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

Fishman, Sylvia Barack

Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender, and the Anxiety of Assimilation. By Riv-Ellen Prell. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. 319 pp.

Researchers working with single Jews report that Jewish men and women articulate "toxic" feelings about each other. While crediting the typical Jew with being intelligent, successful and responsible, single men and women in workshops vociferously assert that Jews of the opposite sex are spoiled, materialistic, demanding, neurotic, and selfish. They often think of their co-religionists as physically unappealing, with blunt, unrefined facial features, chunky, out-of-shape bodies, and shrill, whining voices.(1) To an astonishing extent, the images harbored by Jewish men and women about each other echo not only stereotypical portrayals of Jews in contemporary films, fiction, and popular culture, but also the anti-Semitic images of the Jew promulgated in nineteenth-century London and Vienna, as chillingly described by Sander Gillman.(2)

In Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender, and the Anxiety of Assimilation, a colorful and convincing new anthropological study of the acculturation of American Jews, Riv-Ellen Prell illustrates the sources and evolution of an often troubled relationship. Suspicion and antipathy between American Jewish men and women, still notable today, was already remarked upon in the teeming tenements which housed millions of immigrants in the decades before and after the turn of the twentieth century. Working from contemporaneous sources, Prell demonstrates the ways in which Jewish men and women turned on each other as they struggled to further their own progress in Americanization.

As members of an impoverished Jewish immigrant group, men and women both confronted the most basic and often overwhelming economic issues. Moreover, many were also ambitious. Not willing to remain "Ghetto Girls" or "green" newcomers, both men and women used whatever resources were at their disposal--including romantic liaisons--to further their upward socioeconomic mobility. As they worked long hours in sweatshop factories, young women dreamed and schemed to marry rising business or professional men; young men looked for dowried females whose fathers' fortunes could bankroll their own career trajectories.

Jewish men and women each wanted the same thing: a spouse who would financially support their entry into the middle class. Each, however, bitterly resented similar attitudes in Jews of the opposite sex and publicly decried the gold-digging behavior of potential partners, wishing to find a spouse who would adore them for themselves alone. Some observers at the time blamed ambitious Jewish men, but as time passed more blamed the women. As one columnist put it, "let him lack enough of the national medium of exchange, commonly known as `the dough,' and the chances are mighty good that he will be looked upon as `alright, if only he had the money'" (p. 95).

Prell finds that, beginning in 1920, these exploitative, grasping behaviors were seen as being specifically Jewish, rather than a culture-wide phenomenon linked to the entry of seasoned immigrants into the American middle class. According to one reporter, for example, unlike the Jewish girl, who was perceived as expecting to be taken care after she married, "thousands of Gentile women work. In most restaurants the waitresses are married. The downtown offices are full of young brides who feel that now-a-days the burden of supporting a home is too great to be born entirely by the man." In contrast with these supportive, hardworking Gentile brides, "a Jewish girl who has to go to work after her wedding looks upon herself as the unhappiest creature on earth" (p. 97). Jewish women, for their part, were quick to see unfairness in the pictures which were being spread about them. As one New York correspondent wrote: "`She is mercenary and extravagant' says the man who showers presents on a shikse [non-Jewish woman]" (p. 101).

Negative images of Jewish women were well-launched in the public imagination, and this negativity was indelibly linked to economic issues. Ironically, in assuming that married women ought to devote themselves to home and hearth, rather than being employed outside the home, Jewish immigrants and their daughters were accommodating themselves to Western social ideals. One of the hallmarks of bourgeois status was the non-employment and conspicuous consumption of the married woman. In expecting Jewish women to adapt to American mores--and then blaming them for doing so--Jewish men initiated an adversarial dynamic which persisted over time. Prell describes this dynamic, explaining her book's title: "These children of the immigrant Jewish working class fought one another on the battlefield of middle-class hopes" (p. 103).

Prell makes excellent use of evocative photos and narrative materials from interview data, film, fiction, television and popular culture to illustrate the ways in which American Jewish distinctiveness diminished with the passing of each decade. She demonstrates that, as Jewish languages disappeared from use, and home-based rituals became the purview of the clergy and a small observant minority of the Jewish population, Jewish identification became linked to socioeconomic, rather than religious factors, and underwent a dramatic transformation in gender coding. Reversing millennia during which men had carried the primary semiotic message of Judaism and women had functioned as support staff, Jews in twentieth-century America appropriated the Western Protestant pattern in which women are the primary conveyers of a moderate, domesticated religious message, a pattern which German Jews had often already adopted even before emigration.

In the 1930s, Jewish alacrity in fitting into this pattern was reinforced by the gratitude of American Jews to be living in a milieu which, while troubled by rising levels of anti-Semitism, was manifestly superior to the environments surrounding European Jews. As a result, Prell writes, Jews "were deeply indebted" to America, "the nation that fought the Nazis. They entered the postwar era with great anxiety and loyalty" (p. 175). As Jewish men gained their sense of self-worth primarily from educational, occupational, and financial accomplishments, women became the signifying Jews. In the decades after the war, as Jews yearned to be genuinely equal to their Christian neighbors, Jewish men impatient with the gap between expectation and reality learned to detach negative aspects of their Jewish ethnicity from themselves. In novels, films, and scalding jokes, Jewish men began to promulgate stereotypes of Jewish women, the overbearing Jewish mother and the spoiled Jewish American Princess (JAP). This putative humor served a purpose: it made women into the decoy Jews, who could absorb prejudicial fires, allowing Jewish men to enter mainstream society unscathed.

As she describes the generational journey which transformed American Jewish men and women from impoverished, largely East European immigrants to middle class acculturated--and battling--men and women, Prell draws on important foundational work by Susan Glenn, Marion Kaplan, Paula Hyman, Joyce Antler and others.(3) Prell's book would be strengthened were the phenomena she describes more explicitly contextualized and grounded in the ongoing work of these historians. Indeed, consistent attention to social historical context would help to clarify which aspects of the Jewish experience were shared by other American subgroups, and which have been specific to the Jews. This is especially important because the essence of the Jewish image in America becomes, as Prell correctly suggests, a kind of hyperbolic American consumerism: "Jews belonged at the center of American middle-class life because they could consume" (p. 198).

Nevertheless, Prell's book offers powerful, often original insights into the complex intersection between gender, class and ethnicity. She compellingly argues that the "beautiful, confident, and even imperial young women protagonists" of novels such as Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar and Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus are not the true foci of this type of fiction. This fiction is really about relationships between men, Prell writes: "The women-daughters of fathers and wives-to-be are conduits through which the males transact their cross-generational relationship. They are portrayed as prizes that the senior generation plans to bestow on the minor one." But because the insightful, artistic young men in the novels understand that Jewish women are prizes poisoned by a whole network of attached strings, in each novel the "man inevitably rejects the women whom the novels represent as embodying the reward of suburban success" (p. 223).

As Prell notes, corrosive images of Jewish women have played a significant role in Jewish acculturation. Her work helps readers to better understand "the astonishing persistence of Jewish gender stereotypes" and the enormous negative impact which these images continue to have in the lives of American Jews.

(1.) 1 of the Beholder: Jews and Gender in Film and Popular Culture (Hadassah International Research Institute on Jewish Women, Working Paper Series No. 1, May 1998).

(2.) The Jew's Body (New York & London, 1991).

(3.) Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca and London, 1991); Marion A. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity, in Imperial Germany (New York and Oxford, 1991); Paula E. Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women (Seattle, 1995); Joyce Antler, Talking Back: Images of Jewish Women in American Popular Culture (Hanover and London, 1998).

Sylvia Barack Fishman Brandeis University