The Case of the Sexy Jewess: Dance, Gender, and Jewish Joke-Work in US Pop Culture

Amidst the growing forums of kinky Jews, orthodox drag queens, and Jewish geisha girls, we find
today’s sexy Jewess in a host of reflexive plays with sexed-up self-display. A social phantasm with
real legs, she moves boldly between neo-burlesque striptease, comedy television, ballet movies, and
progressive porn to construct the 21st Century Jewish American woman through charisma and
comic craft, in-your-face antics, and offensive charm. Her image redresses longstanding stereotypes
of the hag, the Jewish mother, and Jewish American princess that have demeaned the Jewish
woman as overly demanding, inappropriate, and unattractive across the 20th century, even as Jews
assimilated into the American mainstream. But why does ＂sexy＂ work to update tropes of the Jewish
woman? And how does sex link to humor in order for this update to work? Entangling questions of
sexiness to race, gender, and class, The Case of the Sexy Jewess frames an embodied joke-work
genre that is most often, but not always meant to be funny. In a contemporary period after the
thrusts of assimilation and women’s liberation movements, performances usher in new versions of
old scripts with ranging consequences. At the core is the recuperative performance of identity
through impersonation, and the question of its radical or conservative potential. Appropriating,
re-appropriating, and mis-appropriating identity material within and beyond their midst, Sexy Jewess
artists play up the failed logic of representation by mocking identity categories altogether. They act
as comic chameleons, morphing between margin and center in countless number of charged
caricatures. Embodying ethnic and gender positions as always already on the edge while ever more
in the middle, contemporary Jewish female performers extend a comic tradition in new contexts,
mobilizing progressive discourses from positions of newfound race and gender privilege.