Critics Get Serious About Jewish American Princess Jokes

To Andrea Kaye, Jewish American Princess jokes are no longer a laughing matter.

In her first big-time job, Kaye recalled recently, her boss often commended her within earshot of her co-workers. But no matter how often she was publicly praised, she began the workday in private humiliation.

The boss would buzz Kaye on the intercom punctually at 8 a.m. “What does a JAP (Jewish American Princess) make for dinner?” he might ask, once she was seated in his office.

Feeling cornered, Kaye would wait for him to deliver the punch line to his JAP joke of the day. In this case, the answer was: “Reservations.”

“He’d roar with laughter and I’d just sit there,” Kaye said. “I didn’t know if it was funny or not, but I knew I didn’t like it.”

Today, she feels no such uncertainty. Kaye chairs an Orange County committee that, like several other newly formed groups around the country, says it has noticed a disturbing rise in the incidence and virulence of Jewish American Princess jokes. For the first time, they have launched concerted efforts to eradicate the term from the American vernacular, saying it is demeaning to both women and Jews.

The fact that Jewish American Princess humor encompasses both of these groups is one reason its existence has gone unchallenged until recently, said Rabbi Laura Geller, director of the Hillel Jewish Center at USC. “Anti-Semitism masked as sexism is more socially acceptable because, unfortunately, sexism is still an accepted form of bigotry,” she said.

Geller said that while Jewish American Princess jokes were originally circulated only within the Jewish community, they have been increasingly co-opted by non-Jews in recent years, becoming more virulent in the process. And while the term was once leveled only at Jewish women, the slur “is now aimed at women in general,” she said.

The princess stereotype--that of a manicured, materialistic, frigid, parasitic woman--has been in currency since at least the ‘50s and has been enshrined in popular culture in novels such as Herman Wouk’s “Marjorie Morningstar” and “Goodbye Columbus” by Philip Roth. Joan Rivers is one of many comedians who have gotten mileage out of the term. The Jewish American Princess even appears in film. Mel Brook’s “Spaceballs,” for instance, features a typically spoiled character called the Druish Princess who is accompanied by a robot-maid who totes a pile of Gucci luggage.

In tackling the Jewish American Princess stereotype, Geller and other Jewish activists are up against the time-honored tradition of Jewish humor, which is sometimes self-deprecating, and has often been used as a device to brighten dark times. Houston attorney Sherry Merfish says that while she is “proud of the role of Jewish humor in American life,” she feels Jewish American Princess jokes have crossed the line from a healthy coping mechanism to “oppressive bigotry.”

UCLA sophomore Jonathan Schreiber observed that the Jewish American Princess jokes he hears on campus have become “more sexual and more derogatory” in recent years.”

Fear of being pegged a Jewish American Princess may even be one reason many students at UCLA won’t admit to being Jewish, said Schreiber, president of the Jewish Student Union.

Merfish, who is co-chairperson of the women’s issues committee of the Houston chapter of the American Jewish Committee, said that college campuses have become “an open battleground” where animosity toward Jewish women is concerned. Indeed, the problematic nature of Jewish American Princess humor was first brought to national attention last year by the Jewish women’s magazine Lilith, which reported on a rash of what they termed “JAP-baiting” incidents on the Syracuse (N.Y.) University campus.

Gary Spencer, an associate professor of sociology at Syracuse who was behind the push to quell the name-calling, said in a telephone interview that when he began studying the Jewish American Princess stereotype as it was expressed on campus, “I was so shocked by what I learned.”

Scrawled on library tables, Spencer said he found “vicious” remarks directed at the Jewish American Princess.

And in almost every dorm, Spencer said he saw signs on students’ doors with the words “No JAPS” inside a circle. The diagonal slash through the circle was a swastika.

And at basketball games held in the university’s Dome arena, a well-dressed woman student would leave her seat to go to the refreshment stand, and “four thousand students would stand up en masse and shout JAP! JAP! JAP!” Spencer said.

Gayle Kronenthal, who graduated from Syracuse University last May, said antagonistic use of the term was “rampant” during her last year at school. As a member of an all-Jewish sorority on campus, she said, “We were the butt of a lot of jokes.”

Kronenthal said she has heard the term Jewish American Princess all her life and always took it to be a harmless stereotype. “But now instead of the words meaning ‘you’re Daddy’s little princess’, they mean: ‘You’re a JAP, you’re a Jew, you’re a snot. . . ,’ “she said.

‘Tension on Campus’

Spencer believes the sentiments vented in Jewish American Princess graffiti and jokes are “symbolic of ethnic and racial tension on campus.”

In an incident that points out the anger directed at women who are perceived as being Jewish American Princesses, Kronenthal said she and a friend were walking on campus early one morning when they encountered two freshmen, drunk from an all-night pledge party. When Kronenthal and her friend ignored the young men’s advances, they accused the women of being JAPS. “You girls only go out with your own kind,” one said. One of them was so enraged that he began kicking a car door, Kronenthal said.

After speaking out on the problem at Syracuse, Spencer began hearing from other East Coast campuses where T-shirts with slogans like “Slap-a-JAP” or “JAP Busters” were in vogue. “The pattern that I’m finding is that if it’s a fairly large school, with a large population of Jewish students, the JAP stereotype will be there,” he said.

The Syracuse University administration cooperated with Spencer’s campaign by refinishing graffiti-marred desks and calling a halt to JAP chants in the Dome. Dorm advisers were trained to discourage the display of Jewish American Princess insignia in students’ rooms, Spencer said.

