Foer days late to the most important story of all time

So here's something I'd wanted to write about for a Jewish publication, but was very much beaten to the punch, which... I'd sort of figured would happen, because, I mean, this story. It's now yesterday's news, but the personal Weblog is yesterday's genre.

What follows, to be clear, is not the article that might have been. Rather, it's the free-from-constraints WWPD version. This is the very definition of my beat, in a way that no other story past or present possibly could be.

Natalie Portman and Jonathan Safran Foer. By now we all know this much: He got the byline, she the pantsless fashion spread in that T Magazine story from over the weekend. It was kind of like that Margot Robbie profile, except, I think, much worse. With the Robbie one, I'd thought it was a bit silly that the standard feminist complaint was that this woman famous primarily for being gorgeous wasn't being asked more intellectual or substantive questions. After all, isn't a better feminist complaint why the women in magazines being asked questions, period, tend to be ones about whom the salient (known) facts are such things as "26," "blonde," "sufficiently good at acting," and "looks good in a bathing suit"? Meanwhile... yes, Portman is beautiful (ahem, understatement), but the reason she's being profiled is because she directed a highbrow foreign film. (Clarification UPDATE: the *profile* is a pretentious/flirtatious musing on Jewish identity and alternate side of the street parking regulations that has been aggregated and parodied all over the place at this point.) But we're still in the world of male-gaze female pantslessness.

The Foer-Portman article, though, presented itself as more sophisticated. This is even alluded to in the profile, which isn't a profile but a back-and-forth email exchange (but intended for publication) between two colleague-type friends (and more on that in a moment). At one point Foer writes (and note that this needs to be specified in a piece given only his byline, ahem): "[...] we weren’t going to be in the same place for long enough to allow for a traditional profile — me observing you at the farmer’s market, etc., which would have felt ridiculous, anyway [...]" Ridiculous why? Because they already knew each other, or because standard-issue celebrity profiling is for peasants?

And then there's the gossip angle, which is too fascinating, and which sheds light on a reason, other than logistics, why the profile may have had to be via email, rather than at the café where the starlet orders and picks at the proverbial cheeseburger (but not real one, in this case, because of the famous vegetarianism of the parties in question).

Anyway. I read Foer's recent short story in the New Yorker. And it was... fine. But it was also a predictable return to that thing in Jewish literature where "Jew" equals a Jewish man; where penises and that ever-fascinating-to-men question about them (cut or uncut?) is the metaphor; and where female characters couldn't possibly play into any of the psychodrama. Not to be all, Philip Roth did it and did it better and so did Arnon Grunberg so why bother, but... Roth and Grunberg did it better, and even if I weren't a Jewish woman myself, I'd be ready for stories about Jewishness that weren't entirely about the concerns of - to use an of-the-moment but in this case entirely needed specification - cisgender men.

Portman, meanwhile, is the subject of longtime fascination here at WWPD. If you're a petite, dark-haired, pale-skinned Jewish woman who's read at least one book not assigned in school, and who has at any point in her life given off that vibe that says, 'Please, men of a certain type, write me pretentious emails' (a vibe that is, let it be known, entirely consistent with "RBF" in day-to-day interactions), you are that type. (There are plenty of us; allow me to shed all intellectual credibility and note that we're what Patti Stanger refers to as "spinners.") But as much as I am that type, I'm also not that. I'm not about to be hired to be the face of a perfume, or to pose in a thousand-dollar sweater and little else. Which is a way of saying that yes it annoys me, as a feminist, that she's pantsless and not given a byline, and yes it gets to me that Jewish literature is to this day such a (kosher-) sausage-fest. But there's also the whole thing of how Natalie Portman is Natalie Portman and I am not.

The end of racial anti-Semitism?

A commenter suggests that I may be too quick in dismissing the existence of racial anti-Semitism in Europe. Which tells me that I should have been more clear: I don't remotely think racial anti-Semitism is done - in Europe or anywhere else. But it does seem significant if anti-Semitism has swung (back) towards penalizing Jews for not assimilating. Bigotries that target immutable traits (real or constructed) are always going to be that much more unsettling.

But racial anti-Semitism hasn't disappeared. This is most obvious when it comes to the whole "looking Jewish" question. Secular Jews - Jewish women especially - continue to be relieved when they pass as non-Jewish. This is still, in 2015, a thing that happens. What else is going on when Broad City's Abbi Jacobson compares doubts about her and Ilana Glazer's Jewishness to "being carded"? I point this out not to accuse these women of self-hatred or of hiding their backgrounds - far from it! - but to point out an aspect of how Jewishness is day-to-day experienced, even by many out-and-proud Jews.

Or consider the response to the first sentence of Lisa Schwarzbaum's recent essay about traveling through Europe on a Jewish heritage tour. The sentence: "Like many who share my hair texture and fondness for rugelach, I am the descendant of Jewish forebears who boarded boats in the first half of the 20th century to escape bad times for our people in Central and Eastern Europe." Readers were horrified. One commenter writes, "That opening could just as well be coming from a Nazi, who was (falsely!) trying to prove that we Jews are genetically different, and therefore somehow inferior!"

Imagine a similar reaction to an article by an Italian-American writer - same reference to hair, but replace "rugelach" for "tiramisu."  Would that be seen as an outrage-worthy affront to the Italian-Americans who don't have "Italian" hair (whatever that might mean!!!) or enjoy delicious, creamy desserts? But the default assumption is that looking Jewish is a bad thing, and that surely the author is upset about her hair texture, whatever it may be. (A Google image search confirms what I'd suspected - she and I could totally share hair-product recommendations.) Schwarzbaum didn't say that all Jews resemble her, or cast doubt on the Jewishness of those who don't. Nor did she even say that most Ashkenazi Jews do - but what if she had? What does it tell us that Jewish-looking is assumed to be something a person - a woman - would wish to avoid?

Probably the most WWPD post ever

-Parental overshare for profit.

