Shma;An Online Journal of Jewish Responsibility

Fighting to Become Americans: Assimilation and the Trouble between Jewish Women and Jewish Men (Riv-Ellen Prell; Boston; Beacon Press, 2000. 328 pp. $18.00)

Riv-Ellen Prell's fascinating book, Fighting to Become Americans, is an example of recent feminist scholarship that shows how to integrate research on ethnicity, gender and class. Her study is an in-depth analysis of how 20th-century Jews tried to integrate into the larger American society and how the dominant society dealt with them. Even as Jewish immigrants aspired to transcend the negative stereotypes designated by WASP society and culture, they nevertheless internalized these destructive, anti-Semitic images. In fact, middle-class Jewish men attributed these qualities to other Jews - usually female and/or working class - who were thereby deemed responsible for Jews' failure to fully integrate into the mainstream. Jewish anxiety about assimilation was, and still is, acted out in the intimate sphere of gender relations. Prell's work reflects recent understandings of ethnicity that see it as changing over time, rather than fixed and frozen. Her book illustrates how over the course of the 20th century, as historical, economic, and cultural circumstances changed, the nature of negative stereotypes changed accordingly. Nevertheless, whatever traits in a given historical or social context marked Jews as different (and therefore unable to assimilate, making them prone to rejection by the dominant culture), were precisely those attributes projected by Jewish men onto Jewish women.

This work traces, through captivating examples drawn from the arts, literature, drama, comedy, and other forms of material and lived culture, how particular gender stereotypes emerged in response to America and changed over the course of the century with changing historical and cultural patterns. Prell begins her analysis in the first two decades of the 20th century with the ghetto girl, and then moves on in the twenties to the frustrating aspirations of young women and men wanting to marry each other, and the economic and class factors that prevented such unions. She then studies the images of overbearing Jewish mothers projected in the 1930s and 1950s and finally addresses the familiar images of JAPs of the 1970s and 1980s. These representations portray Jewish women as overly demanding of the goods available within the consumer culture (entry into which nearly all Jews were aspiring), greedy, never satisfied, and often overwhelming of their men (whether as partners or as sons). Jewish men, on the other hand, are culturally portrayed as the hapless workers whose long and hard labors to achieve integration into mainstream society through economic mobility are unappreciated by their women.

The very traits that Jewish men and women found in each other (and Jewish men, in particular, projected onto women) - vulgarity, lack of gentility, excesses of productivity and consumption - are identical to those reviled characteristics that Gentiles claimed marked Jews as eternally other. Only by shedding their distinctive characteristics could Jews enter mainstream society. But, even though Jews sought to do so, albeit at the expense of their gendered companions, they were still seen as distinct. Fighting to Become Americans succeeds because it demonstrates how a group's internal constructions of self are always related to how the external society views that group. Changes in either internal - the group's - or external - the larger society's - circumstances, dialectically reflect and create changes in the other.

Lynn Davidman, a sociologist, teaches in the departments of Judaic Studies and American Civilization at Brown University. She has authored two books, Tradition in A Rootless World: Women Turn To Orthodox Judaism and Motherloss. Together with Shelly Tenenbaum she co-edited Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies. She is currently involved in a project on Jews, ethnicity, race, and multiculturalism.

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