Sophisticated, powerful, forthright—and Jewish—Rachel Menken walks on the set in the first season of Mad Men (2007), a television show that Rolling Stone magazine will come to name the fourth best program of all time, and leaves an indelible mark. Portraying the lives of advertising executives in the 1960s, Mad Men will draw expansive praise for, among other things, its verisimilitude in set design and costume, as well as its illustration of the sweeping societal changes between 1960 and 1970. Characters weep over Marilyn Monroe’s overdose, go to Mississippi to register black voters, and panic during those thirteen days in May. None of these historical realities is more relentlessly or graphically portrayed, however, than the oppression of women during this time period. Stiletto heels, pointy bras, and garter belts connote confinement; yet the imprisonment goes well beyond costume. The hero’s wife, Betty, a graduate of Bryn Mawr, majored in anthropology but is now stuck at home raising three children. Chain-smoking, bored, and angry, Betty could well have been one of Friedan’s subjects in The Feminine Mystique. The stultified housewife that producer, director, and writer Matthew Weiner presents does not surprise the twenty-first-century viewer—we know this story. What still can shock, however, is his portrayal of the daily interactions between men and women. Weiner portrays a male culture committed to rendering women insignificant and silent, among other indignities. In subsequent seasons, the viewer will be relieved to see some of these women make gains. But before that, Rachel materializes. Independent and outspoken, Rachel signals a new chapter in the representation of Jewish women in popular culture.Heiress to and currently the CEO of her family’s department store, Rachel appears like a beacon in a dark night. Were she just inheriting her father’s fortune and handing management over to a husband, her situation would be more typical of the time period. But unmarried, she receives the spoils of her immigrant father who has grown the business from small storefront on the Lower East Side to a full block on Fifth Avenue, a story Weiner borrows from history, as many department stores—Macy’s, Gimbels, Bloomingdale’s, Saks, for instance—were founded by Jewish immigrants whose scions became millionaires. When Mad Men joins the Menken story, the store is foundering and the shrewd founder and patriarch, realizing that he must modernize to survive, hands the reins to his daughter. A symbol of postwar American Jewry, Rachel hires the upper-crust, Protestant-y Sterling-Cooper Agency (the Mad Men of the title) to market the store in a way that appeals to a higher class of customers — both Jewish and not. But the execs don’t get it. They don’t understand why the Menkens are not working with Jewish agencies. In a thoughtless and vaguely antisemitic gesture, the execs show Rachel an ad campaign based on door prizes and coupons. The partners even drag the one other Jewish guy they have working for them (in the mailroom) to sit in so Rachel might feel “more comfortable.” Rachel tells these five men how widely they have missed the mark. When the men tell her she is wrong, she argues with them. The male lead storms out of the room and shouts, “I will not be talked to this way by a woman.” But he is wrong. He will be talked to this way—by this woman—not only because she commands a $3 million account, but because she’s smarter than everyone in the room, and speaks with a candor and clarity that compel him.Rachel Menken appears on only nine of Mad Men’s 92 episodes, but nonetheless, she matters, both on and off the show. Played by the actress Maggie Siff, Rachel is attractive enough, but compared to the other women in the series—beauty queen January Jones and large-breasted and statuesque Christina Hendricks—Siff’s looks are understated. Her tailored suits and tasteful jewelry tell the viewer that she has learned to tame down the excesses of dress—unlike so many of the nouveau-riche Jewish women in film and literature, or the desperate-to-be-married female employees of the fifties firm. Financial independence means Rachel has none of the anguish (economic or otherwise) that many women of this time period fell victim to, even if her fortune is just the happy accident of birth, and her courage and honesty are nurtured on the freedom that having your own money provides. But money alone does not create a Rachel Menken. It is also brains and poise and sechel.In the fifteen years since Rachel’s supporting appearances on Mad Men, a relative flood of Jewish women have produced, written, and starred in their own series. Lena Dunham’s Girls (2012–2017) follows four twenty-somethings in New York City, with two of the four lead characters being Jewish. In Transparent (2014–2019), Joey (formally Jill) Soloway, the Jewish-identifying creator, writer, and producer, creates a Jewish family whose members explore their connections to traditional gender roles and religious identity after their