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

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Case of The Sexy Jewess: Dance, Gender, and Joke-Work in U.S. Pop Culture by Hannah Schwadron Grace Kessler Overbeke THE CASE OF THE SEXY JEWESS: DANCE, GENDER, AND JOKE-WORK IN U.S. POP CULTURE. By Hannah Schwadron. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018; pp. 216. Building on critical work interrogating Jewish female stereotypes like the Jewish American Princess and the Jewish Mother, Hannah Schwadron's impressively multidisciplinary study introduces the Sexy Jewess, the newest addition to the canon of analytically rich, persistent Jewish female representations. Exploring case studies ranging from the "downwardly mobile" Jewish neo-burlesque performers to the capitalistic Porn Princess Joanna Angel, Schwadron argues "that what is so funny about Jewish girls is their self-conscious looks and internalized cultural anxieties about failing to fit in, when fitting in is trite and tiresome for emboldened women who would rather strive to be comically eccentric" (164). Although not a study of traditional concert dance, this text exemplifies the potential for analysis of embodiment and choreography throughout a variety of pop-culture media. Sensitive to the differing demands of her multimedia case studies, Schwadron takes an aptly mixed-methods approach. In her first chapter, she uses performance ethnography to examine New York's Jewish neo-burlesque circuit. Analyzing interviews and Hannukkah-themed performances by the Schlep Sisters, Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad, and others, she explores the way that the nostalgic form of neo-burlesque also traffics in comic nostalgia for a period in which Jews were not yet wealthy or white. Her ethnographic method allows her to attend to [End Page 265] her subjective position as "not in the show but not quite simply a spectator either": in thick description, she recounts her experiences serving as an usher for the Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad troupe and making conversation with warm-up acts at the 2014 Menorah Horah, elaborating her auxiliary role and its impact on her writing with incisive self-awareness. The resulting text is an unparalleled example of scholarship that thematizes the liminal position of an ethnographer in a way that is productive and not apologetic. Her methodological innovations here are one of the book's greatest strengths, as she "pushes against a range of disciplinary codes that demand objectivity [and] suspect the feeling body," giving readers vivid descriptions suffused with pointed insights about both the objects of analysis and her own subject position as a scholar (49). Addressing the archival evidence of her case studies in the next two chapters, Schwadron takes a historical approach. In chapter 2 she traces the embryonic Sexy Jewess, from Fanny Brice, Sophie Tucker, and Betty Boop, through performances by Sexy Jewesses of the 1960s and '70s: Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Gilda Radner, and Madeline Kahn. Using these case studies, she demonstrates a variety of facial, vocal, and gestural strategies that these performers deployed as "the funny girl body [was] becoming sexy"—including comic dance sequences (often parodic ballets of Swan Lake), racial impersonation (like Tucker's blackface performance), and the foregrounding of stereotypical negative elements of Jewish women (such as sexual apathy) (76). Chapter 3, "Comic Glory (and Guilt)," follows the developing Sexy Jewess through the next thirty years, during which the glory of celebrity platforms is tempered by the guilt of mainstream white access. Specifically, Schwadron reads performances by Sandra Bernhard, Sarah Silverman, and comedy duo Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson, finding significant parallels in the ways in which these contemporary Sexy Jewesses both satirize and embody attempts to use Jewish ethnic Otherness to appropriate blackness and sexual freedom. Chapter 4 draws on queer theory and scholarship theorizing horror films, performing a close reading of the mainstream ballet movie Black Swan (2010) to highlight "horror plots of Jewish racial passing and sexual deviance" (110). As a scholar-practitioner of dance, Schwadron is exceptionally attuned to "the inseparability between doer and the thing being done" (112). Exemplifying this heightened sensitivity to embodiment, she skillfully analyzes both the implied Jewishness of the film's characters and the (somewhat) public Jewish identities of the four lead actresses. The fifth chapter engages interlocutors like Ariel Levy (Female Chauvinist Pigs) and Jane Ward in the feminist discourse on...