This book documents the unorthodox case of the Sexy Jewess, a distinctive figure of twenty-first-century American Jewishness. Versions of her image proliferate in US popular culture among neoburlesque, movie musicals, comedic television, ballet parody, and progressive pornography. In embodied plays with sexed-up self-display, the Sexy Jewess revises long-standing stereotypes of the ugly hag, the insatiable Jewish mother, and the self-obsessed Jewish American princess that sustain images of excess even as they have assimilated into the American mainstream. Talking back and dancing back at these ... More

This book documents the unorthodox case of the Sexy Jewess, a distinctive figure of twenty-first-century American Jewishness. Versions of her image proliferate in US popular culture among neoburlesque, movie musicals, comedic television, ballet parody, and progressive pornography. In embodied plays with sexed-up self-display, the Sexy Jewess revises long-standing stereotypes of the ugly hag, the insatiable Jewish mother, and the self-obsessed Jewish American princess that sustain images of excess even as they have assimilated into the American mainstream. Talking back and dancing back at these stereotypes through gender and humor rebellion, a slew of celebrity and lesser known performers play up their Jewish and female difference as self-conscious comments on their majoritarian sameness. In doing so, performers invoke the Sexy Jewess as a postassimilatory, postfeminist persona with radical and conservative effects. The introduction, five chapters, and the conclusion show how this occurs in a spectrum of spectacle embodiments across a range of performance contexts. Extending across stage and screen legacies of a hundred years, The Case of the Sexy Jewess links humor to classed ideas about sexiness and links ethnicity to gendered constructions of race. Unique to the study of American Jewishness but not limited by its scope, the book situates the body as a site of critical agency in discussions of parody and representational politics, with an emphasis on cultural appropriation and reappropriation that provokes questions applicable to a wide range of other identity acts and impersonations.