The Case of the Sexy Jewess: Dance, Gender, and Jewish Joke-Work in U.S. Pop Culture by Hannah Schwadron

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Case of the Sexy Jewess: Dance, Gender, and Jewish Joke-Work in U.S. Pop Culture by Hannah Schwadron Jennifer Caplan Hannah Schwadron. The Case of the Sexy Jewess: Dance, Gender, and Jewish Joke-Work in U.S. Pop Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Xi + 222 pp. Hardcover $99, paperback $34.95. ISBN: 9780190624194, 9780190624200. Hannah Schwadron’s new book The Case of the Sexy Jewess: Dance, Gender, and Jewish Joke-Work in U.S. Pop Culture is a lively, complex, and insightful entry into several fields. That variety is both the book’s biggest strength and its biggest weakness, as it engages conversations spread across and throughout a range of fields and subfields, but that range might find it ultimately unsatisfying to scholars who want a more complete thought about their individual area of study. The book is a series of case studies, each extremely readable and useful on its own, and should have great value to those teaching courses on a number of topics, from Judaism and gender, to humor studies, to dance. Surrounding the five case study chapters are an introduction and conclusion in which Schwadron makes her case for the “Sexy Jewess,” a character she calls an “imaginative fiction.” (1) But while the Sexy Jewess might not exist in reality, Schwadron’s point is well taken that “a study of the Sexy Jewess reveals how assimilation—a core concern of secular Jewish American collective identity—is a performance of return and imagination.” (4) Schwadron’s Sexy Jewess tells a story of how American Jews have navigated racial identity, gender, class, and nationalism. As such, this is a valuable and needed addition to the standard canon of narratives about Jewish Americanization. Chapter 4, “Black Swan, White Nose: Jewish Horror and Ballet Birds by Any Other Name,” is by far the strongest section of the book. It is here that Schwadron’s expertise in dance shines through most clearly, and it is here that her passion for the material and her topic becomes most apparent. It is also here, however, that the internal logic of the book is strained the furthest. In chapter 2, Schwadron discusses Fanny Brice and Barbara Streisand, and she uses the example of Brice’s (and more prominently Streisand-as-Brice’s) comedic performance of “Swan Lake” as a way to establish how the Sexy Jewess uses humor as part of her sexual performativity. The connection between this “Swan Lake” and Darren Aronofsky’s seems tenuous, however, and Black Swan is many things, but it is not funny (as Schwadron acknowledges) [End Page 92] . So this chapter is both the swan of the book in terms of content, and the ugly duckling in terms of its interruption of the narrative. Beyond that the chapters form two sets, in ideas if not in organization. Chapters 1 and 5 are fascinating examinations of Jewish women reclaiming a sex-positive position within the adult entertainment industry. Chapter 1, “Nice Girls Gone Blue: Neoburlesque Nostalgia and the Downwardly Mobile,” looks at performance groups made up of Jewish women doing modern striptease and neoburlesque acts. Schwadron describes these acts and revues as being a combination of irony, sex, religion, and dance, and she reproduces them in such vivid and engaging terms that I felt as though I were watching the performances she observed. In this chapter Schwadron use the concept of “Jewface,” which she describes as “white women performing Jewishly,” but with a sense of nostalgia, to explain the layers of performance she sees in the construction of the Sexy Jewess. (28) This chapter pairs nicely with chapter 5, “Punk Porn Princess Joanna Angel and the Rise of Jewish Raunch.” Joanna Angel is in many ways performing an inverse sort of Jew-face, where she plays not on nostalgic conceptions of Jewishness, but on a postmodern, post-ethnic, postfeminist construction of Jewish womanhood. The description of Joanna Angel’s interracial niche within the pornography market is informed by chapter 3, “Comic Glory (and Guilt): The Appropriative License of Jewish Female Comedy,” in which Schwadron pushes against the way Jewish women in comedy have more (Sandra Bernhard) and less (Sarah Silverman) successfully engaged in race...