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  • You Never Call! You Never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother
  • Paula E. Hyman (bio)
You Never Call! You Never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother. By Joyce Antler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. xii + 321 pp.

The Jewish mother is a familiar, and stereotyped, figure in literature, theater, comedy, film, and television. We know far more about her as she is represented in this wide variety of genres than we do about the actual experiences of Jewish mothers and their impact within their families. In this engaging book Joyce Antler seeks to combine representation and historical experience. She has, in fact, provided us with the most comprehensive analysis of the changing portrayals of the Jewish mother in America. However, her talents and interests as a cultural historian lead her devote less attention to American Jewish mothers themselves. Actual American Jewish mothers, an important foil to the iconic stereotypes, occupy only a small part of this book, although their presence inevitably raises the question of why the guilt-inducing Sophie Portnoys—the fictional products of Jewish writers and comics—occupy center stage in any discourse about American Jewish mothers of the past three generations.

Antler succeeds in anchoring the different images of the Jewish mother in their particular time and place. By displaying contrasting images of the Jewish mother at any one time—what she calls the “multiple faces” of the immigrant Jewish mother, for example—she demonstrates that the many representations suggest a social variety that belies any monolithic stereotype. A hallmark of her scholarship is her artful mobilization of biographical vignettes that enable the reader to associate representations with their creators, whether Sophie Tucker, Clifford Odets, or Molly Berg. Antler does not lose sight of the fact that the representations reflect, albeit not always directly, issues of gender relations within the American Jewish community as well as the turbulent process of acculturation of an ethnic group within a changing America. Concerned with how the images are created and disseminated, she adds to the entertainment industry, the mass media, and the comics of the Catskills the lesser known impact of social anthropology, especially the research project that resulted in the popular book, Life Is With People (1952), in “entrenching” the dominant negative stereotype of the Jewish mother (74).

Antler pioneers by examining how the most negative representations of Jewish mothers were moderated in the relatively pluralist, postmodern decades of the end of the last century. As comedians aged and a more [End Page 115] pluralist multiculturalism influenced the popular media, the garish mother of Fran Drescher’s The Nanny jostled with Billy Crystal’s gentle, and still funny, spin on his mother. Jewish mothers simply became variants on mothers in general.

For Antler the impact of feminism is a critical factor in enabling Jewish women to rethink both the representations of Jewish mothers and their historical roles. She begins by noting the disproportionate participation of Jewish women in the early American feminist movement. Although Jewish feminists, like virtually all daughters, often resented their mothers for their controlling and nagging behavior, some also began to realize that their mothers had modeled many strengths for their daughters. They had internalized the negativity of the prevailing stereotype of the Jewish mother, but their feminism provided a tool to reexamine that stereotype. As some became mothers themselves, they explored the meaning of motherhood in their own lives. While key Jewish feminist theorists like Shulamith Firestone offered an analytical framework for rejecting motherhood, others, like Phyllis Chesler, offered a positive feminist interpretation of motherhood as an important component of women’s experience. Feminism also inspired Jewish women, from professional historians to writers and artists, to reclaim their mothers’ lives. Memoirs and oral histories enable the current generation to collect the voices of women and to continue the process of understanding just what women have done, both within their families and in social institutions. Jewish mothers are no longer invisible, or just a joke, in Jewish history.

Scholars and lay people alike will learn from this immensely readable book. It should become a staple in college courses and in reading groups. And all its readers will enjoy its stimulating journey...

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