mother comes out as a transgender woman. In Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015–2019), writer-producer Rachel Bloom creates Rebecca Bush, an alter ego who struggles with mental health. Abbie Glazier and Ilana Jacobsen play thinly veiled versions of their comedian selves on Broad City (2015–2019), and Difficult People (2017–), co-created, produced, and written by Julie Klausner, showcases another Jewish female stand-up turned lead actress. No list would be complete, of course, without mentioning Amy Sherman-Palladino’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017–), which has proven more popular, and mainstream, than the previous programs I have listed. With as many as eight Jewish female lead characters on successful TV shows—all created by Jewish women themselves—it is time for sustained analysis of Jewish women in popular culture. Yet in order to appreciate the singularity of this moment, we must first take a brief historical detour.In the parochial circles in which I was raised, Rhoda Morgenstern’s arrival on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–1977) counted as an event. As we say now, representation matters. Growing up in Brooklyn and Staten Island in the seventies, I lived the salad bowl, rather than melting pot, model of ethnicity. In my world, everyone identified—and was identified by—their ethnic background, whether Jewish, Italian, Irish, Puerto Rican, or Black (the predominant groups where I grew up). While not exactly the set of West Side Story, at my high school, the Irish kids and the black kids always fought. The Jewish kids were the nerds. The black kids were bussed in from Stapleton, a poor neighborhood. And all the Italians dressed up and were connected. Whether or not these stereotypes would have held up under closer examination isn’t entirely the issue. The point was we knew we were all different: we were supposed to be.Television took a while to begin reflecting any of this. On TV, sameness reigned. On shows like The Brady Bunch (1969–1974) or The Waltons (1972–1981) no one ever said they were Christian; but everyone was American, they celebrated Christmas, and no one but villains raised their voices or had facial hair. Unhappiness lasted for no longer than twenty-two minutes. According to Allan Burns, James Brooks’s co-producer on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, a CBS executive told him early in his career that American television audiences did not like New Yorkers, Jews, people with mustaches, and divorce. As a Jewish New Yorker, then, I was out of luck. And so would have been the many Jewish writers and producers working for television, had they not focused recreating white Protestant worlds. A well-known anecdote from this period recalls that Carl Reiner, the creator of the Dick Van Dyke Show, cast himself as the Irish Alan Brady and then sought ways to incorporate his own ethnic sense of humor. Buddy Sorel, Van Dyke’s sidekick, became the locus of all things Jewish. Still, no one on the show ever said the word “Jewish”—even if Buddy Sorel did talk a lot about delicatessen.By the 1970s, Rhoda was not the only outsider on television. On Happy Days (1974–1984), a top-five program for most of that decade, the Cunninghams modeled the typical American family, but an interloper added spice to the serene and conventional clan. Played by the Jewish Henry Winkler, and modeled after the 50s “greaser,” Fonzi was the rebel in town. Judging by his name, one might have concluded that Arthur Fonzarelli was Italian, but he was portrayed with little ethnic inflection—an interesting decision given that at the time American cinema was making serious bank by depicting the lives of Italian Americans in The Godfather franchise. Two years before that, Norman Lear launched his first television show, All in the Family. The lead character, Archie Bunker, lived in a working-class neighborhood in Queens and talked about things that no other TV character had been allowed to talk about before—race, religion, women’s rights—in such a reactionary and bigoted manner that he gave succor to those on the opposite side. Lear had a long career working in both TV and liberal politics, and he would change television in far-reaching ways, especially for African Americans. Lear produced The Jeffersons (1975–1985), a spin-off of All in the Family in which the Bunkers’ black next-door neighbors get rich and move to uptown Manhattan. Sanford and Son (1972–1977) followed an irascible junk dealer—who had little use for white people—and his son, and Good Times (1974–1979) depicted a working-class African American family living in the Chicago projects and showcased the fight for social justice. What one might say in 2022 about how fairly these programs, closing in on fifty years old depicted blackness must be the subject of another essay. For our purposes, it is enough to observe that these programs supplied a variety of images by which uninitiated viewers could develop multilayered impressions of what racial and