The Case of the Sexy Jewess: Dance, Gender and Joke Work in US Pop Culture by Hannah Schwadron (review)

Hannah Schwadron's The Case of the Sexy Jewess is an engaging and insightful exploration of Jewish identity, as well as its construction and historical transformation in the United States. Schwadron is a dancer, researcher, and professor at Florida State University, with a research focus in dance studies, critical theory, and performance practice. In this monograph, she traces the performance of identity by Jewish women in American popular culture, drawing evidence from sources like film, neo-burlesque performance, television, and comedy. The book documents a history of spectacular performance by Jewish women, unpacking/deconstructing how these performances constructed and communicated Jewish identity and how the Jewish female body has been a site of cultural meaning making. The choreography of "The Sexy Jewess," as performed by a range of Jewish women, thus reveals some of the ways that power functions within society and how social norms of similarity and difference are perpetuated and maintained within and across generations.

The book makes a significant methodological contribution to Jewish studies. In bringing the perspective of choreography and dance to the idea of Jewishness, Schwadron is able to answer questions important to understanding how Jewish identity has been (and continues to be) expressed through the body. In reading the body as historical evidence, Schwadron contextualizes the in-your-face antics performed by Jewish women in pop culture. Their performances become allegorical and literal enactments of identity, demonstrating how cultural norms and stereotypes are constructed, signified and received.

Sexy and funny are two qualities that emerge as thematic characteristics of Schwadron's inquiry. She paints a picture of how Jewish women were represented and also how they have represented themselves as other/exotic, objectifying themselves for an audience. Schwadron situates this sexualized archetype within a larger culture of hegemony as represented by much of post-World War II American popular performance. In chapter two, the chapter with the strongest historical perspective, she asks how the Jewish funny girl trope circulated over time, on what circuits, and with what creative and political power.

The answers lead Schwadron to the theoretical ideas of self-representation and parody. She argues that Jewish performers have exaggerated their differences in humorous and horrifying ways. These Jewish women performers, then, participated in longstanding theatrical tradition of representations of people with low social status as funny. Using humor as a mask for ugliness, these performances of what Scwhadron calls, "Jew-face," share much with the minstrel show, and with the Harlequin character of the commedia del' arte. In the 1930s, for example, a derivation of blackface minstrelsy called "coon shouting" became Jewish women's territory. Performers Fanny Brice and Sophie Tucker regularly performed songs in broken English while performing cakewalks, signaling their Old World immigrant identity.

Bettie Boop, the cartoon vixen, is another "Sexy Jewess" who reflects how the character has evolved over time. In the 1932 cartoon Stopping the Show, Bettie Boop demonstrates her racial and sexual deviance from the norm, performing Josephine Baker's famous banana dance while speaking in a Yiddish-inflected accent and batting her eyelashes. Represented as distinct from the whitewashed hegemony of pop culture, the sexy Jewess character has continually differentiated herself from norms, both inhabiting and discarding racial and gender identities in order to enhance her act.

As performers like Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Gilda Radner, Sandra Bernhard, Sarah Silverman, and Joanna Angel take on the roles of ghetto girl, the good Jewish girl, and Jewish American Princess (among others), they dance a choreography of the self that mocks, modifies, and mobilizes. Schwadron describes how these performers use both their faces and bodies to express their character's Jewishness (or choice not to identify as Jewish). This inquiry looks to the Jewish female body as a unique site for a process of racialized and cultural marginalization during a historical period in which Jews assimilated into American society. Therefore, the question of assimilation...