More Details Original Title. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Add this book to your favorite list ». Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Dec 14, Lauren Haley rated it really liked it. My mother read this book as a teenager and told me I would like it. This definitely intrigued me since I had the same copy to read as she did.
When reading this, I was surprised to see all the pictures. I wish the pages were more organized so I knew where to start, but it wasn't a huge hassle. I figured it out eventually.
I liked the format of the book. It was a nice change because I am so used to reading chapter books with no general exciting format. While reading the book, it surprised me to s My mother read this book as a teenager and told me I would like it.
While reading the book, it surprised me to see that my Bat Mitzvah was so cliche. The "Fight with your mother" Toback 28 time slot every other hour was very accurate to the way that it actually happened for me. It was nice to know that I wasn't the only one going through this issue the day of my growing up.
Although there were many dated references, it was nice to see that some things in the world of American Jewish Adolescence was the same. It was nice learning about what I have to expect in 'the college scene. The first was the Jewish mother figure. Consumed by her nagging, overbearing affectations, the Jewish mother was to blame for the persistent woes of the Jewish American male — his anxiety, his neuroticism, his own assimilation failures.
Her image was designed to absorb the stigmas of the old world. Her inverse, the JAP, was entitled and withholding, designed to take blame for the stigmas of the new.
If the WASP still saw the Jewish man as nouveau riche — even after so much Americanization — then surely there must have been a third party to blame. The JAP was a woman who had overshot the mark, piling on the trappings of the stable middle class like so many diamond tennis bracelets.
Patimkin, of tony, suburban Short Hills, is the nose-jobbed, Radcliffe-educated ideal of a Jewish American woman. As she gets to know Klugman, she engages in sex to speed the transition from provided-for daughter to provided-for wife. Klugman, for his part, resents these expectations as much as he resents his inability to meet them.
Though Roth did not coin the phrase JAP, he did set the baseline from which she would evolve. Her existence said more about Jewish male insecurity than the actual inner lives of Jewish women. In any case, in this first iteration, the JAP was defined by her sexual manipulation and acquisitiveness. Depending on what you had and what she wanted, she might decide to put out, or not.
You owe her a dinner. If you should take her home after dinner and rub around and kiss in the doorway, right. They do expect a lot for a little fooling around. The s saw the rise of Barbra Streisand, a nasal-voiced, ugly-pretty icon for Jewish divas to come. By then, the public image of the JAP had expanded to include a full syndrome of tastes and behaviors.
My grandparents moved to a detached house in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania, and stocked it with three kids, three Persian cats, and a live-in maid to rake the shag carpets. They bought a boat. As Jews continued to move up the ladder, the schedule of Jewish life cycle events offered new opportunities for Manischewitz pissing contests. On the one hand, these expenditures proclaimed success in the American class system. On the other, so much flagrant consumption amounted to a kind of cheap caricature.
The JAP transcended her literary roots to claim a new place in the popular discourse. This rise is evidenced in the jokelore of the era :. How many JAPs does it take to change a light bulb? One to pour the Diet Pepsi, and one to call daddy. The Official J. From there, the J. The Jewish feminist magazine Lilith ran a special issue on the trend. The first years of my life were spent in a new construction townhouse in Feasterville, Pennsylvania, a second-tier JAP suburb about 45 minutes from Philadelphia.
The nearest first-tier JAP suburb, the unincorporated community of Holland, was only one zip code away. When my parents first went to look at the house, the agent had called the address Lower Holland. Irrespective of this fact, our neighbors were still Jews. It was there, among the plaster cacti and the pink-and-mint urns of the American Southwest, that I celebrated my first few Hanukkahs.
My brother was born in and circumcised in the living room, under an airbrushed painting of a Navajo woman. We went to temple preschool and day camp in the summer. She describes Jewish life as a pinball game, a pleasant cycle of recapitulation, handed down with only minor variations:. Once that princess pinball was whacked out of her slot, she hit the top of the board and tumbled down, hole to hole — the schools, the Houses of Worship, the Junior Holiday and Varieties, the Blind Dance, the camps, the tour of California, the tour to Europe, the college, the marriage, then — thwock — out comes a new princess-pinball and she drops into the last hole and people rub their eyes a few times at Riverside Memorial.
If we had not moved from that Feasterville house, I imagine my life might have followed this path. But in , my mom got a new job teaching third grade in a barely Jewish farm town on the Delaware River. We moved into a new construction, single-family home on a cul de sac in Doylestown, Pennsylvania — a step in the direction of the upper middle class, but two steps back from Zion. Our new temple, with the heavy-handed name of Temple Judea, was a motley agglomeration of about Jewish families, led into hostile territory by jobs at the nearby Merck corporate campus.
In school, I could count the other Jews on one hand. There were never enough to sustain a JAP contingent. In tackling the Jewish American Princess stereotype, Geller and other Jewish activists are up against the time-honored tradition of Jewish humor, which is sometimes self-deprecating, and has often been used as a device to brighten dark times.
University campus. The diagonal slash through the circle was a swastika. Kronenthal said she has heard the term Jewish American Princess all her life and always took it to be a harmless stereotype. In an incident that points out the anger directed at women who are perceived as being Jewish American Princesses, Kronenthal said she and a friend were walking on campus early one morning when they encountered two freshmen, drunk from an all-night pledge party.
One of them was so enraged that he began kicking a car door, Kronenthal said. The JAP joke formula often plays on this reluctance to work, and a desire to be taken care of, as well as a distaste for sex. Some feel that the characteristics emphasized in these barbs has aggravated a pre-existing problem: the fact that some Jewish men are determined not to marry within their faith.
Because the Jewish American Princess is portrayed as an undesirable partner, it confirms for some their decision to marry non-Jews. Valley College and Pierce College. Rabbi Gerald Goldstein of Cal State Northridge said the term continues to be used frequently by male students, in particular. It must have something to do with fear of these women. It gives you a chance to say Jap, and get away with it.
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