“Exiled from Exile Itself”: Jewish Privilege and the Feminist Afterlives of Yiddish in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Broad City

Abstract

Abstract This essay studies how Jewish creators of television comedy negotiate the tension between Jewish white privilege and inherited memories of social precarity by shaping a Jewish-ly coded vernacular. Specifically, I explore the multilingual idioms designed by Ilana Glazer, Abbi Jacobson, and Rachel Bloom in the sitcoms Broad City and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I argue that their feminist language design generates various afterlives for a migratory diasporic condition that is by now for them a mere memory. Through vernacular reimaginations of their own removal from their ancestors’ precarity, they envision new linguistic ways to unsettle hegemonic structures of gender, sexuality, race, and culture.