Reconsidering the Jewish American Princess

December 10, 2018 7:17 PM

Jamie Lauren Keiles writes for Vox on Jewish American Princesses: The JAP, as a figure, is a paragon of nuance, as complex as the Jewishness and womanhood she draws from. At worst, she is the dybbuk of the upwardly mobile, the ever-haunting spirit of the Jewish nouveau riche as it tries to find its place in the American class system. At best, she performs her own kind of Jewish drag, reclaiming the anti-Semitic tropes of yore as a positive ideal of Jewish womanhood. I see her as a queen of multitudinous existence.
posted by ChuraChura (15 comments total)

I can't RTFA. I want to. I know I maybe even should. I love reading Jewish women writing about ourselves, our own culture. But as someone who this has been used against as a slur - I guess, a second degree slur? A kind slur? Not a big deal slur? Whatever - who has had to explain to goyim what it means, who has heard it directed at people for one low-key antisemitic reason or another, I can't. I'm all for reclaiming words used to hurt us but there's something about how it is right now --- like, there's a huge ad campaign for Marvelous Mrs. Maisel in the NYC subway right now, it seems like everyone I know who likes good tv is in love with it and I feel like I should be too - but I saw her, a non-Jewish actress in this glamorous giant advertisement for a very Jewish show, a woman who looks not unlike me (but unlike enough me that I'd be cast as a fun supporting character in her show) and I started to cry. In the subway, for what felt like no reason. I don't know what these things have to do with each other exactly but it's so messy and complicated and now there's the extra level of being Allowed To Talk About Jewish Things Because Timely and as a woman, as a Jewish woman, one who has had to deal with antisemitism I'm only now allowed to call my liberal friends out on, I am filled with this exhausted sadness and this sense of loss and this feeling like once again, I'm in middle school.
posted by colorblock sock at 7:33 PM on December 10, 2018 [43 favorites]

This part spoke to me, and I'm sorry I didn't put it in the pull quote. And I'm sorry this compounded your hurt, colorblock sock!

Like all the most successful slurs, the term embodies both descriptive power and judgment. (The word bears no relation to the anti-Japanese slur.) When JAP is utilized in its Jew-on-Jew sense — by leaps and bounds its most common application — it can serve as a means of impartial description, as well as a tool for policing other Jews. (See: “White ripped denim is the JAP look of the moment” versus “We bought a house in Westchester because Long Island was such an unbearable JAP scene!”) ... JAP is rarely used outside the Jewish world — only by goyim in very Jewish cities, and usually playfully so. A second-degree ethnic slur, it is far too acute to be useful in places where people don’t know many actual Jews. On those milk-and-meat main streets, Jews don’t have midlevel designer handbags or custom window treatments; they have horns. There, the top-level pejorative is “Jew.”

posted by ChuraChura at 7:48 PM on December 10, 2018 [10 favorites]

Ah, ChuraChura, thank you! You have articulated exactly why I hate being referred to as a Jew even by well-meaning folks. I prefer to be referred to, if one simply MUST refer to my ethnic identity, as “Jewish,” - in no small part because it usually qualifies “person.” I don’t want to reclaim “Jew”. I wish to be a Jewish person. Been thinking a lot about this recently. I am in your debt. (thank you too, colorblock sock)
posted by mollymillions at 8:46 PM on December 10, 2018 [3 favorites]

When JAP is utilized in its Jew-on-Jew sense — by leaps and bounds its most common application

Not in my high school, but I guess her mileage varies.
posted by escabeche at 9:53 PM on December 10, 2018

The term is such a seething ball of internalised misogyny and antisemitism that I can't imagine it could, or should, be "reclaimed ".
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:27 AM on December 11, 2018 [11 favorites]

Grew up in New City in the 70's and 80's, went to SUNY Albany in 85. I'd be glad to see the term die and become a historical footnote.
posted by mikelieman at 3:21 AM on December 11, 2018 [2 favorites]

The term is such a seething ball of internalised misogyny and antisemitism that I can't imagine it could, or should, be "reclaimed ".