-So much YPIS: A woman - sorry, a "white lady" - was middle/upper-middle class, until some life events happened, and she was all of a sudden poor. A turn of events led to her picking up food stamps in a Mercedes, thereby outdoing a certain food-stamps applicant from a while back, whose only crime had been spending $1.50 on a coffee she might have made at home or skipped entirely. But the Mercedes-ness and whiteness of all of this seems to have caused controversy. Presumably because of the broke vs. poor obsession - as in, it's seen as so terribly offensive to claim poverty when you're merely broke that people who honest-to-goodness once had some money and now don't end up somehow getting classified as "broke," as if the cultural capital from having once been not-poor can fix everything.

-Tara Metal seems to have had just the same experience I did upon seeing an image of Jenny Slate. I saw an ad for "Obvious Child" on the subway and thought, huh, so that's what's meant by seeing faces that look like yours. My only disagreement with Metal is over the need to explain that this was the experience of women who "may be Jewish, or Italian, or just blessed with slightly unruly strands that cannot be dyed lighter or made straight without a significant amount of sturm and drang." While it's absolutely true that white people of various ethnicities (including super-Anglo - see British actor Daniel Hill, the oddly attractive villain on "Waiting For God") can have not-so-"white" hair, this has particular significance to people for whom that hair texture has political significance. I know that there's this compulsion, if you're Jewish, to make a point of not being parochial, to explain that whatever you're talking about doesn't just apply to Jews. And... hair politics certainly don't just apply to Jews, but I'm not aware of other ethnic whites having this concern. An Italian-American woman might straighten her hair, but is it understood to be about wanting to look less Italian?

-Miss Self-Important and I may have different politics, but we definitely agree on the fundamental issue re: elite high schools, namely that, as she puts it, "when a school becomes 'too Asian,' we immediately complain that it is not black or Hispanic enough." The "we" being society, not MSI and me, neither of whom are arguing this. My pet theory is this: Some offspring of rich white families regress to the mean (see the second item here, actually...), and this produces tremendous anxiety in rich-white-land. It's not guaranteed that those from any but the most established families will do just fine in the end. But! No one wants to say, outright, that the mediocre offspring of the rich deserve better. It sounds so much nicer to complain about meritocracy on behalf of the poor or underrepresented minorities.

Elsewhere

Is this meta enough for you? I wrote a dissertation largely about discussions of intermarriage in 19th century French-Jewish newspapers. And now I've written about intermarriage in 19th century France in an American-Jewish newspaper. Go read it!

Valentine's cheer

-Jews and anti-Semites in love. Whodathunk? OK, I'dathunk, given that one of the novels I discussed at (such) length in my dissertation was about a couple whose love is actually based on one being an anti-Semite, the other a Jew.

-If Valentine's Day wasn't already making you feel terrible, what with the consumerism and the heteronormativity and the exclusion of the not-coupled, Mark Bittman provides one more reason: underpaid waitstaff. In one sense, fair enough - the system's a mess, given that not everyone always knows (nor is it always even the case) that servers are paid extremely low hourly wages and almost fully rely on tips. And yet, why pick the day that, as Bittman points out, "is the second busiest restaurant day of the year" to inspire feelings of customer guilt? What that second-busiest business tells us is that a lot of people who don't normally eat in restaurants - likely because they can't afford it - are doing so today. The scenario Bittman evokes - the exploited waitress who has to serve you, you ungrateful rich person to whom it wouldn't have occurred to treat a waitress as human were it not for Bittman's op-ed - seems especially not relevant on this day.

-The "Princeton Mom" is at it again, with special Valentine's Day 2014 observations about cows and free milk. The wrong in the op-ed is so abundant that it drowns out the right. (By "wrong" I also mean, "You should be spending far more time planning for your husband than for your career," and yes, at least every other sentence.) Hyperbole sells, as does anything that reminds women over 25 of their objective repulsiveness to men (ahem!), which is unfortunate, because buried underneath the retro and sexist link-bait are some valid points. Both that there's nothing wrong with settling down (relatively) young if that's when you meet the right person, and that it's really difficult to meet someone when you're no longer in school. Whether you're a man, a woman, or any of the other 56 Facebook-recognized possibilities.

The taboos that govern dating among non-students are immense, so cross that with the reduced opportunities to meet people generally, and indeed, options are slim. But it's mostly the issue of taboos. You will meet people outside of school, but, as Princeton Mom says, it's complicated: "You'll no doubt meet some eligible guys in your workplace, but it's hazardous to get romantically involved with co-workers." Co-workers are generally out, as of course are bosses and employees, but so, too, are friends, because it's creepy, in the world of non-students, to hit on one's friends. It gives the impression that the friendship was all along a front for a longterm plan of seduction. Meanwhile, strangers are off-limits, because they're just trying to ride the subway/drink their beverage/walk down the street in peace. Sure, they might turn out to like you back, but if they don't, you've made them feel uncomfortable.

There are good reasons for each of these rules individually. But the net result, with so many spaces safe from romance, is that there's virtually no spontaneous way to meet someone outside of a school environment. It's not impossible to meet someone - there's online dating, there are friends-of-friends - and it's very much worth remembering that some of those who don't meet that special someone in school are actually happier single. But if you're actively avoiding settling down too young, while at the same time knowing you want to settle down on the very cusp of old-enough, then sure, maybe it makes sense to consider it un-tragic to meet your spouse in school.

Intermarriage news of interest to those writing the 2314 equivalent of my dissertation

Millepied's converting, not because anything for Natalie Portman, but because he loves Israel. Scarlett Johansson - Jewish on her mother's side as every lister-of-beautiful-blondes-who-happen-to-be-Jewish will have you know - chooses seltzer over boycotts. Netanyahu's adult son may or may not be dating a non-Jewish woman who is both blonde and Norwegian, making her, by Portnoy-era standards, extra-Gentile. (Netanyahu Junior is also quite blond, but, as we have discussed on WWPD, Israel isn't in Scandinavia).

