The Jewish American Princess 👑 is not ok

I read "The Official J.A.P. Handbook" so you don't have to

Dear reader,

About two years ago, I began joking to friends and fellow Jews that “American Jewish white women are not ok.” By this, I think I meant that some Jewish white ladies, particularly Gen X and older but also millennials, seemed to be living in a state of uncertainty, rage, grief, and a kind of aggrievement about our role in The Culture. We wanted to be good, had been told as children that we’d been oppressed, but suddenly we were now being told we were a part of doing the oppressing, and this felt bad.

I was originally thinking about Hannah and Shoshana in Girls and Ali and Sarah in Transparent (which I just rewatched! wild!) and Rachel in UnReal and Rebecca in My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I was thinking about the main character in the 2020 movie Shiva Baby and in the 2021 novel Milk Fed by Melissa Broder. IRL, I was thinking about Bari Weiss (she dated Kate McKinnon in college!) and Debra Messing. These women were bursting their own ear drums, dropping out of 17 PhD programs only to start an 18th (this is hyperbole), stalking exes, lying to reality TV romance contestants, starving themselves, calling for Arab-American professors to be fired, and getting into an unhinged war with Susan Sarandon. Sex is in there a lot, and so is power seeking, and so are eating disorders, and so is FEAR.

Then October 7, 2023 happened, and it turns out that this is really not a joke. Some of us really are not OK. Which American Jewish women are screaming the loudest about feeling unsafe? Usually, those who are of Ashkenazi descent and wealthy. There was even this widely aired commercial (that supposedly took place in the Philly suburbs!) which urged white Jewish women to vote for Trump because he “will keep us safe” and it looked like this:

I want to be clear: I’m a Jewish white woman from class privilege. I’m not exempt from the confusion and fear that comes with being raised in a family that holds contradictory beliefs about race and power and victimhood; I’m very much implicated.

I’m half Jewish though I was raised Jewish, but secular, in New York City. My father’s family immigrated from Russia long before the Nazi occupation so we have no Holocaust survivors in our family, nor relatives in Israel that I’m aware of. My father grew up speaking Yiddish and often spoke phrases to my sister and me. I recently got access to some of paternal grandmother’s records and saw that her race was listed as WHITE in the 1910, 1920, 1930, and 1940 census, but when my great-grandfather applied for citizenship in 1932, his race was listed as HEBREW. What a mindfuck.

I cherish my Jewishness, which to me means, among other things, culture and history and food and politics and telling good jokes and stories and always wanting, nay NEEDING, to know why something is the way it is. It is inextricable from who I am. Recently at a book event, someone asked me if I’d felt unsafe when promoting my novel Housemates around the United States because I have a recognizably Jewish last name. The answer is no. You know who is unsafe in America these days? Palestinian-Americans, Arab-Americans, and people who are talking about Palestine. I have many, many more thoughts (I’ll be presenting on this panel at AWP in March, sending so much love to LA right now) but I also have only one wild and precious life and I shan’t spend it arguing with people who are going to yell at me for being a “self-hating Jew” on the internet.

So this is all to say that I’ve been curious for a long time about the source of a particular kind of white Jewish woman (with which I feel a strong identification and from which I also feel a strong alienation) unwellness and yes, sometimes cruelty—to herself and others. You could say I’ve been curious about it ever since I was thirteen and switched schools from a weird downtown school where we didn’t learn math (plenty of Jews) to a fancy upper east side private school (more Jews and of a different kind). In this new school, the phrase J.A.P.¹, meaning Jewish American Princess, was an everyday occurrence, used in a sort of loving-in-group-but-also-insulting way, as in, “Look at that girl’s hair, it’s so pretty, she’s such a J.A.P.”

In this new school, I fell in with a group of students who were also new and/or not from the upper east side, including kids from the outer boroughs and on scholarship. I’ll never forget as long as I live: a softball game wherein a group of girls who self-identified as J.A.P.s played me and my friends and when my team scored a run, our opponents sang that song from Bring It On: “That’s alright, that’s OK, you’re gonna pump our gas someday.” What was that about? I wondered. And wonder still.

Wondering lead to research. From this Vox article, “Reconsidering the Jewish American Princess: How the J.A.P. Became America’s Most Complex Stereotype,” I learned that there exists a very funny (and somewhat dated) book from 1982 called The Official J.A.P. Handbook by Anna Sequoia (nee Schneider). Apparently it was a bestseller at the time in humor/satire though it has since gone out of print (a crime!). I settled in to read about my people, and myself, prepared to feel very accused and very amused. I felt nervous, and feel nervous here again, diving in to what some may feel is a harmful Jewish American stereotype. At the same time, it was immediately clear to me that this book was written with love from the inside, by a Jewish woman for Jewish women, which is the same stance I’m trying to take here, though I’m aware that readers here may come from all backgrounds.

So what’s the point of reading this silly book and coming for my own? I think we need to be come for sometimes, both in the sense of set straight, and in the sense of comforted, held.

TLDR; I read this book in full so you don’t have to!

The book starts out by trying to identify what is core to what Sequoia calls “natural born” J.A.P.-dom, its credo if you will, and comes up with a few things: “More is more.” And, “At the very core of the female born J.A.P. aesthetic are two guiding principles: 1) I am terrific; 2) Daddy will pay.” Then Sequoia gets into the real meat: “Jewish American Princesses are warm, coddling, funny, smart, and achieving. They are wonderful, dedicated mothers…She eats at fine restaurants. Her children go to marvelous schools. She travels. She reads. She often has an exciting job. A J.A.P. has a flair for living and entertaining unlike almost anyone else.” It’s true. There is a certain core ALIVENESS to this kind of woman.