I don't think the author's intention is to reclaim the term JAP. I think it's to describe the women who were called by the term, contextualize them within their culture, and offer a much more loving interpretation than the term itself provides.
posted by entropone at 4:25 AM on December 11, 2018 [4 favorites]

FFS. I can't finish TFA. Like escabeche said, it was quite common for non-Jews to use this term where I'm from, at least in the 80's & 90's. Maybe 5% of the town I grew up in was Jewish and I heard it all the time.

The whole thing gives me an icky feeling and I wish I'd never seen the post. (I still like you ChuraChura.)
posted by wellred at 5:04 AM on December 11, 2018

Previously on MetaTalk. The discussion didn't go very well, but seems to have stuck anyway. At least, I can't recall the last time I saw the term on this site or someone defending it. I came very close to shuttering as a result of that thread, though.
posted by maxsparber at 7:25 AM on December 11, 2018 [2 favorites]

WOW. Wowwwwwwww. That thread. I was lurking at that time as a non-member and am glad to say I missed it. I read about a quarter of it just now and felt queasy.
posted by wellred at 7:44 AM on December 11, 2018 [2 favorites]

Towards the end of the article, she mentions this:

At age 8, I was sent off to sleepaway camp, where I roomed with a cabin of other Jewish girls. The Jewish camping movement is a hybrid outgrowth of a slew of Jewish cultural projects: urban social and moral reform, Zionist education, denominational training, and the general acculturation to American-style leisure. In modern times, these camps have come to serve as a stabilizing force in a diffuse diaspora, forging links between far-flung Jewish communities and facilitating a fun, if not aggressively gendered, form of Jewish socialization.

For young me (80s/90s DC-area Reform Jewish), this was by far the kind of environment where the term was thrown about the most, and her accurate description of these camps being "aggressively gendered" probably had a lot to do with it. Perhaps not surprisingly, the group most likely to use it was their spear counterpart, i.e. largely upper-class Ashkenazi Jewish boys who seemed very comfortable in their relative privilege, whether or not they were aware of it. These summer camps are not only where the misogyny of the term was celebrated, but also racism (I heard a lot about how "the blacks" ruined DC) and the mocking and torture of anyone who showed any inclination to exist outside masculine and straight norms. It was also where I first encountered the depressingly common othering of certain Jewish demographics for any of a number of reasons, although I don't think that was a factor when it comes to this term.

Now, I'm sure many of those little sociopaths grew out of it, but I can definitely see more than a few of them grow into the guys who, unlike many of the girls and women they were belittling, were able to take advantage of the consequence-free lives that (regardless of faith) come from wealth and privilege. Indeed, they probably expected those exact same girls or women to eventually take on traditionally deferential wife and mother roles when they got married..

On review: As I was writing this, maxsparber posted the link to that MeTa, and the sexism of the term both within and outside of Jewish communities comes across pretty strong there as well.
posted by zombieflanders at 8:43 AM on December 11, 2018 [6 favorites]

Ugh. I thought that term had died and gone to hell where it belongs.
posted by 41swans at 9:38 AM on December 11, 2018 [2 favorites]

Me too. It's like the ethnically specific predecessor to the term "basic bitch".
posted by Autumnheart at 2:05 PM on December 11, 2018 [1 favorite]

I read this when it was published last week and tbh was giving it a little side-eye because of how much it had in common with Marjorie Ingall's piece from the day before about Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Maybe it's just a coincidence?
posted by naoko at 2:21 PM on December 11, 2018 [1 favorite]

From reading that MeTa it seems many people originally thought "JAP" was a slur against Asians. So there's another reason for its persistence: it gives people the edgy thrill of apparently using a racially offensive term in public.
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:28 AM on December 12, 2018