cultural diversity looked like. When Rhoda appeared in 1970, she was the first Jewish woman to appear on network television since the original Mrs. Goldberg had departed in 1957. This Mrs. Goldberg, of lore, should not be confused with the mother on The Goldbergs, a conventional and one- dimensional character on a sitcom that has been on network television since 2013.When James Brooks (né Bernstein) created Rhoda Morgenstern, he assigned himself a complicated task: he had to create a funny, believable, and likeable portrait of an assimilated Jewish American. Of course, the character would not attend synagogue or observe shabbat; she had to be ethnically Jewish. What did such a distinction mean in 1970? Although The Mary Tyler Moore Show took place in Minneapolis, Rhoda was a native New Yorker. A little bit hippy (by television standards), Valerie Harper was told by the producers that she should not lose weight. Black eyeliner emphasized her dark hair and eyes; head scarves and large hoop earrings alluded to the exotic. Ironic and self-deprecating, Rhoda acted as a foil for the earnest, ultra-thin, and repressed Mary. In the four seasons that they played against each other, Rhoda encouraged Mary to express herself, for the latter had been trained to speak in a mannerly and midwestern way—never to disagree, never to offend. Again and again Rhoda interrupted Mary’s stammering to urge her to “just spit it out.”Although both characters were thirty and unmarried, Rhoda voiced unhappiness while Mary bit her lip, obligated as she was to be mild, modest, and American-sunny. This was a rich fount of comedy for the show, illustrating the difference in the communication styles between Jews and others—a disparity that is more than anecdotal, as documented by sociological and ethnographic research. In popular culture, the viewer has seen it frequently, most notably perhaps in the dining room split-screen scene of Annie Hall where the Protestant family is murmuring quietly about a swap meet and the Jewish family is yelling about a relative’s diabetes. That scene suggests a whole catalogue of differences between the two families; but on The Mary Tyler Moore Show the differences between Rhoda and Mary amounted to slight variations in wardrobe and a subtle, but meaningful, deviation in communication styles. When portraying Rhoda’s family, however, Brooks relied on safer comic material, employing vaudeville shtick. In one episode, Rhoda’s mother chased Mary around the couch as she tries to stuff money in her pocket.In the spinoff series, Rhoda (1974–1978), the married heroine, theoretically, had no more reason for unhappiness; thus, her sister Brenda provided the melancholy that viewers had apparently enjoyed in Rhoda’s earlier incarnation. To create Jewish comedy, it seemed, someone has to suffer. In her 1998 book Talking Back, which collects essays on the topic of this Studies in American Jewish Literature special issue, Joyce Antler objects to the show’s representation of Brenda, calling the character “whiny, self-deprecating and unattractive.” But I loved her, and I was not alone. Many in my peer group felt a kinship with a character who counted calories obsessively and admitted to being depressed—without being suicidal. I found comfort in Brenda in the same way that in later years, I would find balm in Jewish American literature. Reading E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, for instance, when I met the main character’s grandmother, a survivor of poverty and pogrom who was out of her mind with grief and deprivation, I understood my own grandmother for the first time. Yet neither Brenda Morgenstern nor Daniel’s grandmother provide uplifting articulations of Jewish identity. I can’t help wondering whether being showered with positive images of Jewish women would have changed how I felt about myself. Is it enough to be recognized, or must one be uplifted? In an ideal world, people would have enough contact with Jews, or Muslims, or African Americans, or LGBTQ folks, that no one or two characters on television would make the slightest difference in what people thought. Failing that, there could be enough depictions of such characters over various media that it would not be possible to say that any one individual’s attributes belonged to the entire group. But that milestone for the Jewish American female would take another fifty years to achieve. It’s a history of steps forward and steps backward.Created, written, produced by a Jewish woman, The Nanny (1993–1999) was the first sitcom since The Goldbergs (1949–1957) to take a Jewish woman as its main attraction. Although a commercial hit, the response from most critics and Jewish American cultural custodians was less than positive. The lead character, Fran Fine, played by Fran Drescher—who was also the creator, producer, and writer of the show—had a loud and exaggerated nasal drawl that irritated many Jewish viewers. In fact, such theatrics call to mind early twentieth-century African American performance, which