post-post-jew

The blogosphere is still abuzz about Christopher Noxon’s recent Details essay, “The Rise of the Hot Jewish Girl,” or as Noxon more colorfully calls it the “JILF.” It’s the sort of trend story one regularly sees in the pages of the New York Times Styles section, that is to say largely made-up. Here’s the recipe: start with a Jewish porn star with an Orthodox background, name-check a few famous Jewish actresses (Rachel Weisz, Scarlett Johansson), toss off references to two current examples (Mad Men and Glee) plus a biblical one (Queen Esther), and voila, the suddenly sexy Jewish woman.

What Noxon glosses over is that the idea of the exotic Jewess has history much longer, and more ambiguous than Natalie Portman’s career. To find the proto-Jewess, one needs to go back further than the 1990s to 1819, when Sir Walter Scott published Ivanhoe, with its portrait of the beautiful and wise Rebecca (often assumed to be based on American educator Rebecca Gratz). But philo-Semitism has always been double-edged–just think about the evangelical love of Israel. In fetishizing the Jewish women, Noxon can’t help reiterating some old and tired stereotypes, even as attempts to flip their value, lusting over the very qualities–her dark hair, her nose, her loquaciousness–that others have found repulsive. It’s worth noting here that Noxon himself is not Jewish–though he is married to Jenji Kohen, the Jewish creator of Weeds. Still there’s something a little creepy in hearing him wax archly about the appeal of the “ladies of the tribe,” as though they were all interchangeable.

The problem is less that Noxon attempts to identify a trend but that he skirts over the nuances. Surely, Noxon is onto something as far as Mad Men is concerned. Who could have predicted in season one that Don Draper would fall for the aloof and alluring Rachel Menken? Glee, too, has created something of an anti-heroine in Rachel Berry, a success-driven Streisand-in-the-making (seriously, listen to actress Lea Michelle’s oddly captivating rendition of “Don’t Rain On My Parade“). But the writers of both shows were careful to touch on stereotypes, at the same time puncturing them. There’s no doubt both Rachel’s are recognizably Jewish, but there’s something consistently surprising about them, too. That’s the difference between a caricature and a character–between following the scripts of stereotypes and creating something new.

Today’s session centered on nostalgia for place as a central trope in Jewish identity, community, and culture since World War II. We started with the “old neighborhood”–specifically a longing for the Lower East Side, what Irving Howe termed “the world of our fathers.” As Hasia Diner shows in her wonderful study Lower East Side Memories, American Jews of the 1960s and 70s began looking increasingly to the neighborhood around Hester, Orchard, Rivington, and Delancey as the essential and authentic “homeland” of American Jewry. This mnemonic move, of course, overlooked many of the realities of life in the Lower East Side–for one that it was never exclusively Jewish–and privileged certain lives and narratives as both more American and more Jewish than others. (How shocking it is to learn that until 1880, the U.S. city with the largest Jewish population was Charleston!)  But I’m less interested in considering whether we’re “right” to idealize the Lower East Side, than I am in thinking about how Jewish identity and culture changes depending on when and where we start our usable past.

At the same time that American Jews began to long for the Lower East Side, after all, they also began looking back to “the old country,” the world that the Nazis destroyed, as a meaning-full homeland. Fiddler on the Roof, first on Broadway in 1966, then on the silver screen in 1971, and now in countless countries (and high schools), stands as the most significant example of shtetl nostalgia. Yet Fiddler is hardly a simple portrait of Jewish tradition, despite the lyrics of opening song. Rather, Fiddler shows us a world already in the throes of change, where old patterns of family and religion must make way for modernity, for better or worse. Our longing for tradition begins precisely at the moment it’s lost.

The lure of the Old Country has only seemed to grow stronger in the 21st century, as the  success of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated seems to attest. What makes the novel still compelling, and more complex than one expects, is that it is at once about the desire to recover the past and the impossibility of ever doing so in a stable way. The novel is divided into two alternating parts–we get a travel narrative, as a young Ukrainian guides an American Jewish writer on a search for the women who saved his grandfather from the Nazis; and we get the writer’s playful rendering of his grandfather’s shtetl, Trachimbrod. In the end though, Trachimbrod only exists in the pages of Jonathan Safran Foer’s book. Anyone can visit the Tenement Museum for a taste of the immigrant East Side, but we never go back to the shtetl except in imagination. Yet perhaps that very absence is what draws us back to Old Country, both freeing and forcing us to find and create a usable past for ourselves, over and over again.

Nobody is quite sure what to make of the new Harvard J-Term–least of all those of us responsible for content. Tomorrow, 1/4/2010, is the first day of “American Jewishness,” a two-week, eight-session look at the eponymous concept. Here’s how we described it:

This course looks at contemporary American Jewish culture as a popular phenomenon that has developed in the post-World War II era. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, we will study the ways in which cultural identities are performed, produced, mediated, and betrayed across a variety of media, paying special attention to questions of secularism and authenticity. Though this class studies Judaism as a particular, the method and questions engaged are relevant to broader discussions of American ethnicities and cultural groups.

You can find the syllabus here.

The course is going to be very informal. We don’t pretend to have any answers; just questions, a research grant (so much money–you can’t stop that) and room 1 of the music building from 10am-12 noon, Monday-Thursday. All Harvard grad students are welcome.

And then there’s the blog. Part complement, part supplement to the course, we’ll be using this forum as a way of broadening our questioning, or at least bringing other voices in. Like Paul Zakrzewski, who, capturing our cultural obsessions with “postness”, cleverly defined the current (?) generation of American Jewish authors as “post-Roth.”

Call them the “post-Roth” generation. Just as Philip Roth once gave the Jewish community a double hernia–and a jolt of shock and recognition–with the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint, so too, many new writers flirt with controversial topics such as sex, materialism, assimilation and religious intolerance, not to mention the continuous legacy of the Holocaust, to create an authentic mirror of Jewish life today. Some, raised in Orthodox settings, are particularly attuned to the conflicts found in religious lives. Others, perhaps more committed to a cultural identity, explore the social contradictions of our time. Funny, raw, dark, even transgressive: these writers have reinvigorated Jewish fiction with their attention to contemporary dilemmas often ignored by others. (from Lost Tribe)

There’s a lot to consider here, from the assertion that Jewish American fiction today is primarily a vehicle of the representation of Jewish life, to the literary historical claims that the current group of writers discovered submerged subjects.

But what interests us here as a gloss to our course is the idea that a text must be either in the religious sphere or in the sphere of cultural Judaism. Admittedly, this is an overstated reading, but is it really that far off? As Zakrzewski presented it, there is a clear dichotomy between the subject of Judaism as religion and its cultural manifestations, Jewishness. Where’s the line? How do we find it?

These are our first questions.