This dissertation explores the idea of the 1970s as a critical turning point for the representation of young Jewish women in American popular culture, specifically considering examples from popular literature, popular film, television, and comedy that undermine the validity of midcentury conceptions of the Jewish-American Princess (JAP) or Jewish Ugly Duckling. The introduction and first chapter establish the historical context of how stereotypes of Jewish women—including the JAP—came to be used as a means of mitigating assimilation-related anxieties, especially in light of the post-WWII Jewish ascent into the white suburban middle class. The dissertation then transitions into a deeper investigation of female-driven responses to these archetypes. With the rise of the contemporary Feminism movement, the sexual revolution, the Jewish New Wave of filmmaking, and the shift in emphasis from assimilation to multiculturalism within the American social consciousness, the 1970s provided a platform for Jewish female authors, entertainers, and filmmakers to directly respond to and reconceive the stereotypes of Jewish women honed during the midcentury period. The second, third, and fourth chapters each tackle a different facet of popular culture, looking specifically at how popular literature, film, television, and comedy produced by Jewish women confirmed, complicated, and challenged stereotypes of Jewish women, effectively shifting the cultural paradigm away from the JAP and towards a new understanding of Jewish female identity that undermined existing archetypes. In this way, the dissertation argues that Jewish female-driven popular literature, film, television, and comedy during this time period acted as a bridge between the more one-dimensional, often male-driven midcentury conceptions of the JAP and the more complex, nuanced images of young Jewish women in contemporary popular culture. Simply put, while the novels, films, and series that are explored here all draw from the hegemonic stereotypes of young Jewish women established in the 1950s and 1960s, they also articulate something new about Jewish women in their privileging of the Jewish woman’s voice, their re-conception of Jewish beauty, and their questioning of gender norms, and thus can be seen as the natural predecessors of modern popular cultural depictions of Jewish women.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/45143 |
| Date | 19 September 2022 |
| Creators | Pickette, Samantha |
| Contributors | Anderson, Ingrid |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
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