Incidental rhinoplasty

Lisa Kudrow* just gave an interview that's received a lot of press, essentially because in it, she admits to being glad that, at 16, she got a nose job. The Daily Mail helpfully intervened to provide the requisite before and after photos. Because let's get real - a nose job story needs pictures. In the same interview, by coincidence, Kudrow also discusses her Jewish background, including the Holocaust and her personal experiences with anti-Semitism.

Neither Kudrow nor her interviewer draws any connection between these two items. It's as if, by total coincidence, she had a deschnozzification, and is Jewish. Is this like interviewing a black woman about skin-bleaching, or an East Asian woman about eyelid surgery, and doing so in a way that suggests ethnicity didn't have anything to do with this? And I say "women" because, as they say, intersectionality. Sure, men do such things too, but there's the extra pressure on women to be beautiful, on top of whichever pressure's on everyone to look less ethnic.

I suppose we might look at it as progress. Look, an article going out of its way not to imply that Jews have big noses! Any actress might have had a nose job! How about Rachel from "Friends" - despite what the name might have had you believe, the actress who played her, at least, isn't Jewish.

Still, to admit that there's a tremendous Jewish angle here isn't to agree to the 'fact' that Jews have big noses, which, I wouldn't bet on it, nor am I offering my own as an example for Exhibit A for 'see, Jews can have button noses.' It's not so much that Jews have prominent noses (and it sure isn't that non-Jews don't!) as that when a Jew has a big nose, this is a feature associated with Jewishness, and thus more likely to be agonized over and, if funds are sufficient, trimmed. No, Jews aren't alone in that regard, and may no longer be the group most self-conscious about that trait. But certainly back in the day, when Kudrow underwent schnozz-reduction surgery, those were still the days of this procedure having a specific association with Jews.

*I have a complicated relationship with this actress, or more accurately, with the character she played on TV. Early in the days of self-Googling, I found a white-supremacist website where I was under attack for being Jewish. Or my name was, but they were, it was clear, discussing Phoebe from "Friends," and had somehow gotten the last names mixed up, and were under the impression that my name was that of the actress who plays Phoebe on that show. Cue requisite 'racists are idiots' remark.

That, and for as long as that show's been in syndication, I've had to field questions about whether I was named after Phoebe from "Friends." Which makes no sense - I was not plausibly born in or after 1994 - but once a sitcom reaches a certain age, it's just old, and short of being in black and white, when exactly it comes from is a blur. It might have been from the 1980s, but even if it had been, a part of me is like, you think my parents named me after something to do with "Friends"? Yes, there's a television connection to how I came to have this name, but not friggin' "Friends." It's just such a terrible show, and I say this as someone who really likes some sitcoms and readily tolerates even the mediocre ones. I can't put my finger on what about the show was so off-putting - I think it was mostly just the aesthetic, something between the set design and the hairstyles. Or that people were always conflating that with "Seinfeld."

Jews' "sheer sexiness," and the insist-too-much paradox

At various points in the gargantuan stack of paper called my dissertation, I needed to cite something to do with modern-day intermarriage panic. Because the way it works, in academic writing, is that the fact that I know from living and breathing that the American Jewish community has long concerned itself with this topic isn't sufficient. That's not how scholarship works, nor should it. You can't footnote 'Take my word for it.' So in the process, I ended up finding that the whole 'intermarriage finishes what Hitler started' line comes up more often in references to anti-intermarriage sentiment (such as) than in the anti-intermarriage articles themselves. It's not that there isn't panic, just that it's often less hysterical than its more hysterical extremes.

In any case, if only I'd seen this sooner. I've now read Jack Wertheimer's essays and a couple of the others, but will need to read the lot of it. Mosaic Magazine (which... how had I just found this?) has an very useful array of the range of standard Jewish opinion on the matter, albeit the most informed and intelligent array one is likely to find. (And hey, a UChicago student is among the participants!) 

I have, as you might imagine, exactly ten trillion things to say in response even just to the parts of this series I have read, and maybe five trillion ideas of ways and places to pitch whichever aspect of my response doesn't get channeled into the academic version of this that I'm also working on. And I suppose, Petey, I also have thoughts on the new finding that Jews are actually Northern Italian, although this is really a single thought, one I'd already expressed on Facebook, which is that this explains why my apartment is basically the kitchen of an Italian restaurant, Casa Della Bisou. But in the interest of not blathering on altogether forever, I'm going to narrow this post down to the awkward question that always comes up with this topic: How, or really if, Jews who oppose intermarriage should try to eroticize endogamy.

Sylvia Barack Fishman, probably the leading scholar in the field of contemporary Jewish intermarriage, writes: "Individuals, families, and communities need to show, by example and by word, why Jewishness matters—to create in sons and daughters an appreciation of the appeal, and the sheer sexiness, of Jewish men and women." This came up on my Birthright trip as well, when the group leader asked the young men in the auditorium to behold the beauty of Jewish women. The first part - "why Jewishness matters" makes sense, but the second? There's nothing like a well-meaning authority figure telling you that someone - or some group - should do something for you erotically for that not to happen. While I personally have no trouble believing Jewish men can be good-looking, somehow the statement that I, as a Jewish woman, ought to think this summons the image of Brian Krakow - the guy you know you should like, but can't get yourself to. 

Which brings us to the problem with addressing intermarriage with more outreach along existing lines. As it stands, Jewish events aimed at the maybe-not-yet-married age demographic are virtually always thinly-veiled attempts at matchmaking. College students are invited to attend Jewish "singles" events, as though one can be an urban American single at 19. What if you just wanted to see an Israeli movie, or learn about the Dreyfus Affair, and if you happened to be unattached and met someone romantically, so be it? Why couldn't it all be a bit more casual? College itself, for instance, doesn't feel, while you're there, like an elaborate plot to mate you off to someone on a similar socioeconomic path.

Mostly, I'm just skeptical that unless we return to an era of something drastically less casual - arranged or quasi-arranged marriages, or unless all Jews up and moved to Israel, any sort of large-scale change in this area could occur. Points of contact among Jews can be increased, but without a full-on secession from the mainstream community, socialization will continue between Jews and non-Jews. And if every time Jews are placed in close proximity, there needs to be this overt now go mate vibe, a certain number of Jews with an interest in Jewish culture end up not going to what they fear will be a meat market. 