On the reason why we associate J.A.P.s with fancy brands and makeup and chemically straightened hair, Sequoia says: “The true JAP always looks great. She wears her full makeup and at least some jewelry to the supermarket because she knows it is important to look ones best at all times.”

Some of these lines are just jokes, but some really struck me. Throughout the book, Sequoia keeps coming back to the idea that J.A.P.s are always pursuing and embodying “the Good Life,” which seems to have to do with the trauma of Jewish flight, immigration, and assimilation.

“It’s simply part of the quest for the Good Life,” writes Sequoia, “the Good Life that negates the shadow of the shtetl, the ghost of walk ups on the Lower East Side, the indignity and hardships of immigration. The litany of brand-name labels is an invocation against past indignities, an affirmation that pogroms were just a bad dream, a promise that in America hard work and ingenuity bring, to the deserving, almost endless rewards. The lucky J.A.P. child growing up in such an environment learns, from the first moments of emerging consciousness, that only the best is good enough for him or her, and that with the proper education or training, the best is their beshert.”

Sequoia also has an astute and very funny taxonomy of J.A.P.s that speaks to questions of class, place, generation, and politics. (She argues that some cultural figures, see below, are J.A.P.s in spirit despite not being Jewish, which is interesting). The book describes some of the girls I went to high school with as “J.U.P.s” or “The Jewish Uptown JAP…Very like the Born JAP, except from a much more prosperous family that has been in this country one or two generations longer. Raised, usually, on Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, Sutton Place, or a townhouse in the East Seventies. Often of German-Jewish extraction. No Yiddish spoken here. Often a younger brother may have a bit of a heroin problem.” Iconic.

Estella Havisham! I’m dead.

She also comes for many of us when she enumerates another kind of J.A.P which she calls “The Revisionist J.A.P.”! “Ellen has had every advantage. She’s bright, she’s pretty, she’s been to good schools. But somehow she’s become political…Before long, after marching in every march and demonstration from Washington, DC., to Shoreham, supporting every cause from gay rights to Save the Whales, Ellen finds her Ultimate Rebellion: she moves to East Third Street, in the building occupied by the Hell’s Angels, where she becomes pregnant by an unemployed, non-Jewish revolutionary she refuses to marry. The question is, how long will this go on?”

I was really curious if Sequoia would go into the specific ways in which J.A.P.s tend to have a dysfunctional relationship with food, but sadly, despite the cover advertising it as one of the books’ covered topics (“Dieting—caviar and carrot sticks”) she doesn’t really. All we get are comments like in Sequoia’s chart of what is and isn’t J.A.P. (below), where she lists “obesity” as “Not J.A.P.” (!) but anorexia as “J.A.P.” There’s also a section about drugs and how much J.A.P.s love diet pills: “The J.A.P is always on a diet.” This resonated with me about my high school milieu: not a single one of the girls at my school, me included, had a healthy relationship with food.

I’m definitely part J.A.P. by Sequoia’s description, if not quite a “natural born J.A.P.” or a “J.U.P.,” I’m at least half “Revisionist J.A.P.” I’ve been open in previous posts about having had an eating disorder and being raised in a very food dysfunctional household. My first book, The Third Rainbow Girl, goes much more deeply into my self-destructive tendencies and not okay-ness!

So what now? I’m thinking, what if we didn’t hold so much fear? What, I wonder, could that be about.

Toppings

• L.A. is on fire. I’m holding my friends tight and I’m angry at the human greed and disregard for climate change that enabled this to happen. If you’re looking for resources to support, I found this list put together by MALAN (Mutual Aid Los Angeles Network) helpful.

• So far this January I’ve read Cassandra at the Wedding, A Certain Hunger, and Catalina. Of the three, I find myself turning over Catalina the most in my mind. The voice was so exciting and unexpected. Highly recommend on audio. I read Cassandra because I’m looking for books that have uneven first person narration splits (aka have two first person narrators but don’t just alternate back and forth like A,B,A,B etc). And while A Certain Hunger wasn’t exactly my bag, I did enjoy the food writing very much (!!) and there’s an insight at the end about how we sometimes have to choose between versions of ourselves in order to be loved that gutted me.

• I’m really enjoying reading on my Kobo (non-Amazon version of Kindle) this winter more than reading physical books for some reason. There’s something very “I’m rotting in bed and no one can take me from this story” that an e-reader seems to encourage.

• I’m reading January 24 at 6pm in a new series taking place at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in conjunction with their exhibit What Times Are These? (“The works gathered together for this exhibition find poetic ways to probe the histories and state of this nation, without asserting a fixed political view”). Free but RSVP here.

• On February 6, I’m helping run a fun event (online, Zoom) to celebrate the 46 (!!) titles coming by Philly or Philly-connected authors coming out in winter, spring, and summer 2025. Weike Wang, Kim Kelly, Kayleb Candrilli, Tre Johnson, and Sophie Lewis are among the 9 readers headlining the event. To register, simply donate to Blue Stoop's winter fundraiser at any level. If you’re a bookseller or part of the bookish media, you can attend free! Just email info@bluestoop.org.

That’s all!

Yours,
Emma

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1. This is an acronym and bears absolutely no relationship to the anti-Japanese slur.