. I’m talking about the importance Jews have placed on family and community and how that builds immensely entangled connections that seem inescapable. I think there’s a reason that one of the first yiddish words I learned as a child was mishpochah.
Um, wow.
I think what got me was the initial point about finding things from The Onion “offensive.” And that’s why I said, “don’t overthink it.”
The best humor isn’t necessarily “offensive,” but it doesn’t tend to recognize a line between offensive and non-offensive.
So I think the original piece (and some of the subsequent comments) struck me as a little bit over-sensitive.
I run into this a bit, and sometimes it’s regional in nature. Being a Southern liberal, I do notice a difference in attitudes toward perceived slights, depending on whether I’m around people from the West Coast, the East Coast, etc…it’s not a big deal. It just struck me as a small example of the overwrought idea of “political correctness” that the right loves to complain about re: liberals.
Evan, if the best argument you can come up with against the second sentence of my post is tired cliches like “over-sensitive,” “overthink[ing],” and “political correctness,” then you’re probably better off learning more about feminist and anti-racist movements before you try to engage with them. I don’t know what your background is – maybe you’ve been commenting on this site for years – but your reaction here is demonstrating a lot of ignorance about what the term “offensive” means in this context. (Note: ignorance doesn’t make you a bad person, but it does derail a discussion.)
I have two points.
The first is, it’s The Onion, so it’s very likely that you are thinking about this much more than the original author is. I expect he was much more concerned with the flow of the article than with fine-grained distinctions in the meaning of the words.
The second is that since the sets of genetically-Jewish and religiously-Jewish and culturally-Jewish people have so many members in common, it may be unfair to blame our language for failing to have words to distinguish between the three. For most people, the difference between different types of Jewishness just isn’t all that important, so we don’t clutter up our language with extra words to describe them.
To make an analogy, do Jews have different words to distinguish between Jews who eat pork but otherwise keep Kosher, and those who mix milk and meat but otherwise keep Kosher? If not, then it’s probably because those distinctions just aren’t all that important.
Okay, people –
If you want to respond to the points I’m making, go for it. But the next person who accuses me of overthinking things because I’m using pop culture to make a point (oh, us over-educated pointy-headed egghead academics!) or tells me that the issue I’m talking about “isn’t all that important” is getting deleted.
Oy! The question of whether “Jewish” is a religion, an ethnicity, a culture or a race, or some combination of two or three, or of all four together, or whatever, is so damned fraught! I think it’s important to remember that there was a time when the religious nationalism expressed on Passover–Next year in Jerusalem! (and it was, originally at least, an explicitly religious nationalism)–was, at least in Eastern Europe, so widely shared among Jews that the question of dividing ethnicity from culture from religion, etc. would have never have occurred to people, neither those Jews who might be reflecting on the nature of Jewish identity nor the Jew-haters who racialized “Jewish” and who saw it all as one big, racialized and therefore despicable Jewishness. In other words, I think it is when significant numbers of Jews began to secularize when the question of what it means to be a Jew if you are also an atheist, a German, a “cultural” Jew, etc. became even remotely apt. If I am right, the questions raised by this post–and while the article may be from the Onion, and intended as humor, that very fact means it participates in these questions by definition–result not merely from the marginalization or oppression of the Jews, but also from processes and forces within the Jewish community (even though those processes and forces did not and do not exist independently of the marginalization and oppression of the Jews).
I am not necessarily arguing with anyone in this thread here, but it’s interesting to me that, once you ask the questions raised by this post from within the Jewish community/a Jewish perspective, it seems to me to make clear the extent to which antisemitism is about the refusal to allow these questions any validity or to be asked with any subtlety. That’s what the Nazis did, after all; they racialized Jewishness and incorporated into that racialization every antisemitic trope imaginable. It’s what the Church did in medieval times when it pathologized Jewishness in various and sundry ways. And so on and so on.
“I am not necessarily arguing with anyone in this thread here, but it’s interesting to me that, once you ask the questions raised by this post from within the Jewish community/a Jewish perspective, it seems to me to make clear the extent to which antisemitism is about the refusal to allow these questions any validity or to be asked with any subtlety. ”
Yes, that!
I find many of the responses here from non-Jews regarding the interstitial nature of Jewish identity to be weird, baffling, and slightly offensive. They seem to be saying, Don’t ask that question; don’t blame us; don’t think about this; please shut up; it’s not important to me, so why should it be important to you?
Well yeah. White Christian CEO (Christmas and Easter Only) is the default state. My great grandpapy was a white CEO. He did care if he was WCEO due to faith or ethnicity. Neither did anyone else in his town. And they were 100% of the population so if it was worth wonderin’ he’d a wondered. Why should you care about that of stuff. ?!?!?!!?
