The Fockerized Jew?: Questioning Jewishness as Cool in American Popular Entertainment

This essay examines the recent upsurge in overt Jewish identity in American popular culture, using the film Meet the Parents (2000) and its sequel Meet the Fockers (2004) as a case study to demonstrate how the Jewish Jew is no longer avoided and when portrayed does not fall victim to stereotyping. While looking at these two films together, I describe a broader evolution in media from the de-ethnicized Jew, and for that matter the de-ethnicized Jewish actor, to performers flaunting (and thereby celebrating) Jewishness in a Christian-centric society that has found acceptance of the Other. The paper also questions what about Jewishness is cool and describes how viewer subjectivities influence the perception of coolness. Meet the Fockers (Jay Roach, 2004), the sequel to the wildly successful film Meet the Parents (Jay Roach, 2000), ends with a main character noting that the uptight, paranoid, and decidedly un-Jewish Jack Byrnes (Robert De Niro) has been "Fockerized." In other words, the Focker family has made Byrnes cool. The Fockers, a Jewish family played by three Jewish actors-Ben Stiller as Gaylord/Greg, the only child of Bernie (Dustin Hoffman) and Roz (Barbra Streisand)-are the good guys in this movie, die hip characters, the anti-Shylocks, the Jews happy to be Jews as opposed to, for example, Woody Allen's chameleon Leonard Zelig {Zelig, Woody Allen, 1983). Unlike past personifications of the Jewish family, reticent about overt Jewish tradition, the Fockers do not shy from referencing religious practice, including circumcision; die Fockers have proudly preserved Greg's foreskin in a scrapbook-which ends up in a fondue pot. The Fockers' interactions with one another and overall persona exude goodness and functionality, as opposed to the Byrneses' (Gentile) dysfunction. Even if in Meet the Parents Greg "admits" to his Jewish background, there are very few other obvious assertions of his heritage. To be sure, the hapless Greg evolves from bumbling schlemiel and ever-changing suitor (a Zelig for the twenty- first century) in the initial installment of the series to a man who learns to take pride in his open-mindedness (he is a nurse) and difference (his Judaism) in the most recent much more obviously Jewish film. He reaches this apotheosis via his unashamedly Jewish parents. The name Focker, used as fodder in the first film, is one that evinces pride by the end of the second movie. More frequently, Jewish characters do not manifest their difference in a celebratory or affirmative fashion. Rather, Jews in American popular entertainment convey Otherness in one of three ways: by the discrimination they experienced, through flagrant stereotypes, or by concealing or merely implying their Jewishness. Since the advent of the motion picture and later television, there was little inherendy positive about Jews in genetal pop cultute. After viewing Meet the Fockers in the movie theater three days after its release (I saw the film so quickly because I was excited by the multiply Jewish cast rather than for the premise) and with a Gentile friend, I gushed about how Judaism was not expressed as oppression, and factoring out Greg, although he does undergo a transformation to coolness, I also noted that two Jews (both characters and actors) were cool for nearly two hours, cooler than even one of the coolest performers in Hollywood, Robert De Niro. I felt liberated and concluded by proclaiming that the Jew, at long last, has been Fockerized! My friend was not so convinced. It is not a Jew versus Christian movie, he said, it is a left versus right movie and an embarrassing family movie-the film is all about politics and sometimes about parents without Freudian ids. These dichotomous responses instigated the following essay. Looking at Meet the Fockers, seen by millions of people since its December 16, 2004 release (it is the 29th highest grossing movie of all time),1 and other depictions of Jews in current years, I examine the recent Jewish pt esence in American popular culture while questioning the premise on which this volume of essays is based. …