Nanny Fine, not a "JAP"

The "JAP" is back. On the show "Girls," one of the characters evidently fits the bill. Emily Shire situates the David Mamet's daughter character within the history of the "JAP" in American culture. One bit jumped out:

Perhaps the television character most commonly associated with the JAP stereotype was Fran Drescher as Fran Fine on the 1990s show “The Nanny.” Her nasal whine, love of shopping, and general lack of decorum drove the plots and jokes of the series.

If Nanny Fine was a "JAP," then I've been misunderstanding the term. She's a working-class woman amidst British and WASP elites. She's, well, working. Not a daddy's girl - her father remains off-screen, and isn't her source of income. Plus, she's not exactly frigid. Granted, Fran Fine's cultural identity is distinct, and she's not going to be heralded any time soon in that 'did you know X is Jewish' category in which we might place, I don't know, Lauren Bacall, or any of the more recent ice-queen ingenues revealed to have rabbis in their lineage. She's unabashedly ethnically and culturally Jewish. But a "JAP"?

"The Nanny" as a show is incredibly not offensive to Jews, both because it offers us a rare Jewish female character who's presented as the height of sex appeal (the other: Lisa Cuddy on "House"), and because of the class dynamics. The world of the show has no place for rich Jews or, for that matter, working-class Gentiles, Niles the butler excepted. Jews on the Upper East Side are scrappy underdogs, a set-up that doesn't quite mirror reality (there are of course low-income Jews, but they're more likely to be living in a huge Hasidic family than working as nannies in Manhattan, and in reality, many of Mr. Sheffield's neighbors would have been Jewish), but that ends up being what allows the show not to give us a "JAP."

So if Nanny Fine of Flushing was a "JAP," in Shire's estimation, which Jewish female characters were not? The problem is that the "JAP" is not merely a stereotype of a kind of Jewish woman, but our only way of conceiving of an American Jewish woman in literature or onscreen. A history of representations of the "JAP" is a history of representations of American Jewish women, so much so that it's easy to lump in even the occasional not-princessy examples, as Shire does with Miss Fine. 

Shire's conclusion leaves something to be desired:

Even with many of the stereotypes intact, JAP characters can be emotionally layered and compelling to watch — a fact evidenced by Shoshanna Shapiro and her peers. The Jewish American Princess may be with us for a while, but that doesn’t mean she has to stay the same. We’ve just got to let her evolve.

I mean, kind of? Better a nuanced and interesting "JAP" than a cut-out figure. But as long as "JAP" is synonymous with "representation of American Jewish woman," the underlying concern remains.

And, because I love online-newspaper comments, this, from someone who comments using his Facebook account to comment, because god forbid people not be able to trace this gem back to the source:

The stereotype is around because it's true. Anyone involved in a Jewish community has had the misfortune of meeting these types of women. Let's face the truth - the JAP stereotype wasn't concocted in some smoky Hollywood boardroom. These women actually exist. Let's focus on discouraging this kind of behavior in our communities instead.

Vows, the Gary Shteyngart version

-I totally know the Vows couple! OK, not the couple, but I very much remember that cashier from Blue Apron, largely because she was once part of a chamber music group playing outside the store, which is very much in keeping with the spirit of the place, which is, there is no doubt, the most pretentious food store in the entire world. (A pretentious food store has classical music playing inside. One with live classical music out front thus takes the organic-or-preferably-flown-in-from-France cake.) A gourmet shop, in Park Slope, for people too rich for the Co-op (I once overheard a conversation among well-heeled-looking 50-somethings about their "three houses"), or, ahem, grad students who had written rants about the Co-op on their blog and on Gothamist, had been written up angrily in the Co-op's newspaper, and as such could not join even once living so nearby, as in directly around the corner, it was kind of idiotic not to. Blue Apron also has (or had, when I lived across the street from it, in a kind of disastrous apartment where carbon monoxide was considered a kind of eh situation the landlord might ignore - people, do not live in central Park Slope) a fantastic cheese selection, Baked brownies, lox, croissants on the weekends... just enough to make gilded/suffocating atmosphere of the place worth dealing with. I complained about it when it was there, then, in Battery Park City, where the options are Gristedes or Gristedes, I came to miss it terribly.

That aside aside, from a Grad-Student Anti-Defamation League perspective, nothing like a story of someone entering a doctoral program and leaving after a few weeks to become a barista, ultimately finding fulfillment working at a coffee bar in Grand Central Station. And from a literary perspective, if I didn't know that the bride was a real person, I'd think the whole thing was a story by Gary Shteyngart.

-"Happily Divorced" is such a disappointment. As a Fran Drescher admirer, I'm kind of crushed. The show consists of exactly one joke - the main character's ex-husband, being gay, likes moisturizer, musical theater, and the color pink, OMG! - repeated ad nauseum in slightly different incarnations each time. One would think, in this post-"Will and Grace" age, we'd be past the idea that "gay" = liking "gay" things, and would have arrived at "gay" = attracted to members of the same sex. But there's no evidence of this character, who has left his wife because he now likes men, being even remotely interested in men. In "fuchsia," yes, in designing clothes, yes, but XY-chromosomed individuals, no. And if this basic premise weren't offensive enough, there's a cringe-inducing minor character, a Latino servant who occasionally interacts with "Miss Fran" and "Mr. Peter," whose presence on the show is so dated, so how is this even possible, that the ex-couple's black female sidekick friend (played by Tichina Arnold, who was/is the best thing about "Everybody Hates Chris") seems like a semi-developed character, even if this character, too, is offensive-cliché central. And, if anyone Jewish reading this wants to be offended as a Jew, there's the fact that we have, as with "Grace," the premise that a straight, attractive Jewish woman's natural companion is a gay man.

But even for the impossible-to-offend, the problem with the show is that there's nothing there. It's not believable that the costars were ever a married couple, that the ex-husband's dealing with suddenly coming out as gay after 18 years of marriage to a woman, that the ex-wife's dealing with the result of this, that either of them are doing anything more than reciting a script they've niftily memorized on what is clearly the set of "The New Adventures of the Old Christine," a similar show that is, alas, a great work of art compared with this one. And the premise is based on Fran Drescher's real life, co-created by the newishly-out ex-husband Peter! How is it so off? Mostly though, the show just feels empty, because the non-plot of Nanny Fine's husband being gay isn't rescued by any sub-plots. The other characters (see above) have no stories of their own. Fran's parents on the show are in the Generic Jewish Parents model, but with so little nuance - like when a black family on a TV show is played by actors with no resemblance to one another aside from all being, according to U.S. definitions, black - that they seem to come from a totally different world than the Fran alter-ego. The mother should be lecturing in Jewish Studies somewhere, i.e. is not the mother of Nanny Fine. Where's Sylvia? And Yetta? I miss Yetta.

-Ombré, round two, has happened, thanks to readily available and inexpensive adolescent-angst hair products in Heidelberg. Basically the same as the first attempt, except the tips fade not to orange but to blond - not platinum, because my hair doesn't do that, but light enough that the pink ought to show up just right. However, because I was, against my request, sold the weaker bleach, by the time it had done its thing I was too sick of having hair goop in that I'm going to have to save the pinkification for another day. I mean, I get that they're trying to be helpful, but obviously if your plan is to rebleach just the tips of your hair, you're not losing sleep over whether the hair-color you use is going to give you split ends. Obviously, if I decide to/need to look conservative, a haircut will be in order.