characteristically deployed blackface to please the racists who would pay good money to see this kind of signifying. Fran Fine was overdressed, vain, materialistic, and too loud—as if Drescher sought to confirm the worst stereotypes of Jewish women. Had the creators (Drescher and her husband Peter Jacobsen) not been Jewish, the Anti-Defamation League might have protested. Had only a man dreamed up the show, he would have correctly been labeled a misogynist. It’s perhaps unsurprising that Antler disapproves of Drescher’s performance, lamenting that “even when Jewish women are in charge . . . unflattering stereotypes can still prevail.” Antler is right, of course, but academics sometimes have the luxury of remaining blissfully ignorant of commercial markets.It must have been a hard bargain for Drescher, finding a way to keep network executives pleased while securing her own platform. On the one hand, having a Jewish woman “in charge” of both a network show and of an on-screen Protestant household, should be tallied as a victory. On the other, it was hard to know whether audiences were laughing at Fran Fine or with her (the truth is that it was probably a bit of both). Still, Fran Fine has redeeming qualities, especially in contrast to her repressed and mumbling Protestant boss, a man the Nanny will eventually marry—after she converts him to her ways, if not her religion.One might have been able to view Fran Fine more positively had hers not been the only game in town. In 1998, critic Jeffrey Goldberg wrote, “One reason The Nanny has struck me as unhealthy for Jewish women is that it exists in a vacuum. There are few female Jewish characters on television today, at least as compared with male Jewish characters.” By “few” Goldberg must mean none, at least in starring roles. In both Seinfeld and Mad About You, shows that aired on television at the same time as The Nanny, the central male characters identify as Jewish and were played by Jewish actors, but their female co-leads were not played as Jewish. On Mad About You, Helen Hunt played Jamie, Paul Reiser’s Protestant wife. On Seinfeld, Jerry’s sidekick, Elaine, was played by the Jewish Julia-Louis Dreyfus, but her character was never identified as such. Much has been written about how Jewishness was or was not portrayed on Seinfeld (it is fruitful to consider, for example, that more outlandishly stereotypical ethnic, often easily coded as Jewish, characteristics were associated with secondary players, including, notably, the main characters’ relatives). For our purposes here, we should simply note that Jerry had the freedom to identify as Jewish without employing unflattering stereotypes to get laughs or to keep network execs and audiences happy.One of the more surprising discoveries I have made in completing this project is how few people, especially over thirty—well, at least those who run in my circle—know about the radical assemblage of Jewish female characters that have been populating the small screen in the last decade and a half. A wealth of Jewish programming preceded the coming of Mrs. Maisel. The diversity of screening platforms might explain some of the ignorance I have noted: Broad City, for instance, ran on Comedy Central; Crazy Ex-Girlfriend on the CW (and received the lowest ratings of any show ever to be renewed for four seasons); Transparent and Girls are available only by subscription service, Amazon and HBO respectively; Difficult People can only be seen on Hulu. Too many things to watch on too many different platforms.Yet these shows have garnered a fair share of awards: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend itself was nominated for twelve Emmys and won four, and it then won many other awards for choreography, original music, and community service awards. None of these award citations has mentioned the show’s Jewish themes, instead focusing on its frank treatment of mental health. Transparent also won a host of Emmys and Golden Globes and has been commended for its brave treatment of gender issues, even if no less a critic than Judith Butler has recognized that Transparent is much better on Jewish life than it is on trans life (Thurm 2016). In Transparent, Solloway directly engages questions of Jewish identity, going as far as situating a whole season in Israel, and having Ali go to Palestine, even if criticism has tended to emphasize gender issues.This apparent blindness raises several critical issues for those of us who work in Jewish studies. Has Jewishness been so woven into the fabric of American life that it hardly bears mentioning, that it just is not recognizable as “difference”? As stereotypes of nurturing nanas, meddling mothers, or whiny JAPs get retired, Jewish difference gets harder to locate. Even fifty years ago, Rhoda’s difference was hard to specify: a pair of hoop earrings and dark eyeliner? Some self-deprecating jokes? Worrying about weight? The question that this generation of secularized Jewish women has to address is whether there is something about