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Fighting to become Americans

Name: Fighting to become Americans
Author: Riv-Ellen Prell
ISBN: 9780807036327

by Riv-Ellen Prell

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Overview

Why would an American ethnic group use racist terms to describe itself? Riv-Ellen Prell asks this compelling question as she observes how deeply anti-Semitic stereotypes—particularly gender stereotypes—infuse Jewish men's and women's views of one another.

Prell provides an innovative history of the relationships between Jewish men and women in the twentieth century, exploring Jewish self-representations in popular culture—magazines, fiction, sermons, films, and articles and letters in the Jewish press—to examine the desires and anxieties that perpetuated gender stereotypes, such as the turn-of-the-century "Ghetto Girl" and the"puffy," arrogant Jewish man. She finds that these stereotypes arose in large part from tensions Jews experienced as they left the immigrant experience behind to assimilate into American middle-class culture.

Jewish gender stereotypes are produced precisely at the meeting point of internal and external constructions of Jewishness, Prell argues, and are intimately connected to the changing role of Jews in U.S. society. She traces the evolution of these cultural images and finds, in chapters on the "Devouring Mother," the "JAP," and other stereotypes, key themes of desire, consumption, and the "distorted" body that reveal the dominant culture's idea of the Jew as representing both excessive consumption and productivity.

Fighting to Become Americans is an important book for anyone interested in Jewish American life, the immigrant experience, and discrimination.

About the Author, Riv-Ellen Prell

Riv-Ellen Prell is author of Prayer and Community: The Havurah in American Judaism, winner of the National Jewish Book Award. She is currently associate professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

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Editorials

Women's Review of Books

...[L]ooks to the stories told within minority culture to provide alternative perspectives on immigration and acculturation....[She] traces the nasty open secret of Jewish anti-Semitism in America....[Her] research breaks new ground because she examines the class anxities underlying the image [of the Jewish American Princess].

Women's Review of Books

Kirkus Reviews

Where do Jewish gender stereotypes, such as the JAP and the Jewish mother, come from, and why are they so persistent? Prell explains in this astute study. These and similar stereotypes, Prell theorizes, are a projection onto Jewish women by Jewish men, expressing their anxiety about assimilating into American culture, an anxiety that she claims is renewed in every generation despite Jews' apparent success at becoming Americans. In particular, men's anxiety about attaining and remaining in the middle class becomes expressed through stereotypes of women who are excessive and voracious—whether, as in the case of the Jewish mother, emotionally all-consuming, or in the case of the JAP or her predecessor, the Young Jewish Woman in Search of Marriage, materially all-consuming. Drawing heavily on the Yiddish newspapers around the turn of the century, she paints a portrait of the first such stereotype, the Ghetto Girl, the young immigrant woman who was supporting herself and her family by her labor, and whose efforts at dressing fashionably were invariably scoffed at as tasteless and vulgar expressions of acquisitiveness. Prell devotes less energy to discussing women's stereotypes of Jewish men (e.g., as cheap dates or spoiled princes); clearly, in her analysis, it is women who have borne the brunt of the burden. In this way, the larger society's anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews as "the representation of excessive consumption and productivity" in a society centered on consumption and productivity, were internalized by Jews and turned into ammunition in internecine gender wars. Prell (American Studies/Univ. of Minnesota, Minneapolis), whose Prayer and Community: The Havurah in AmericanJudaism, won a National Jewish Book Award, unfortunately couches her gutsy and imaginative theory in dry, academic prose, but she convincingly engages a range of complex issues about how men and women, Jews and gentiles, perceive one another.