It would be much simpler to say (as used to be said) that marriage is about reproducing the community, forging allegiances between families, and whether or not you find your spouse "sexy" is irrelevant. But once spouses are to be chosen on the basis of individual desire - which is to say, once a baseline of chemistry needs to be there before either party even considers compatibility in other areas, not that chemistry trumps incompatibility - it's only natural that the conversation about how to stop intermarriage would veer towards the ill-fated project of asking Jews to find one another hot. 

Rhoda Studies 101

So I've now watched from the second (not the first - it's unavailable) episode of the notorious "JAP" Bravo reality show, up through I'm not saying what number. Possibly too late to write about it for a thing that isn't WWPD, unless I find a timeless angle, which... I think I might, so maybe more later, elsewhere. But for now:

The first thing I noticed: the "Princesses of Long Island" - most of them, at least - retain their original noses. A definite change from earlier generations of the same milieu. Is it that they really own their Jewishness? Is it just some kind of Ashkenazi-Sephardic divide, with the former (for some obvious historical reasons I could think of) more likely to have undergone this procedure?

I point this out not to gratuitously bring up noses, but because the original-nose-retention (in the midst of a great deal of artifice otherwise) seems somehow emblematic of the show. The whole unapologetically-Jewish thing. A few seconds hardly go by before we're reminded that the women - who seem basically like reality-TV women everywhere, and who one half expects to start speaking in Essex accents - are Jewish. Did they mention recently that they're Jewish? This, despite only one of the women being a practicing Jew, or seeming at all plugged into anything culturally Jewish, for that matter. The others have evidently been instructed by producers to play up the Jewish angle, to drop various Hebrew expressions that don't make any sense in the context, and seem incredibly forced. One asks all men she meets if they're Jewish, in a way that seems beyond artificial. So basically the same relationship to Jewish-Americanness as "Jersey Shore" had/has (?) to Italian-Americanness. Or the TV-show version of this.

Maybe the show is anti-anti-Semitic. It represents Jews as big drinkers and not remotely clever or intellectual. Overanalyzing everything? Overachieving? Overrepresenting the group in graduate schools? Not so much! Oh, and if the "JAP" is frigid, well, our pal Erica clears that up.

Should I be offended that this show kinda-sorta claims to represent me, a Jewish woman about their age, living not on Long Island, fine, but in New Jersey, which might be exactly the same thing? (There was an intro shot of a tristate-area strip mall that brought me right back to my most recent supermarket trip. And I'm half thinking, 'but I just bought groceries, how am I back there?') Probably. I'm not, but only because of a likely misguided belief that no one would imagine I belonged to that subculture. I'm about 50 primping-steps away from being socially acceptable in that world. But to someone from well outside it, by virtue of being American, Jewish, female, and not a complete hippie, I may well read as a "JAP." Which is why all American Jewish women effectively have to find this stereotype offensive.

As with all minorities, we're probably all the same to outsiders, yet small internal differences seem immense to us. Growing up, I virtually never encountered this subculture for any length of time (once at summer camp, at 8, and then not again until Birthright Israel, at 23), other than to have it drilled into me from day one that I was not and should not ever be that. That princessy-ness was simultaneously anti-feminist and repulsive to men. Not sure how I came to grow up with this message - it seems to more often come from Israeli-American communities. Maybe an urban vs. suburban thing? A clash between those with more cultural capital than economic and those in the reverse situation?

There's a kind of mutual class snobbery between whatever the thing I was brought up as and whatever that is. The only instance of bullying I can remember from my childhood involves that sleepaway camp, where I was harangued for not blowdrying my hair (I was 8!), and having clothing that clashed (is that still a thing?). But the very same Jewish women who are most attuned to issues of gender-and-marginalization are probably the ones most wary of coming across as "JAPs," despite this being nothing more than a gendered stereotype, with intersectionality written all over it. It's complicated.

As Jessica Grose pointed out, this show really harps on the age of the participants, displaying their age with their name, which is not a normal thing done on reality shows. (We don't get the ages of their dates, parents...) Grose sees this as highlighting that these grown women live like children, which they do. But as Rachel Arons picks up on, the age is what brings drama to the proceedings. Time is running out. They're all on the cusp of 30. Which has tremendous significance for them, because they need to be married by that age. The moment all the women are 30, some kind of timer goes off.

Which... I don't even know. That view is hardly unique to this one subculture. But they're stuck in a frustrating middle-ground, culturally. Traditional enough that it's a tragedy if they're 29 and single (and that it would be tragic if they married out), but not enough that someone in the community has it together to find them spouses.

And then you get the show's Snooki (the very short, quirky one) getting quasi-proposed to by her father, with a diamond ring, with her mother present, to mark her 30th birthday. One of those reality-TV moments you can only hope was scripted.

What is anti-Semitic about the show, I suppose, is that it perpetuates the idea of the perpetually single-and-desperate Jewish woman, the one whose very Jewishness somehow rules out the possibility of her pairing off, yet makes her all the more keen to do so ASAP. (You'd know about this if you'd taken Rhoda Studies 101.) The single woman in American mainstream culture virtually is a Jewish woman, so thoroughly has that cliché caught on. A certain New York-area accent and 'Semitic' appearance is shorthand for 'perennially single-and-doesn't-want-to-be sidekick'.

And yet! Women in this subculture do get married. Happens every day, I'd imagine. There are, after all, men of the same subculture, who contrary to what Philip Roth might have you believe, tend to prefer their female equivalents, and not to be running off with low-maintenance WASPs (whom they'd be meeting where, exactly?). These particular women are, one gets the sense, unusual in their milieu for still being single at their age. A subset of a subculture. Yet the show's message is, look at how repulsive Jewish women are to the opposite sex! Who would want anything to do with them? When it's like, a) not all Jewish women are anything like this, and b) of the ones who are, this does not seem to be an impediment to pairing off.