Although East Coast campuses have identified a specific Jewish American Princess look--tight leggings, oversized sweaters, Reebok sneakers, a butterfly clip in the hair known as a “JAP clip,” with conspicuous jewelry and makeup painstakingly applied--UCLA student Sherri Katz said that in Los Angeles the term connotes a “rich, snobby” attitude more than any particular style of dress.

For example, said Katz, who is a member of a predominantly Jewish sorority at UCLA, she and her sorority sisters were all dressed in old work clothes, engaged in the task of constructing a float for a campus festival one day, when in walked a young woman “with a deep tan, perfect nails, big earrings, and these fashionable sandals.

“And she wouldn’t work,” Katz said. “I said: ‘She’s such a JAP,’ because she just came to make an appearance. She didn’t come to do what she was supposed to be doing.”

Reluctance to Work

The JAP joke formula often plays on this reluctance to work, and a desire to be taken care of, as well as a distaste for sex.

Some feel that the characteristics emphasized in these barbs has aggravated a pre-existing problem: the fact that some Jewish men are determined not to marry within their faith. Because the Jewish American Princess is portrayed as an undesirable partner, it confirms for some their decision to marry non-Jews.

“Among other things, the jokes indicate that there is a lot of strain between Jewish men and women,” said Rabbi Susan Laemmle, Hillel director at L.A. Valley College and Pierce College

When Merfish talks to high school groups, she said, she notices that the stereotype has already become so ingrained that it has “driven a wedge between Jewish boys and girls.”

(Although the term Jewish American Prince is also heard on campuses from time to time, UCLA student Schreiber said the stereotype “is used much more in reference to women.”)

Rabbi Gerald Goldstein of Cal State Northridge said the term continues to be used frequently by male students, in particular. “I certainly hear Jewish men talk that way,” he said. “If a guy is well-dressed, they say he’s a sharp dresser. If a girl is well-dressed, she’s a JAP. It must have something to do with fear of these women.”

Annette Goodheart, a Santa Barbara psychotherapist who has studied ridicule and its role in humor, said that jokes that make fun of a particular group do indeed “come out of fear and a lot of repressed anger and a feeling of powerlessness.”

“I think ridicule is rampant in our culture right now,” she said. “It’s one of the ways society keeps people in the status quo.”

Goodheart pointed out that JAP jokes are really a triple-pronged form of ridicule since as well as demeaning women and Jews, “they also include the Japanese. It gives you a chance to say Jap, and get away with it.”

According to Linda Greenman, National Director of Women’s Issues for the American Jewish Committee, the first step in eliminating the stereotype is to expose the Jewish community to the notion that JAP humor “is not funny. It’s our writers, our movie producers and our comedians who have made this public domain,” she said.

When some people argue that the characteristics of the Jewish American Princess are a fair representation of certain Jewish women, Greenman says that indeed there are some Jewish people who are materialistic and spoiled--just as there are non-Jews who display those traits.

“Why do we have to use the pejorative, ‘Jew’?” she asks. “Why don’t we just say that this particular person is tasteless, loud, ostentatious, or materialistic?”

Sherry Merfish went on the warpath against Jewish American Princess humor after seeing 50 copies of “The JAP Handbook” for sale at a Jewish Community Bookfair in Houston.

Not long after, Merfish came across a line of greeting cards in her local card shop which featured a Jewish American Princess caricature named Bunny Bagelman. Merfish describes the character as having “a large nose, protruding lips, heavily shadowed eyelids, and frizzy hair. She’s always seen filing her nails or in some self-indulgent pose.”

Merfish brought her complaint to the Houston Rabbinical Council. The Bunny Bagelman cards and other Jewish American Princess paraphernalia actually constituted “age-old anti-Semitism, age-old hatred in a new package,” she told the rabbis. (Larry Barnett, spokesman for the Carolyn Bean Publishing Co. in Hayward which distributes the Bunny Bagelman line, said, “The cards were developed as a light-hearted satire on an archetypal Jewish personality type. They were not developed to offend.”)

“The rabbis were not with me on this at first,” Merfish said she found after stating her case. “In fact, a few of them tried to tell me JAP jokes.”

But after further campaigning by Merfish and others, the Houston Rabbinical Council eventually passed a resolution denouncing the Jewish American Princess stereotype. Merfish said the council also saw to it that synagogue gift shops in their area discontinued any items that portrayed the stereotype, such as children’s T-shirts bearing the slogan “JAP-in-Training.”

The consensus in the Jewish community in Southern California seems to be that JAP-baiting has not escalated to the point it has in other parts of the country. But no one is waiting for a Syracuse-type situation to develop locally. “We hope that maybe by being on top of it we can prevent (more serious incidents) from happening here,” said Hinda Beral, area director of the Orange County chapter of the American Jewish Committee.

‘Not an Innocent Thing’

“We’re trying to sensitize the students to the issue,” said Jackie Tolley, director of the Campus Jewish Centers at San Diego State University. “It’s not an innocent thing any longer.” She said they have advised the campus bookstore to discontinue a greeting card that displays what it calls “Priceless Precious Jap Jokes.”

And at UCLA, Rabbi Patricia Karlan-Newman said the Hillel Council is attempting to stimulate conversation on the topic among students. “They think JAP jokes are benign,” Karlan-Newman said.

Professor Spencer said that for too long young Jewish women have avoided confronting the stereotype by reasoning: “It doesn’t apply to me.”

Elaine Mandel, a 20-year-old UCLA student, said she has heard the term Jewish American Princess all her life, but it was especially popular when she attended the Westlake School for Girls. “A lot of the girls there are JAP-py,” she said.

“If (the term) is used by a friend in a joking, kidding sense, that’s one thing,” she said. “If it’s used as a synonym for bitch, that’s anti-Semitism. A lot of it does depend on the intent. But most of it, I think, is playful.”