Jewish-American feminists and the construction of whiteness

This dissertation consists of three extended chapters. In the first, I discuss the overrepresentation of Jewish feminists in the Second Wave and offer notes towards a more structural understanding of that overrepresentation. Writing against the prevailing trend celebrating Jewish women's audacity and long-standing investment in social justice, I consider how Jewish women were particularly well situated as newly minted white women to serve as figureheads for mainstream feminism. As Jews achieved financial success and became more strongly identified with American whiteness in the fifties and sixties, they also became more strongly identified with the victimization of the Holocaust; through feminism, Jewish women could articulate the minority consciousness of victimhood while simultaneously speaking to and for the white mainstream. I suggest that the relationship of these Second Wave feminists to their whiteness recapitulates the strategy of psychoanalysis in scaffolding the integration of Jews in Europe: in both cases, an intense interest in sex difference and the social construction of gender is used to reframe Jewish anxieties as universal ones, and thereby to play down visible Jewish otherness. In the second chapter, I use close readings of Holocaust metaphors to suggest how Jewish anxieties about assimilation find their way into influential feminist texts. Considering Holocaust metaphors that appear in Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex, and Andrea Dworkin's Pornography: Men Possessing Women and Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation, I observe that the authors' shared interest in how Jewish victims of the Holocaust actually participated in their own destruction demonstrates the extent to which their work is marked by guilt about Jewish assimilation—guilt that is then projected onto the victims of Nazi genocide. Whereas the first chapter discuss the victories of white identification for early Jewish feminists, the second dwells on the doubts that dogged that identification. I demonstrate that the resurgence in concern about Jewish "self-hatred" in the '50s and '60s found its way into Jewish feminist work in the form of concern about women's complicity in their own destruction, in women's own internalized self-hatred. Jewish women's concerns about Jewish buy-in to a white mainstream thus found its double in their concerns about women's profit from powerlessness. The three feminists I use as test cases channel their anxieties about Jews' complicity with the white mainstream into feminist action. Jewish self-hatred became the pattern through which they understood white women's self-degradation; and thus feminist activism served as a parallel if not a stand-in for de-assimilation. In the final chapter, I suggest how contemporary Jewish-American humorists work to repopularize the Shirley-style obstreperousness of the Jewish feminists of the Second Wave. In the transition from the Second to the Third Wave, Jewish feminists began lodging complaints about anti-Semitism in the feminist movement while feminists of color began to take long-denied places at its vanguard. Jewish feminists became heretics in the movement they had helped to build. The alienation was painful; in many cases, it was seen as flatly unjust. Through comedy, I argue, Jewish feminists recover the the trope of the Jewish wrecking ball, the performer-cum-social justice warrior. Through readings of Girls and Broad City using the Yiddish tropes of the schlemiel and the schnorrer, I demonstrate how Jewish-American feminists take opposite tacks in attempting to recover this positive affect. While Girls uses a Philip Roth- and Woody Allen-inflected schlemiel persona that aligns Jewishness with a cripplingly self-conscious whiteness, Broad City uses an appropriative schnorrer persona that aligns Jewishness with Black women's resiliency, independence, and confidence. These assimilationist and de-assimilationist strategies recapitulate the themes of the Second Wave. In both cases, though, they respond to the Jewish fall from leftist grace with ambivalence about the utility of feminist politics.

Advisor: Moya Paula M. L. 
Fonrobert Charlotte Elisheva 
McGurl Mark
Ngai Sianne