Immediate post-turning-it-in goals

-Get dog groomed (check!).

-Go to supermarket (check!).

-Catch up on emails (getting there!).

-Clean the bath (hmm...).

-And the rest of the apartment (ehhh...).

-Cuddle with freshly-groomed poodle while watching the newly-available "Princesses of Long Island," trying not to view it through any kind of academic lens (no comment).

So Betch

Oh, the New York Times, always the last with trend stories. Except when they're not. Like Jezebel's Katie J.M. Baker, I'd never heard of Betches Love This until seeing the NYT profile of the same. Also like Baker, I wondered if this was all in the proud tradition of things-being-about-Jews-without-spelling-this-out (see also; if these ever go online in a legal capacity, I'll start watching and responding); also like Baker,  I had to ultimately conclude that this is a category that overlaps with "JAP," but is its own thing. Perusing the site, I kept thinking of very much Gentile examples (some very "old-money") of women who fit the bill.

The site is more or less the exact opposite of the one where the (adult) children of the One Percent self-flagellate behind placards. Or is it? More on that in a moment.

Who is a "betch"? She's basically an anti-intellectual (those who don't read the news don't suffer, as I do, from the fate of finding that 30% of white men between the ages of 20 and 50, including 100% of those who are trying to help you fix your computer, look like this Snowden) rich young woman from the suburbs, who may have been one of the out-of-state, higher-paying "coastals" (a possibly anti-Semitism-tinged term, but not necessarily) at flagship state schools in the Midwest. (A sentence I wrote before even seeing this post.) Sororities and Uggs enter into it, as does some kind of borderline eating disorder. I don't think there necessarily was an all-encompassing term for this know-it-when-you-see-it phenomenon, so the various commentators calling the site "anthropological" are onto something.

The problem with the site, or its genius, is that it can't seem to decide if it's a dark, secretly Marxist satire of the "betch," or if it's a gently self-mocking but ultimately sincere expression of that which it's describing. I'm leaning towards "genius" - it has a built-in audience of the women who identify (and who participate in forums and threads, offering one another sincere advice on "betchiness", or snarking at one another for being posers or poor or I don't even know) as well as of the women (and men?) who find it all kind of horrifying.

Because - here, Caryatis, is the cultural-capital question - there's this other set of women from more or less the same demographic who are raised specifically not to be princesses. Some kind of internalized "JAP"-o-phobia, passed down across the generations. Yet they - we - are maybe not so different after all. (Do "betches" read "Into The Gloss"?)

I looked at the list, and much of it applies to women who'd see themselves as much higher-brow or more mature than the described category. Alternate explanation: I'm lower-brow and less mature than I might fancy myself. Iced coffee? (I tend to prefer D.I.Y. cold-brew or made-by-a-hipster over Starbucks, but same thing, really.) Sushi? (And other Japanese food! Sushi-and-only-sushi is so passé. But ugh, yes.) Neon? (Nike Frees? I never.) Equestrian chic? And argh, I don't even get an out for having married someone from a different country.

I'd be disqualified from betchiness, it seems, if for no other reason than that going out to dinner at an upscale restaurant with a large group of expensively-dressed girlfriends doesn't sound like the absolute best possible way to spend an evening. (Why? Because that was all-girls middle school. I experienced a lifetime of "sorority" in the Greek sense between the ages of 10 and 13, which was enough.) And fine, for financial reasons as well.

The best thing about the site - also, needless to say, its worst - is its lack of sensitivity. Sometimes this unquestionably veers off into wildly offensive. Other times, though, there's a frankness, a telling-it-like-it-is, not often found elsewhere.

"On paper" UPDATED

Sometimes we all make assumptions. For instance, I'd assume an American Jewish woman of a certain generation would be familiar with what the "Jewish American Princess" stereotype consists of. As I have been informed that not all readers of my blog are American Jewish women around my mother's age (that my blog is read by more than just my mother), I will link to the Wikipedia entry on the phenomenon, which is incomplete but gives some sense. What it doesn't get into is the sexual aspect of the "JAP" cliché. The "JAP," according to tradition, wants a husband desperately for money and status, but is frigid and uptight. She's preoccupied with what she looks like, but her husband needs to be a hard-working pushover, and Jewish, and that's about it. 

Which is why I'm completely flummoxed by (JTL, avert your eyes) this recent Dear Prudence exchange:

Dear Prudence, 

I am a 31-year-old American Jewish woman who has been studying veterinary medicine and working in London for the past several years. I am ready to start a family. I recently ended a casual relationship with a man I desperately loved, but who wasn’t ready to commit. Enter David, a tall, blue-eyed Jewish doctor I would be proud to introduce to my family (the antithesis of the dark, hipster man I still think about). David is sweet and kind and everything I could ask for, on paper. We are a couple of months in and he wants to meet my mom, but I'm scared my family will love him so much I will be pressured into marrying him. Here’s my problem: He's bald. When we have sex it just sometimes feels like I'm banging an infant or grandpa and I get weirded out. I have never imagined being with a bald man for the rest of my life. I'd also like him to work out more than he does—I’m a workout junkie. All superficial things, but isn't passion and attraction an essential ingredient to a happy relationship? How do I improve a man without demoralizing his ego? How do I get past the baldness without resorting to asking him to wear a hat?

—Self-professed JAP

Dear Self,

I despise the Jewish American Princess stereotype, but in your case, you deserve the crown and scepter. Out of nowhere, just as you feel your egg timer ticking, comes a tall, kind, blue-eyed Jewish doctor who’s crazy about you. I’m ready to plotz! But you want to kick him out of bed because of a weak follicular showing. Surely you know that one day, no matter how much you can bench press, your breasts will deflate. I sincerely hope that your husband—if you find one—won’t complain that he feels as if he’s having sex with his grandmother. [....]