Jewish ethnicity that is worth preserving.In Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a masterpiece of Jewish identity studies, Rebecca Bush, Rachel Bloom’s alter ego, would answer this question with a firm no. Rebecca returns home to New York from California for the bar mitzvah of a cousin in an episode called “Will Scarsdale Like Josh’s Shayna Punim?” (season 2, episode 10). Rebecca’s Asian boyfriend accompanies her to what she promises him will be a dreadful event. Despite her warning, he has a good time—as do the other guests—in ways that seem quite ordinary. In other words, this scene does not resemble the wedding scene in Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus: no one is overdressed, overeating, or measuring the carpet. The female rabbi, played by Patti Lupone, is thoughtful and well-spoken, despite Rachel’s incivility. Rachel is furious that everyone, even her boyfriend, is having a good time; for her, being Jewish is not about fun, it’s about suffering. While the other guests do a joyful hora, Rebecca imagines a more ghoulish scene in which the dancers sing this macabre but satirical tune:Now it’s time to celebrateGrab a drink and fix a plateBut before you feel too greatRemember that we sufferedNights like these are filled with gleeNoshing, dancing, singing, wee!But we sing in a minor keyTo remember that we sufferedBeing happy is selfishRemember that we sufferedYou have no idea what pain isRemember that we suffered, hey!. . .This DJ is terrificRemember that we sufferedMy grandma’s a survivorRemember that she sufferedI’m just saying that we sufferedWhen I say “we” you say “suffered”WeSuffered!WeSuffered!I can’t hear you!Remember that we suffered, hey!Rebecca blames her unhappiness on all things Jewish, including a selfish and vain mother. In a moment of reflection, she thinks about “epigenetics,” the controversial theory that one’s DNA can carry the legacy of trauma, first posited by psychologists treating the children of Holocaust survivors. Rebecca Bush, like her creator, grew up in a culture in which the Holocaust worked as a primary means of uniting the Jewish community and expressing Jewish identity. As the satirical lyrics above suggest, however, Bloom’s attitude toward the Holocaust is typical of her generation: Enough already. We get it. Isn’t there anything but suffering on which to fashion an identity? The viewer should remember that Bloom’s alter ego Rebecca is mentally unwell, which includes an unhealthy dose of delusional thinking. Presumably, when Rebecca gets well—she will, in the final season—she will not believe that being Jewish is the source of her suffering.Whether such Jewish misery is produced by epigenetics or culture, it is part of a past that this generation of Jewish women casts off. In Transparent, Soloway presents several historical montages in which Ali, the millennial daughter, “remembers” the Holocaust, suggesting that her alienation as nonbinary in a binary world corresponds to the historical exile of the Jew. In other dreamlike memories, however, Ali sees her female ancestors as radical dissenters, both in terms of nonconforming gender patterns and leftist political stances. Unlike the Holocaust, the history of Jewish American female radicalism, extending from Emma Goldman to Rose Schneiderman to Bella Abzug to Betty Friedan, has had little presence in popular culture, and is an area ripe for reexamination. In the 2021 miniseries Mrs. America, one might notice that many of the feminists who oppose Phyllis Schlafly and fight for the Equal Rights Amendment are Jewish—though little is made of that fact. Whether or not contemporary producers and writers label these women as Jewish, the informed observer understands that the revolutionary spirit can also be part of the experience of Jewish women.While not always world-shattering, today’s contemporary Jewish female lead is an outlier, critical of the status quo. She is young, not particularly unusual for television, but notable for a genre where, for seventy years, the most visible character had been a mother. Abby and Ilana from Broad City, Rebecca from Crazy, Ali Pfeffermann from Transparent, Hanna Horvath from Girls, and Julie from Difficult People are single, shockingly open about their sexuality, sharp observers of the hypocrisy around them, and under 40. If their mothers appear, they provide comic relief, but also serve as reminders of a past best left behind—by the genre as much as by American Jewish society. In Crazy, for instance, Tovah Feldshuh plays Rebecca’s intrusive, divorced, and narcissistic mother; in Broad City, comedian Susie Essman (who currently plays an unlikeable, aggressive, and selfish wife on Curb Your Enthusiasm) plays a more likeable and gemütlich character, but she is also an overzealous shopper, so desperate for a bargain on handbags that she will crawl down a manhole in Chinatown for the best buy. Such antics still work for easy laughs; even so, these mothers can also be compassionate and savvy, and a source of comfort. Most