NYT: The Woke shouldn't punch up at Jewish women who appear to be white.

The theory of intersectionality proves Jewish women are actually doubly non-dominant. Or something.

In the New York Times opinion section, two Jewish lady professors complain that they are being mocked by the Woke because they appear to be white, as entitled Karens worthy of being punched up, but in reality they are a minority vulnerable to exclusion yet simultaneously perceived as sufficiently inside dominant culture. And yet Jewish women still can’t get that Netflix romcom Nobody Wants This about a blonde shiksa who converts, or so she says, to Judaism in order to marry a “hot rabbi” canceled.

This shiksa is just pretending to convert to marry the hot rabbi

Misogyny and Antisemitism Are a Toxic Brew

Dec. 1, 2024

By Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Rachel Schreiber

Dr. Petrzela is a professor of history at the New School and a fellow of the Carnegie Corporation. Dr. Schreiber is a professor of art, media and cultural history and a co-director of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Institute at the New School.

“Zio bitch!” a young man in a kaffiyeh and Black Lives Matter T-shirt barked at one of us, his ire apparently provoked by a yellow ribbon pin, a symbol of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas. The exchange was unsettling but not surprising. Even in New York, where we both live, we have often seen an extraordinary lack of empathy for the Israeli victims of Oct. 7 and outright hostility toward those who advocate for them. The epithet “Zio bitch” highlights multilayered animosities, pointing to an insidious, specific prejudice we have seen bloom this year: the melding of misogyny and antisemitism.

Though cartoonish tropes of Jewish women are ubiquitous (think of the materialistic Jewish American princess, gossipy yenta and overbearing, often overweight Jewish mother),

After all, what kind of anti-Semite KKK-adjacent comedian in an Arkansas trailer park makes up Jewish women characters like Jeff’s termagant wife Susie on Curb Your Enthusiasm?

they often barely register as bias in a progressive culture otherwise attuned to identity-based offense. Mocking American Jewish women, many of whom appear white,

Lots of snark ahoy, but I’ll put the paywall here.

But deep down they aren’t white?

Seriously, the United States federal government puts a large amount of effort into classifying Americans by race. But, here’s how they do it: they let everybody check whichever race box they want, and only in the most egregious cases do they object to anybody’s self-identification. Democrats have been running the executive branch for 20 of the last 32 years, and despite all the fashionable talk about “Race does not exist,” over those decades they haven’t done anything about it.

As it turns out, the vast majority of Jewish-Americans check the white box on the Census form.

can be seen as punching up,

You know, maybe punching, whether up or down, is the problem, not the precise direction of violence you choose to initiate.

a variation on calling out a so-called Karen — that is, an entitled, whiny white woman seen often in a racially charged situation.

Maybe the New York Times promoting the use of racist-sexist slurs like “Karen” against white women was not a good idea?

To be a Jewish American woman is to experience a paradox: We are a minority

Or an elite.

Seriously, per capita, Jewish-Americans are arguably the wealthiest and most influential group on earth. About five years ago, I looked up the family background of the first 100 names on the Forbes 400 and 31 came from Jewish families and 4 from mixed ethnic families.

You might be able to name a smaller group that is richer and more powerful, although I’m stumped to think of one.

vulnerable to exclusion yet simultaneously perceived as sufficiently inside dominant culture

A lot of people like to imagine that their problems stem from being outside of the “dominant culture.”

In contrast, growing up seeing my suburban neighborhood on TV all the time — I grew up 7.5 miles north of the intersection of Beverly Blvd. and La Cienega from which the movie and TV studios measure their Thirty-Mile Zone (as in TMZ.com) — I couldn’t really believe that I was terribly excluded from the dominant culture.

The Thirty Mile Zone is a concept used in Hollywood labor union negotiations. If a shooting location is within 30 miles of the Beverly Center in West Hollywood, everybody working on the set is required to get themselves there at their own expense and their daily hours begin when they arrive and clock in. If the set is more than 30 miles from West Hollywood, they are provided free transportation and are paid from the time they begin their commute.

that we are often expected to endure, or even deserve, any opprobrium that comes our way.

You could argue that the residents of the 30 Mile Zone, like myself, were being excluded from America’s true dominant culture, but it sure didn’t look like that on TV.