OK, so. Several issues here. One being that baldness and/or paunch are kind of the name of the game if you're a heterosexual woman over the age of 16 and not a supermodel. Heck, even if you are a supermodel. And even if your dude is currently musclebound and with a full head of hair, look around at men of various ages and it will become clear that what's common at 20 is less so at 50. So I wouldn't think to anchor male beauty to either of these. As Yoffe notes, aging happens to us all, and in predictable enough ways. That said, men don't seem to have a problem anchoring female beauty to qualities more often found in the young, even when assessing women they perfectly well know to be middle-aged. A further that-said: there's a case for being attracted to your partner initially, and then taking what comes aging-wise later on. Blather blather blather, but allow me to get to the point:

How does Yoffe, given her professed familiarity with the stereotype (and she's from the generation most plagued by it, I suppose), not see that it is in no way "jappy" to care what a man you're intimately involved with looks like? The "JAP" is utterly uninterested in intimacy or sexual pleasure. It is the precise opposite of the "JAP" stereotype to meet a nice Jewish doctor and think not, OMG when am I getting the ring, but, does he do it for me physically? And life being unfair, part of sexual attraction for the non-blind is, do you like looking at this person while you're having sex with them? Does this add to or detract from the experience? Obviously, not all women will consider baldness and paunch detractions - just as there are gay men who prefer the bear look, there are probably that many more straight women who simply associate that look with masculinity and would be suspicious of a never-aging Keanu Reeves type. (Poor Keanu, must be tough for him to get a date.) But the letter-writer, for whatever reason, is not one of those women. She spells out that she does not like looking at this guy while they are having sex.

These are, then, two separate questions: a) is she being a "JAP"? and b) is she being reasonable? Re: the first, it's an obvious no, this is exactly what a "JAP" does not do. If she cared what he looked like to her friends, if there were a status angle, maybe, but if this is about their most private moments together, nope, definitely not. Re: the second, it's less straightforward. It kind of hinges on whether "I am ready to start a family" refers to her desire to do so, in which case it might be time to reconsider an aversion to what heterosexual men in a 31-year-old woman's dating pool tend to look like, or whether this is something she feels she must say, but the occasional fling with a Keanu would be more to her liking. And I'd kind of guess the latter - the 'too-picky' single woman is often enough a woman who doesn't want domesticity but feels somehow obliged to pretend that she does.

UPDATE

So the consensus in the comments (which are, btw, impossible to read what with the scrolling, and mostly about the other letters) seems to be that a Jewish doctor with a British accent is the prize of the millenium. There are female commenters prepared to run off with him sight unseen. And it's readily agreed that this woman is a "JAP," because apparently "JAP" just means a single Jewish woman not aware that her kind ("JAPs" or Jewish women generally?) is so repugnant to men that she must take what she can get. The consensus is that a woman who expresses preferences for what the man she's sleeping with looks like is being superficial, that these preferences are something to be embarrassed about.

The only reasonable points around were that a) the guy deserves to be with someone who finds him attractive (although the reasonableness was mitigated by the accompanying assertion that this guy - sight unseen, remember! we have not heard him speak, observed his manner... - would have a million women lined up to marry him), and b) she might want to hold off introducing this man to her family.

Mostly, though, it's the usual man-shortage nonsense directed at single women generally and single Jewish women in particular. All of which leads me to revise my initial take - this woman should move on. Better for everyone involved.

When the hottest German is a Jew

So Guy de Maupassant and Paul Bourget not only share space in my dissertation, but also had the same Russian-Jewish lover. The rest of the afternoon will be spent reading the entire book someone has written about Maupassant's apparently vibrant and Judeo-centric love life. From the other reading I've done on this topic, I'm picturing something like "Portnoy's Complaint," but the other way around.

Well, Germany's having its own belle Juive moment. Jezebel cries sexism, which is on the one hand fair, and on the other, there's a bit more to this story, perhaps? It's kind of amazing, given that less than a century ago, a somewhat influential political party in Germany hosted a genocide largely based on the idea that Jews were hideous, that a Jewish woman - and a Jewish woman who does not look like Bar Refaeli, but like half the girls I went to high school with - is winning a desirability contest there among female politicians. Not sure what to conclude from this, so we're going to stick with "kind of amazing."

WWPD elsewhere

Want to know where Woody Allen meets fashion-bloggery? Click here. 

This is most exciting, both because it's been ages since I've gotten off my grad-student behind to do some freelance writing, and because my dissertation is largely about articles in the (nineteenth-century, French) Jewish press. I am at one with my subjects! Someone can cite me as a primary source in their dissertation 150 years from now!

Factoid of the day

Wilhelm Marr, the man who coined the phrase "anti-Semitism" in 1879, came to embrace/launch said ideology despite - or because of? - not one but three failed marriages to Jewish or part-Jewish women (!!! - an exclamation point for each Semitic wife). 

Shabbat Shalom indeed

WWPD would not be WWPD if I did not set aside the latest JStor find for a moment to share with you, my readers, something that hits upon all WWPD themes all at once: women's fashion, male beauty, Israeli secularism, and, of course, public transportation. Via Gawker (which brings us to the slightly-NSFW version here), an Israeli fashion spread and making-of video, inspired by - and aimed at critiquing - the women-on-bus issues happening in ultra-Orthodox areas in Israel and beyond, with women being forced to sit in the back, and all that misogyny. The spread involves a female model in very pretty dresses, surrounded by a pack of lustful, chiseled, ex-IDF-type male models, mostly clean-shaven but in quasi-Hasidic garb, in one case with just the satin coat. Well why the heck not! It's for a good cause!

Rhoda scholarship: a staycation post

Hulu provides only the first three seasons of the "Mary Tyler Moore Show," and the volume on my computer doesn't get very loud, so I've missed a lot, even of the part I've ostensibly seen. The show continues for a couple more seasons, I think, but I'd already lost interest. Mary had begun to evolve into less of a pushover, but the overall strangeness of the show doesn't go away, an ambiguity that doesn't make the show more interesting so much as less-thought-through-seeming. Is Mary this feminist, modern heroine for choosing to be single? Is she really choosing to be single if half the episodes are about her futile quest for a husband? So I let Hulu be my guide and moved along to spinoff "Rhoda," with low expectations.

