Jenny Schecter and the Strange Case of the Present Absent Jewish American Woman on the Queer Screen: The Ghostly Failures of Jewish American Assimilation

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article:

Jewish American assimilation is currently understood to be a completed, and highly successful, project. Yet the persona of the young queer Jewish American woman (whether real or fictional) in popular culture who is maligned or caricatured problematizes this notion of completed Jewish assimilation into whiteness, such as Jenny Schecter on The L Word. What proves most interesting and revealing about such personae (and to some extent, the writers who created the fictional iterations) is that they have all been deeply influenced by post-WWII ideologies of Jewish American identity. Not only have they absorbed the notion that they are assimilated, and thus cannot acknowledge the omnipresent ‘ghost’ of the process of assimilating, but they have also been deeply influenced by stereotypes of Jewish American women created and reiterated by various aspects of popular culture.2 Rather than coming to terms with traumatic Jewish historical ghosts as the personae of young Jewish American men often do, the personae of the queer Jewish American woman is concerned with the struggle to maintain normalcy (e.g., a WASP-like whiteness), the struggle of living as a stranger, or both. While Jonathan Safran Foer, a secular contemporary Jew in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, goes to the Ukraine to try to find remnants of his family from after the Holocaust, the characters/personae examined here cannot afford to spend much time listening to the whispers in the walls, although they are troubled by the ghosts that they sense are there.