Return of the Jewess

So this article is disturbing. True, it's been terribly damaging that the ideal of beauty in our culture tends to exclude Jewish women. Actually, it excludes most women, but there are also a whole bunch of stereotypes about Jewish women that have made it doubly damaging. Even though I'm not a woman, and am married to a non-Jewish woman, I feel like it's had an effect on me. So I've enjoyed some of the attention Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Mila Kunis, Esti Ginsburg, Bar Rafaeli, etc. have gotten.

But there's a difference between recognizing that Jewish women can be attractive, sometimes even exceptionally so, and making a fetish of "JILFs." It really wasn't so long ago that the stereotypes of Jewish women generally ran along the lines of exotic fetish objects. Those stereotypes were just as harmful. And any familiarity with the history of antisemitism should suggest that this pattern of alternating stereotypes is part of the way antisemitism propagates. It's not progress when the pendulum swings back. We need to just make it stop.

I do like the quote from Joanna Angel at the end of the article, though:

"I've desecrated Christian traditions before," says Angel. "In one video, I put a cross-shaped dildo inside me, but I'd never do that with a menorah—that's just creepy."

Op Ed whines, "I'm not whiny."

Roger Cohen, at the New York Times, writes an editorial, about an antisemitic cartoon in France, where his main point is that he's not whiny. Phoebe Maltz makes the point that, "To get all in a huff because of anti-Semitism is to be one of those whiny Jews." It's hard for me to believe that there isn't also more to it, but that stereotype of the shrilly neurotic Jew obsessed with antisemitism is definitely a major reason we can't have an honest discussion of antisemitism.

Could you be a little more, ya know, 'Jewish'?

We're often told that the Zionist narrative is the dominant narrative here in the West. Certainly, the Nakba narrative hasn't generally -until now, perhaps- received as much attention. But what's often left out is the fact that there is another group, neither Jewish nor Palestinian, which has a strong role in determining Western discourse. In the US, the most dominant group is Christian (Episcopalian, actually) white men, but people forget that. It's as invisible as it is pervasive. So, no surprise that people have so many misconceptions about Israel. Shameful, but hardly less surprising is that so many of those ignorant people are the ones reporting the news about Israel.

Journalist Donna Rosenthal was inspired to write “The Israelis: Ordinary People in an Extraordinary Land” when a CNN producer (her former journalism student) told her: “I’m confused, and our viewers are confused. We have footage of Jews who look like Arabs and Arabs who look like Jews. We have black Jews, and bearded 16th-century-looking Jews in black hats and sexy girls in tight jeans. Who in the world are these people?”

Great article at the Forward.