Contrary to what I'd have expected, Rhoda is almost... pleasant in "Rhoda." This is because the Rhoda persona gets shifted over to Rhoda's younger sister, Brenda, so Rhoda can't be the show's Rhoda anymore. In Brenda's hands, the self-deprecation is at least coming from an actress who actually looks (or is made up convincingly to look) how MTM's Rhoda is described (and endlessly describes herself) as looking: slightly overweight by 2011 standards so no doubt strikingly so in the 1970s, and frumpy. There isn't that same frustrating disconnect that usually comes up in these situations (see also: Liz Lemon, Grace Adler).

Also important: Because Rhoda and Brenda are sisters, there's less of a sense that Brenda is the way she is because she's Jewish and speaks with a New York accent. By default, on account of there's the two of them plus their mothah, the show presents more than one way of being a Jewish woman.

Rhoda doesn't become Mary, so much as she becomes... a non-grating version of Rhoda, appealing to men, but because they like her sassy tell-it-like-it is quality and exotic-lite good looks, not because she's like this free-floating potential wife who has yet to affix her stereotypically-feminine (crying easily, afraid to assert herself) self to any one man. So eager to please, so passive, Mary allows a man who's stalking her after one failed blind date to handcuff her to him at her office and leave with her for a restaurant where, the man claims, someone has the key. Was sexual violence not yet invented in the 1970s? Abduction? And this was meant to be a cute plotline? Oh, Mary... Rhoda's still self-deprecating, but she doesn't lay it on so thick. The way to look at it is, the MTM Rhoda gets split between Rhoda and Brenda, and each half, on its own, makes sense as a character in a way that the original sad-sack Rhoda did not.

********

It's not necessary to see further seasons of MTM to catch on to the startling fact that Rhoda gets married before Mary. If indeed Mary ever marries in this evidently extensive spinoff universe.

Earlyish in MTM, haughty neighbor (and, in my view, best character) Phyllis expresses, to Rhoda, her bafflement that Mary isn't married. Rhoda asks her if she's also surprised that she, Rhoda, is single, and she says no. Rhoda responds that Phyllis should go explain why Rhoda's still single to Rhoda's mother.

That Rhoda is single is treated as so inevitable as to be almost scientific fact. How could a Rhoda ever snag a man? Whereas with Mary, being single is a tentative (I say tentative, because she still ostensibly wants nothing more than marriage, but to the right man) feminist step. It means something - it speaks to Mary's own "agency" - that she's not married. Rhoda's just like that. The one time (thus far) a man - scandalously, Phyllis's brother - who's set up with Mary ends up meeting and preferring Rhoda, he's gay. Phyllis is delighted to learn that her brother likes men, because this means he's not going to marry Rhoda, her greatest fear. But what concerns us here is that Rhoda is, in MTM, the "fag hag" cliché, even long before this episode, so by the time the big (and no doubt shocking in 1970-whatever) reveal is made, it's not all that mind-blowing. We know, from her non-stop ogling of good-looking men, that Rhoda isn't single because she's gay.

So on her own spinoff, Rhoda gets married, but she doesn't go about it in a passive, Mary-like way. She asks out and, a few episodes later, proposes to her husband who, far from being a pushover, is this super-assertive, hyper-masculine dude with a ton of chest hair, as 1970s fashions don't hide. Everything, I mean everything, is dealt with in what I suppose is a pre-Reagan America way that comes across as modern and progressive to me, in 2011, more so than anything on TV lately. Birth control and premarital sex? Not non-issues, but not danced around nervously. Rhoda's dude isn't Jewish, and this kind of matters but kind of doesn't to her parents, in a way that seems totally true to life. (Although if he isn't Jewish, what are we to believe he is instead? He looks like 80% of the youngish men on the beach in Tel Aviv.)

Most of all, when Rhoda tells her dude she wants to marry him, rather than just live with him, she's both determined and, well, frank. There's no neurosis, there's no ultimatum, there are no tears. There isn't even quite fauxbivalence. She explains that she doesn't see herself as someone who'd care about this (not because she's a snowflake, but because it's the 1970s and she's in her early 30s, which in her world makes her very much feminist career woman or, depending who's asked, "old maid"), but she's discovered about herself that she does.

That Rhoda, not Mary, gets married makes me think of the Man Repeller personal-style blogger's recent announcement that she's engaged. Leandra Medine, also discussed here, blogs using a persona that's oh so Rhoda-then-Brenda. Medine is Jewish, young but well over 18, and lives in New York with her family. The ostensible point of the blog is that Medine embraces fashion not despite trendy outfits' lack of overlap with what straight men find sexy, but in full celebration of that, which is still, of course, defining dress in terms of, well, the male gaze, but which is a fun response to the irritating sort of straight man who asks why on earth women would wear things that men don't like.

On that blog, there's a great deal of Jewish-humor-inflected self-deprecation, even though Medine is, to phrase this as an understatement, conventionally attractive. If that stance makes sense coming from Brenda, some sense but not much when coming from Rhoda or Liz Lemon (not a Jewish character or actress, but what difference does it make?), it makes approximately zilch when coming from Medine. But presumably that stance alone, the choice of self-identification as hag, is enough to repel.

Competing theory: do coy self-deprecators get men not despite being like that, but because this behavior is appealing to heterosexual men? Or at least more appealing than women who are a) indifferent to their physical appearance (something men might think would be their preference, but that in practice amounts to indifference to dating men or women), or b) openly confident about their looks? Is a veneer of half-faked insecurity, ala Rhoda, ala Liz Lemon, a trait that signals a woman isn't too confident and thus threatening/universally-sought-after, but also that she isn't too pathetic, because she is amused, rather than in a funk, about her imperfections? Is this persona, assuming the right note is hit, basically the personality version of the sexy woman in a men's dress shirt and nothing else?

