Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender, and the Anxiety of Assimilation (review)

Book Reviews 139 Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender, and the Anxiety ofAssimilation, by Riv-Ellen Prell. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. 313 pp. $27.95. Fighting to Become Americans is a complicated and complex book focusing on a subject oftremendous significance: the contentious ways in which Jewish women and men have seen each other in the context of American culture. The word and picture images which Jewish men employed when describing Jewish women, anthropologist Riv-Ellen Prell asserts, reveal as much about the relationship ofJews to America as they tell us about gender relations within the Jewish world. The subject matter of the book spans the twentieth century, and the actors here are Jewish immigrant women and men, their children and grandchildren. As such the book seeks to understand and locate a set ofcontemporary concerns in the past, and it takes as its basic assumption the continuity of tension, uncertainty, and the salience of dominant culture stereotypes as Jewish women and men construct each other. Prell, author ofan earlier work, an ethnography ofthe havurah movement, has now turned her focus on anhistorical subject, albeit one with much contemporary resonance. Indeed she begins Fighting to Become Americans with a 1994 United Jewish Appeal conference, "Jewish Men and Women: Can We Talk?" At this workshop young Jewish women and men articulated a set of highly stereotypical images about the meaning of the term "Jewish woman" or "Jewish man." What struck Prell, the scholar, was the century-olddurability ofthe images of"calculating, narrow minded, expected husbands to be as successful as their fathers, spoiled, high maintenance," and "nagging, demanding," and the like. That is, these phrases which Jewish women and men offered to the workshop co-ordinators reflected stock images whichboth abounded inthe larger, American culture about Jews, and which Jewish women and men offered about each other at the tum ofthe century when the great immigration from eastern Europe was in full swing. Prell chronicles the century-long resilient stereotypes as assimilated and articulated by Jews in the English-language pages ofthe Yiddish press, the Anglo-Jewish press, in movies spanning the entire history of the geme, Jewish representations in radio and television, and the writings of American Jewish novelists, which culminated in such familiar characters as Herman Wouk'sMarjorie Morningstar and Philip Roth's Brenda Poternkin in Goodbye, Columbus. The "JAP" who appeared in countlessjokes is to Prell merely the most recent variant on a hardy image which Jews, men, have bought into and propagated as surely as non-Jews have. That these images persisted is well chronicled in the book. No reader could finish Fighting to Become Americans and fail to grasp this fully documented thesis. The problem, however, is thatthe author over-attributes themto the stresses ofAmericanization with the concomitant pressures of a hoped-for entry into the middle class. That explanation, however, leaves open the question oftheir persistence. By the post-World War II era, and surely after the 1960s, when American Jews no longer felt uncomfortable in the middle class, when Jews and Judaism had achieved a comfortable 140 SHOFAR Winter 2001 Vol. 19, No.2 niche in American society, how can we make sense ofthe durability ofan image attributed here to the desire to fit in. By the end of the twentieth century, where this book ends, "fitting in" is no longer a problem. Yet the words and pictures used by Jewish men to describe and essentialize Jewish women surface with regularity and familiarity. The answers to Prell's questions might have been further teased out from sources extraneous to American life, perhaps intrinsic to Judaism. How much did the religious system itselfpush Jewish women and Jewish men to see each other in these typological and negative ways? While traditional Judaism underwent a massive process ofreform in America, what elements of the normative system shaped the ways in which Jewish women and men saw each other? Conversely, while Prell's focus is ambitious and broad and she definitely cannot be faulted for not asking comparative questions, it would be useful to at least raise the issue of how other immigrant and minority groups have structured their internal gendered discussion aboutmen andwomen and their "essential" characteristics. Indeed...