Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest

10. Moniker

10 Moniker Marjorie Garber moniker, slang. Also monarch, monekeer, monica, monick(er), monniker, etc. [Origin unknown.] A name, a nick-name; also (rare), as v. trans., to apply a name to (a person). “Why don’t we hear very much about Monica Lewinsky being Jewish?” joked comedian Emily Levine at a Los Angeles fund-raiser for the Morning Star Commission , a group of professionals from the media and academia who have organized to combat the stereotype of the “Jewish American Princess.” (The group gets its name from the eponymous heroine of Herman Wouk’s fifties novel, Marjorie Morningstar, about an aspiring Hollywood star who changed her name from Morgenstern.) “A Jewish girl with oral sex? I don’t believe it,” quipped comedian Jackie Mason to a Florida audience. “An oral surgeon, maybe, that’s what a Jewish girl wants.”1 The question of Monica’s Jewishness, and her mother’s name change from Lewinsky to Lewis, was hardly glanced at in media accounts in this country. (In Israel, interestingly, there has been more attention, pro and con.) When I asked a well-known conservative columnist why, he said it might be because there were so many other interns who had been involved with Bill Clinton; Monica was the only one who’d gotten caught. The implication was that Clinton was an equal opportunity seducer, fairly “catholic” in his tastes. Monica, by this account , was just a “Jane Dubinsky,” the Jewish Jane Doe. Yet the deep (throat?) structure of the Monica story does have fascinating resonances with Jewishness, 175 and with the historic narratives, fact, fiction, and stereotype, of the seductive “Jewess” and her political role. Overseas, in Europe and in the Middle East, Monica’s Jewish identity was very much part of her story. As we will see shortly, it made her, in some eyes, an obvious Zionist spy and in others a cultural heroine. In the United States, however , her Jewishness was seldom mentioned, except when she herself brought it up. When it was reported that Monica had given the President a copy of Oy Vey! The Things They Say! A Minibook of Jewish Wit, for example, one journalist cited Henry Kissinger’s “Power is the great aphrodisiac!” as a particularly apposite selection .2 But the fact that Monica was Jewish—something she herself was frank and joyous about in many of her comments, both to the President and to her biographer —was largely ignored by the American press and politicians. Ignored—or displaced into other frames of reference. Her signifying traits were distributed across a whole spectrum of discussions. She was “pushy”; she was “ambitious”; she was “zaftig”; she was “typical Beverly Hills.” She was physically mature for her age. She was sexy and seductive, “the femme fatale in the soap opera of sex and betrayal .”3 She was rich. She had designs on a political or policy role. She lacked moral gravitas. She led a weak Christian man astray. It is not entirely an accident, I believe, that the moral “hero” of the Clinton sex scandal was the Senate’s single (and first-ever) Orthodox Jew, Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, a Democratic liberal and longtime Clinton friend. Lieberman was widely praised for his courage in speaking up about the effect of the scandal “on our children, our culture, and our national character.”4 As the man who persuaded the Senate to discontinue voting on Jewish festivals and holding sessions on Jewish High Holy Days, Lieberman had enormous moral clout. After his speech the national media wrote admiringly about his daily Torah study and prayer and his seven-mile walk from Capitol Hill to his home in Georgetown when the Senate meets on Friday night, since Orthodox Jews may not ride on the Sabbath. So far as I can tell, Lieberman never commented publicly—or for all I know, privately—about Monica Lewinsky’s Jewishness. His opprobrium was aimed at the President, who had failed as a moral leader. But the fact that this story was anchored at one end of the moral scale by Bill Clinton ’s relationship with a young Jewish woman (“disgraceful and immoral”)5 and at the other end by his relationship with a high-ranking and highly respected Jewish man in public life (“a Jewish hero”)6 is evidence of its overdetermination in the public sphere. Although some of the story’s “Jewish” elements went unnamed and unMARJORIE GARBER 176 marked...