Why can’t racist opprobrium be restricted to gentile whites rather to than all whites? Shouldn’t white Jews be issued with an official Jew Card that gets them out of racist anti-white opprobrium the moment they present it to the racist anti-white bigot who is punching up? Is that too much to ask?

Disparaging Jewish women is not new. A century ago, Progressive-era reformers fighting sex trafficking — then called white slavery — often painted the (white) women involved as innocent victims. Jewish women, however, were an exception. One reformer described a Jewish woman driven to prostitution as a “sinful Jewess” and a man who exploited women like her as “a young Jew parasite.” In the 1920s some European films depicted Jewish women as vampires or man-murdering monsters. In the 1940s, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre argued in “Anti-Semite and Jew” that the very expression “a beautiful Jewess” bore “an aura of rape and massacre. The ‘beautiful Jewess’ is she whom the Cossacks under the czars dragged by her hair through the streets of her burning village.” In 1979 the feminist Andrea Dworkin quoted Sartre to argue that such antisemitic misogyny was paradigmatic of the objectification at the heart of pornography.

Uh, yeah, sure. Let’s just not get into the whole question of who in eastern Europe were the pimps and pornographers.

These dynamics endure. In June a 12-year-old Jewish girl in France was allegedly raped by boys who used antisemitic slurs while they violated her. Five thousand miles away, a Texas woman read about this attack and felt compelled to write about her own attacker, a man who she said put on Christmas music and raped her after she disclosed she was Jewish.

The mistreatment of Jewish women is not confined to exceptional, if brutal, acts of violence. A peculiar permissibility of bias against Jewish women permeates popular culture.

If only Jews played a role in American popular culture….

Four years ago, the comedian Sarah Silverman commented that portrayals of Jewish women often default to a sassy friend

I was talking to my amiable neighbor, a chubby Jewish character actress who plays sassy friends, while she was cleaning out her garage. She pulled out out from a pile a photo from about 1990 of her and a very young Brad Pitt on a set. Did she rage that she was never cast as Brad’s love interest? No, she wistfully recalled, “Brad was a very sweet boy, but he didn’t shower often.” And then she carefully placed the photo of her and Brad in a small pile labeled “Do NOT Throw Out!”

or this terrible “girlfriend before the guy realizes what love really can be, or you’re that guy’s book agent, like, sleazy book agent, or a scumbag executive.”

Once again, who is creating portrayals of Jewish women in TV shows and movies if not … Jewish men?

The Netflix series “Nobody Wants This” centers a “hot rabbi” falling for a blond shiksa (non-Jew) who is only dimly aware of Judaism but who is presented as a luminous, lovely contrast to the domineering, whining and otherwise repellent Jewish women in his orbit.

Is it too much to ask to cancel Nobody Wants This? We asked all our unmarried Jewish women friends, and none of them want this show to be on the air. If Jews are so powerful in the entertainment industry, as the tropes assert, how come they can’t get Nobody Wants This canceled.?

Ah, but the Theory of Intersectionality proves why: they are Jewish women, so they are doubly non-dominant.

“Intersectionality,” the term coined in 1989 by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, helpfully explains how sexism and racism overlap and can reinforce each other to create unique barriers — a collective effect that often amounts to more than the sum of its parts. Ironically, the political and intellectual movement that has most embraced intersectionality has at times been a barrier to recognizing, much less fighting, the antipathy faced by Jewish women. Intersectionality is so often deployed to link the domestic fight for racial justice with postcolonialism in general and the Palestinian freedom movement in particular that the framework has been criticized as one that can exclude antisemitism or even perpetuate antisemitic tropes about nefarious Jewish power.

The Forbes 400 list a trope. The Open Secrets list of the biggest campaign donors is a trope.

It’s important to note that the melding of antisemitism and misogyny can be found across the political spectrum. The problem is rampant on the right, as conservatives platform a Hitler apologist and lionize Donald Trump, a man who has been found liable for sexual abuse and scapegoated Jews in anticipation of a possible loss.

Jewish women are a soft target in this world, in which white supremacy increasingly appears intractable: We are white enough to be worthy of scorn but not enough to be reliably protected against racist and sexist structures we should be dismantling rather than perpetuating in insidious new forms.

After all, who can forget how the Central Park Karen got uncancelled the moment she played her white card and proved she wasn’t a Jewess.