"[A] commercialized selfish jewess"

The Christmas thing. As I've explained before, and will need to do each year, there are a whole lot of Jews in this country (hi!) who were raised, perhaps inadvertently, with the understanding that non-celebration of Christmas is the central tenet of Judaism. You can explain to such individuals that Christmas is pagan/secular/commercial, or that there are far more important facets of Official Judaism than not celebrating Christmas, if that even ranks at all, or that there are far more positive ways of promoting being Jewish than making it about not having fun when everyone else is. But it's useless. If this is where you're coming from, if this is your experience, you can be neck-deep in Clams Casino on Yom Kippur and aghast at the idea of your halls being decked come December.

The seemingly bizarre notion that Judaism=non-celebration-of-Christmas isn't that strange, really, and is rooted in childhood. Because you're not engaged in theological discussions with your classmates, the way you know their religion, assuming a secular-ish, mixed-faith environment, comes down to one question: Christmas or Chanukah, or more essentially, Christmas or not. If this has always been your identity, it will not strike you as odd.

In the past, Emily "Prudence" Yoffe has sympathized with Jewish partners who aren't so into the Christmas thing. So the following letter-writer might be forgiven for thinking - mistakenly, it turns out - that Yoffe would find her approach to the holiday something other than insane:

I am Jewish, my husband is not. We were married by a rabbi, attend synagogue, and have a Jewish home. Our son, born this year, had a bris. My husband's parents live in a rural town across the country and know no other Jews. They have been open and welcoming and traveled at great expense and difficulty to our son's bris. But we have run into a problem with the upcoming Christmas, which we will spend with them. We intend to explain to our son that Christmas is Grandma and Papa's holiday, and accordingly we asked my mother-in-law to wrap any gifts for him in Hanukkah paper. My mother-in-law insists that Christmas has become a secular holiday and cannot understand why our son should not enjoy Christmas as her own son did. We see them rarely, so I do not want to taint the holiday with a stern message to them. I think our suggestion is a good compromise that allows their grandson to celebrate the holiday with them with minimal confusion and is consistent with the decisions we reached. How can I help my mother-in-law respect our wishes?

Mom, in other words, has a touch of the nuts. If you marry someone who isn't Jewish and hasn't become Jewish, you relinquish your right to raise your children in full non-celebration-of-Christmas. Mom could explain to the in-laws about Judaism-as-non-celebration-of-Christmas, but who's to say a) that she could articulate it as precisely as I have on this here blog (and her wrapping-paper idea suggests not), or b) that they'd know what on earth she was on about if she did. But she is now a part of a family that is not entirely Jewish. This is different from being a citizen of a country that is not entirely Jewish. These rural folk who've never seen another Jew are her relatives, and what she needs to respect isn't any "Christmas is a secular holiday" nonsense, but that Christmas is a holiday celebrated, for whatever reason, by some of her relatives. She doesn't get to pretend that the entire family is Jewish when it isn't, especially when some of the relatives expected to join the masquerade have only the faintest notion of what "Jewish" is.

The Slate commenter responses to the nutty mom, however, are just as off as she is. Oh how cruel, that the Jewish mom isn't embracing diversity! When this is a pretty clear-cut case of a tiny minority's ways up against the mainstream culture. If the in-laws celebrated something that was also unusual and particular, but not Jewish, if Kwanzaa or the Chinese New Year were at stake, that would be its own matter. (One can read, in another recent Slate "Life" column, about some of the Christmastime traditions I married into but have not, alas, embraced as my own. A meta-diversity-issue if there ever was one.) But here, between Real American Christmas and its Jewish shadow holiday, there's a whopper of a power imbalance. To the commenters who thinks it's the same as a Christian kid being exposed to Chanukah, that is, to put it mildly, missing the point. It's all well and good, if your culture is that of the majority, to "tolerate" others. It poses no particular threat to your way of life. (The absurdity of the "war on Christmas" being, of course, that Christmas isn't going anywhere, but is in fact beginning earlier and earlier each year.)

It's not that minorities shouldn't tolerate the majority, but that what ends up being asked is that they thank and thank and thank the majority for tolerating them, and hold forth at any opportunity on how lovely they find the majority's traditions. Mom should, for the reasons mentioned above, accept that her in-laws celebrate Christmas, but her reaction, if nutty, is rooted in something sane.

But the responses that interest me most are the ones that latch onto the gender of the Jewish parent:

You come across as a control freak as I read over your letter. How very sad for your son. I know a few people who left the Jewish faith because they had mothers like this and of course had little to do with their mothers once they became of age. Is that what you want? 

And:

Reread the letter in the voice of Howard Wolowitz's (sp?) mom from Big Bang Theory. Can anyone else imagine how much of a pain the LW will become if her kid grows up and ends up dating or marrying outside of the Jewish faith?

And!

It's paper and that LW sounds just like a commercialized selfish jewess...putting such restrictions on paper and confusing the holiday...her husband is spineless.

Got that straight? The problem here isn't this woman, it's Jewish women, as a "type." Pushy, castrating, insane.

Quote of the day

"In this chapter we will describe the distinctive erotic culture of the Ashkenazim [...]" - a sentence I wish I'd written, but that I found in David Biale's super-useful Eros and the Jews.

Excessive universalism

Imagine an article about "black hair" that never once used the terms "black" or "African-American." Well that's my take on this personal essay about whether or not the author should get a nose job. I mean, it took extensive research to find out that the author is Jewish, something she obviously goes to great lengths to keep secret. I mean, Jennifer Aniston, really? This would be like a black woman writing about hair-texture politics and using Nicole Kidman or Andie friggin' MacDowell as an example of that struggle. "So maybe I should get the operation [to fix an apparently genuinely deviated septum] but not get my nose reshaped. If seems nobler somehow. A boon for feminism, or for noses. Something." Taffy Brodesser-Akner, I don't know you, but I suspect you know perfectly well what that "something" is, and feminism, though not irrelevant (intersectionality!), is tangential. And of course I did the Google Image search - not that you asked for my opinion, except insofar as you wrote about your nasal self-image in the NYT Style section, your nose looks just fine.