BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Flavorful Odes to Jewish Moms : HER FACE IN THE MIRROR: Jewish Women on Mothers and Daughters <i> Edited by Faye Moskowitz</i> ;Beacon Press $24, 314 pages

Everyone knows about Jewish mothers: They’re the ones who make you put a sweater on because they’re cold, who cook too much and then either complain that no one’s eating enough or observe that you’re putting on a little weight. They worry incessantly; they complain, they kvetch.

Without them--and their daughters, the Jewish mothers of tomorrow--a whole school of male stand-up comics would have had to keep their day jobs.

They are the Rodney Dangerfields of parenthood. A Jewish mom can’t get any respect--or at least she couldn’t until this anthology of essays, stories and poems came along.

Editor Faye Moskowitz intends to do in one volume--with the work of 56 authors, poets, essayists and journalists--what millions of Jewish moms have been unable to do for decades, which is to balance out the portrait just a tad, and show us that the phrase “terrific Jewish mom” is not an oxymoron.

But chronic illness can require aggressive therapy. To cancel out all those layers of wisecracks, Moskowitz offers a strong dose of righteousness--lots of different flavors, granted, but most of them essentially indignant, even devout in their adoration. It’s a strange pill to swallow.

For example: Acid comic Sandra Bernhard’s name appears in the table of contents, and I turned to her contribution first, expecting a dose of bitter humor. Hardly. Bernhard’s brief essay is about the anguish of her adult life (and pray, where did that come from? Any problems at home with Mom and Dad as a kid?), and the solace she finds thinking of her mother and grandmother.

There are other writers from whom we expect more stately prose, and they do deliver. Letty Cottin Pogrebin, one of the founders of Ms. magazine, offers a poignant glimpse of her own life--of losing her mother when she was a girl, of growing into adulthood without a guide, only to find that she has inherited, however subconsciously, many of the endearing qualities she recalls in her mother.

She remembers the superstitions with which her mother protected her from evil, particularly one about never allowing the full moon to shine on a sleeping child (it’s only supposed to shine on the grave, you see).

One night, when the moon is full and the window coverings had been taken down for some house repairs, she creeps into her teen-age son’s room to hang something over his window, and is gratified to see that he’s already done it. She sees here a link between her boy and the grandma he only knows from stories; she sees that eternal life we all fervently hope for, because the physical realities of death are too abrupt to accept.

It brings a lump to the throat. It takes about a day for the left brain to kick in and wonder if the kid didn’t hang something in the window just because he knew the light would bother him.

Kim Chernin’s essay about her social activist mother is both more and less successful--less, when she’s being doctrinaire about her politics; more, when she gives in to the intense feelings she has for her mother, who is becoming frail, and her daughter, who is about to depart for Harvard.

Both of them are leaving her; the fact that all three have the courage to express their feelings in the midst of such upheaval makes for powerful reading.

But I think there’s such a thing as too much dignity. The book reminds me of Ken Burns’ recent documentary about baseball. His elegiac tone, the wistful banjos, the melancholy harmonica. It was too much; it was as though he was overcompensating for his subject, which simply didn’t deserve such seriousness of purpose.

I’m delighted for the contributors--they’ve had great good fortune, no matter what denomination--but this book does them an ironic disservice. The comics always complain about Jewish mothers who want to be martyrs; this book comes perilously close to giving them their wish.