important, they are no longer the main act; they appear sporadically throughout the season and in small bits when they do. At last, the Jewish mother as the sole ambassador of the culture has been retired, one of the welcome casualties of this moment when Jewish women have enough power to represent themselves.While many of the stereotypical qualities of ethnic Jewishness have been effaced, there is one that been enlarged and redefined: the ability to speak plainly, to speak for oneself, and to speak up—and to say what others dare not. The comic as truth-teller harkens back to the Shakespearean jester, and reminds us that comedians often exploit their marginal status to critique culture and to say what others might be thinking but won’t say aloud. The prevalence of Jewish comedians owes much to their eagerness to transgress, to cross this line and address repressed topics—what polite assimilated America Jews were trained not to say. Indeed, mastering “reserve,” Jews and other ethnic minorities have learned to fit in. In literature published as early as the 1920s, Jewish characters understood that restraint is required if they are to achieve wider social and economic success. In Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers, for instance, Sara Smolinsky buys plain dark suits and faults her family and other immigrants who display excessive emotion. She scorns the mother who “weeps and laugh(s) hysterically, and shouts at her child” (276).The difference in the way Jewish Americans communicate stems from an ethnic inheritance that can be as easily effaced as a foreign accent—that is, if one wants to do so. The reinvention of Jewish ethnicity in today’s Jewish American woman relies heavily on the notion of frankness, but without the hysteria. It is worth noting, however, that in Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David’s character often crosses the line from frankness to uncivil speech. David’s character on the show is a rich Los Angeles Jew who has such a firm standing in his community that he deliberately re-marginalizes himself often by saying the most transgressive thing possible. David’s character does this not only for comic effects but because he is more comfortable being an outsider.In the work of contemporary Jewish women, this forthright and truthful way of speaking is more than just a comic tool: it is a source of power. In the past, this tendency toward frankness may have been viewed as pushiness, nosiness, or just plain rudeness; it was a judgment, of course, delivered by those unsympathetic to her, or intimidated by the prospect of her becoming too powerful. The Nanny is only successful because Drescher understands the threat that Fran Fine poses—too smart, too confident, too able—and she makes her character less scary by giving her several unflattering features for which she can be dismissed. In more recent years, however, the roles that Jewish women have inhabited use their voices in ways that are inspiring and important. And while not the sole prerogative of Jewish female characters, the active, truthful, powerful female voice has been, and continues to be, the foundation on which they are modeled. It is the dynamic most clearly in evidence in Amy Sherman Palladino’s breakthrough series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, from which I draw the words that provide the epigraph of this essay, “From now on, I am only taking gigs where I can say what I want.” Midge insists on this when her manager reminds her that, in this business, she just can’t say some things out loud. Insisting that then “they have to change the business,” Midge speaks for the twenty-first-century Jewish heroine rather than for women of the 1950s. In the decade in which the program takes place, saying just what she wants will land her in jail with Lenny Bruce. But then social realism is not the point of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, as Rachel Gordan and Tahneer Oksman observe in their pieces in this issue.Moreover, placing the series in the fifties eliminates any mystification about what Jewish identity means. Sherman-Palladino has only to deliver the Catskills, Borscht Belt comedy, and an expansive feeling of family—which prevails, notably, even among Midge and her ex-in-law family. Discovery of the Holocaust as a means of finding common cause is still in the future. In this version of Jewish life, the dark spots of history have been erased. Sherman-Palladino’s picture of Jewish history is reminiscent of how Irish American descent was reimagined in the late twentieth century when rolling hills and Riverdance replaced the Great Hunger and the Troubles. Mrs. Maisel is the Jewish equivalent of that: the luxurious Catskills (where there are no Holocaust survivors or downscale bungalows), the intellectuality of Jewish Columbia (where no one mentions the quota systems still in place at Harvard or Princeton), and scads of designer clothes (without the vanity or price tags).Realistic or not, Mrs. Maisel provides a