Belittling Jewish Women Is Antisemitic

While enlightened writers avoid anti-Jewish hate speech, many seem to believe that belittling Jewish women isn’t antisemitic. Iconoclast Sam Kriss, reviewing Joshua Leifer’s Tablets Shattered, for example, summarized his Judaism as “a big pile of books, a good recipe for matza ball soup, a pair of candlesticks I never use and an overbearing mother” (New York Times 9/30/24). One of these things is not like the others!

A second, more extended example: “Nobody Wants This,” a new Netflix series about a young rabbi who falls in love with a non-Jewish blond. Adam Brody’s rabbi is so appealing that P.J. Grisar celebrated the “Hot Rabbi” (Forward 9/13/24). The courtship of “a serious, soulful, inordinately considerate guy who happens to be a rabbi,” and Kristen Bell’s “bad-girl, more-sarcastic-than-thou persona” is “paper thin,” parsed New York Times reviewer Mike Hale, but the “swoony” setting and romantic repartee should be cherished as “gossamer” (9/28/24). Author Erin Foster, who crafted this series from her real-life marriage to the son of Russian-Jewish American immigrants, declared today being called a “shiksa” is no longer an insult, it “just means that you’re a hot, blond non-Jew” (Amy Kaufman, Los Angeles Times, 9/28/24).

But in contrast to this generous treatment of Jewish men and non-Jewish women, the series’ adult Jewish women look and act like antisemitic cartoons: scowling, racist, judgmental, and manipulative, calling non-Jewish women “whores.” Tovah Feldshuh’s iconic Jewish mother is also hypocritical and dishonest—ostentatiously religious, she secretly gobbles prosciutto in the kitchen. Rabbi Steve Leder, former senior rabbi of Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles, insists that these Jewish women’s “exaggerated tendencies were written for a laugh” (Shira Li Bartov, Times of Israel, 9/30/24)

Negative stereotypes of Jewish women, along with cross-cultural romantic narratives as metaphors for American opportunities versus tribal loyalties, have been worked and reworked for over a century, including such memorable benchmarks as “The Jazz Singer” (1927), “Annie Hall” (1977), “The Heartbreak Kid” (2007), and many others.

“Nobody Wants This” employs tired negative stereotypes of Jewish women to add dramatic and comic pungency. But America has changed in past decades. In today’s public discourse, Jews are often regarded as hyperwhite—the epitome of a larger privileged, educated class, rather than as a disadvantaged, minoritized and persecuted group. Indeed, some political rhetoric erases most of modern Jewish history, regarding Jews as undifferentiated from other Western “white” ethnoreligious groups—and yet these antisemitic tropes have not disappeared.

Curiously, hateful depictions of Jews–as long as they are women–seem to enjoy blithe acceptance from people who would never accept hateful depictions of other ethnoreligious groups, or of Jewish men, for that matter. Why are we silent when Jewish female characters retain their alien and alienating characteristics in popular cultural depictions, malodorously blending misogyny and antisemitism? They cannot enliven a story already out of date, and do not add to artistic value. We should call out these ugly stereotypes for what they are.