On a more substantive note, if you read only skim the post you might conclude that her point is: “This wasn’t funny and shouldn’t have been said because it’s offensive and treats jewishness as both a race and faith.” To me this explains some of the comments. Especially since you can’t have a discussion on the Internet without having a position to attack/defend.
That’s my point. I think you’re overthinking my point.
I think you’re misusing the term “cliche” here.
Anyway, no biggie.
I’m not debating the idea that there’s a weirdness in distinguishing between what a person means by “Jewish,” any moreso than there is with the terms “Christian” or “Muslim.” I don’t think it’s an isolated phenomenon. It’s what happens anytime a religion becomes so ingrained in the heritage and identity of a family/society/people/race/whatever else. When people start to evolve away from the original religious practice yet retain the cultural identity, that’s just what happens.
But I will say you sort of proved the point I made about some liberals vs. some other liberals — I suppose we can add political stripes to the above paragraph. I’m a card-carrying ACLU liberal, but I don’t get bent out of shape by perceived cultural slights in satirical pieces…I’m Jewish but not religious…we’re Orthodox, but we’re modern…I’m an Evangelical, but I don’t believe Jesus is coming back next week…
And so on.
Julie,
1. I don’t think you’re overthinking. I think the author of the piece was underthinking. In other words, he might or might not understand the difference, but I doubt that he even considered it when writing the article.
2. I thought I made this clear, but perhaps my last paragraph befuddled it somewhat. (I should have written “not that important to them“.) The differences may not be terribly important to many people. That does not mean that they aren’t important to you, or important to others, or that they are not useful to think about.
That said, I was responding to the point you were making. I think your conclusion is wrong. This is not a case of our vocabulary being inadequate to describe something which we think about all the time. This is a case of our vocabulary accurately reflecting the amount of brainpower that we choose to spend on the subject. Ask a hundred random people how much time they spend pondering the differences between genetic, cultural, and religious Judaism, and I bet you that 90%+ will respond, “almost never.”
Do Hebrew or Yiddish have different words for the different concepts? I would sort of expect them to…unless the languages haven’t evolved since the time when there wasn’t any real difference between the three different “types” of Judaism.
Evan wrote:
Well, yes and no. Christians, as far as I know, are not identified with a particular nation in the ways that Jews are by both Jews and non-Jews alike. Doctrinal debates and other biases that exist between and among Christian sects, while important within a Christian context–and I would argue that the anti-Catholic bias Kennedy dealt with existed within a Christian context–are not quite the same thing as having to navigate between and among national, ethnic, religious, cultural and, therefore, at least implied political identities in trying to define who you are both within your own community and over and against a community by which you are marginalized and that doesn’t want to allow you the complexity of identity that would result from trying to connect so many different dots. I would imagine that Muslims face, or will face, similar problems in the US, at least to the extent that Islam in US consciousness is so identified with the Arab world that people here don’t really get that there are Muslims with all kinds of national/ethnic/cultural identities.
I remember when I was a kid being asked by both Jews and non-Jews alike, “If Israel and the US went to war, on which side would you fight,” as if–barring the possibility of the US waging an antisemitic war against Israel, where I would have been a target in my own country (and I am not thinking here about wars I would consider unjust and would choose not to fight in at all)–being Jewish somehow also made me Israeli. (And, I would add, that contemporary antisemitic critiques of Zionism and/or Israel often make the same assumption.)
That is probably the most egregious way in which the issues raised by this post has entered my life, though it is of course not the only way. I don’t want to deny the importance to Christians of questions of Christian identity, and maybe I am wrong about what I am going to say next, but I doubt that Catholics, for example, were ever confronted with the same kind of question about a war between Italy and the US.
I just realized why, in spite of being a short Jewish woman who found the constant hammering on shortness very irritating, I also found the piece kind of comforting. It’s because, while it’s basically about the bizarre situation of a man lusting after women who can’t possibly confer any status on him, it lacks the specific hostility of Jewish mother and JAP jokes.
While I didn’t like Jewish mother and JAP jokes, until I read the Onion article, it didn’t occur to me that having the relentless portrayal of people more or less like me as awful to be around was adding up to being painful for me.
Bjartmarr, you’re probably right about the writer going with the flow of the article (though there were a bunch of easy jokes about Jewish women that *weren’t* made), but that flow is the result of pre-existing channels, and I think it’s reasonable to want find out what those channels are.
Nancy Lebovitz, I’m with your last comment. I’m not particularly theater-going these days, but I’m a short, curly-haired Jewish woman (big breasted and fat, too, not so easy to be picked up).
I didn’t find this article any more or less offensive than the average Onion article that trades on group stereotypes, but it didn’t evoke any of the JAP or Jewish Mother stereotypes, which it easily could have. “Nasal-y” and “squat” were the most negative words used (when I have particularly bad allergies, both of those apply to me).
