Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender, and the Anxiety of Assimilation

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.