I also agree with charlequen that the humor in the article for me was that identification of one’s own romantic leanings, and how one might think that he or she is open to all potential romantic interests, when one does have a “type.”
The Onion’s main goal, I think, is to make fun, not really caring what stereotypes it perpetuates in the process.
That doesn’t mean it’s not fair game for analysis, and I think that the issues about how to identify someone as Jewish linguistically are very messy.
I like to say I am Jewish by civilization, but that’s just the reconstructionist in me talking.
And I love the idea of a high school boy with a crush on Rhea Perlman.
While I’ll defer to people of Nancy’s gender and morphology on whether and how much the stereotypes grate, I’ve gotta suggest giving The Onion credit for knowing what it was doing with “of the Jewish faith” and “Jewish persuasion”: The Onion’s humor (I once saw a presentation at the International Society for Humor Studies on that very issue) relies a lot on stylistically foregrounding Dumb Journalistic Clichés. So in using those phrases as a springboard for discussion, I don’t really think we are giving them more thought than the author, exactly, inasmuch as s/he understands what kinds of cultural conflicts and misconceptions make ’em funny.
Maybe you’re not technically wrong — since the Vatican doesn’t have a huge army, the question may not have come up — but I think the substance is wrong. Plenty of Catholics have been asked “if there’s a conflict, whose side are you on, America’s or the Pope’s?”
Amp wrote:
Interesting. I did not know that. But I am wondering if there isn’t still an important distinction, in that “the Pope’s side” is defined by a set of religious (and, at least by implication, cultural, political, etc.) beliefs, not a national identity, and so it doesn’t involve the same kind of conflation of “axes of identity”–if that is a term I can coin for this purpose–that questions of Jewish identity inevitably involve. I do not mean to diminish the difficulties for Catholics inherent in the asking of such a question, but I wonder if it emerges from and/or engenders the kind of interstitial identity we are talking about in terms of Jews.
Richard,
It isn’t as much of a religious axis as you would think. I think the sentiment is a hold-over from the pre-19th c. world (even 19th C., I guess, the Papal States survived as an independent country with a military until 1870), in which the Pope’s power was political and national as well as religious.
Even with Kennedy, I think this remained the concern, that the Pope would try to take over the US through a Catholic president. Given the roll of the Church in the Spanish Civil War, in Mussolini’s reign, and in the failed ultra-conservative parties in Austria, the idea that the Catholic Church had an interest in exerting worldly political power through its followers was not as bizarre 50 years ago as it seems now.
Even now, Prince Charles had to agree that he would be stepped over in the succession in order to be allowed to marry the Catholic Camila Parker-Bowles, as it was unthinkable that the British Head of State would be that closely tied to a Catholic who might have divided loyalties.
So, and I am making a leap here from what Charles and Amp have written that I am not laying out completely, it would be very interesting to know if Christians in, say, predominantly Muslim countries–especially but not only in countries like Iran where Islam is also the law of the land–have the same issues with interstitial identity as Jews do, even if the specific terms are different. And just to make the question more specific, it would be interesting to know if those issues arise both within the Christian community and outside of it, as is the case with Jews. (And I am using Christian here in its broadest sense, to include Catholics, Protestants, Evangelicals, etc.)
That is an interesting question.
There is certainly a history of indigenous Christians in Muslim countries being used as a justification for European imperial expansion, particularly in Mediterranean Muslim countries (Lebanon and Egypt), so I could see that easily driving the suspicion of Christians as agents of foreign powers. I’ve wondered before if the mountains of shit that the indigenous Christians in Iraq have gotten post-invasion was a response to seeing the local Christians as being powerless stand-ins for the occupiers, or as traitors be virtue of their religion. At the same time, I’ve wondered if the Christians have overwhelmingly fled Iraq because, as Christians, they were better able to get refugee status in Europe, so they fled as anyone who could has.
Interesting point and one I’ve wondered upon on occasion. Being an agnostic Jew I frequently tell people that I’m Jewish “ethnically, not religiously”. What always comes to my mind when I try to grapple with the intersections is something my grandpa said about Russia (where we are from). They don’t beat you based on your passport (or where you go to pray), but on your face! I think the very fact that Jewishness can frequently be identified by outward characteristics is why people identify themselves as Jewish in an ethnic sense. There’s definitely culture but there is also a sense of being related I think. A sense that we’re all part of a really far flung clan.
It’s interesting though, Victoria, how the outward characteristics that are used to identify someone as Jewish can vary from country to country. Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote about a French Jewish friend of his who studied in Berlin in the mid-1930’s. This friend was able to avoid detection as being Jewish because he was blond haired and blue eyed and therefore didn’t fit the German stereotype of what a Jew looked like. On the other hand, in France he was immediately identified as being Jewish because he did fit the French stereotypical characteristics of Jews: thick lips and ears that stuck out.