Miriam Eve Mora’s debut book details how Jewish acculturation to America was shaped by ideas about gender. For twentieth-century Jewish men who sought to integrate into American culture, becoming a part of American society involved negotiating what it meant to be a) American, b) Jewish, and c) a man. Mora explains that the ideals for each of these interrelated categories, which were influenced by various political, economic, and cultural forces, are constantly being negotiated and renegotiated.
American Jewish men did not merely absorb normative ideas about masculinity, or what scholars term “hegemonic masculinity,” but developed their own conceptions in relation to both hegemonic masculinity and regnant ideas about Jewish masculinity. Immigration to America, antisemitism, American military interventions, the Holocaust, Zionism, and the founding of the State of Israel all shaped how different conceptions of American Jewish masculinity developed.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Jewish men were commonly understood as physically weak or effeminate. The prominence of the image of the Jewish male as a scholar contributed to this depiction. Moreover, almost half of American Jews were immigrants, many of whom lived in impoverished urban centers.
As Mora explains in chapter three, several archetypes of American Jewish masculinity emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century: 1) the scholar who embraced intellectualism, thereby rejecting hegemonic masculinity; 2) the Jewish criminal; and 3) the Jewish philanthropist. Philanthropists supported agricultural and fraternal organizations that, in their efforts to improve economic conditions for Jewish immigrants, also combated negative images of the unruly immigrant or weak scholar. They were particularly concerned about urban Jewish juvenile delinquency and created rural and agricultural programs to remedy it.
Zionism also informed American Jewish masculinity. Although some Jews feared that embracing Zionism would threaten their ongoing acculturation by implicitly rejecting American nationalism, it also provided a vision of Jewish masculinity that was agriculturally industrious and physically strong. Paradoxically, Jewish Americans thought of themselves as more American because they had a place that was not their current homeland against which to define themselves. This put them more in line with non-Jewish Americans who could also identify a homeland to which they traced their ancestry.
The soldier was perhaps the American masculine ideal par excellence. In both world wars, Jewish men enlisted in the military in considerable numbers. Some Jewish organizations sought to publicize Jewish military bravery to counter the stereotypes of the unmanly Jew. Mora argues that all this actually did was counter the perception that Jews were averse to military combat in principle; many treated Jewish soldiers as outliers. Traditionalist Jews generally rejected militarism as un-Jewish, in favor of the ideal of the gentle scholar.
The link between American manliness and militarism waned when the US got involved in the Vietnam War, particularly as news of atrocities such as the My Lai massacre emerged. Leftist Jews supported civil rights and antiwar movements, while conservative Jews learned toward militant movements such as the Jewish Defense League. The postwar economic boom created the ideal of the bread-winning father, something to which Jews aspired.
But before that, the Holocaust gave rise to another image of the weak Jewish man: the emaciated victim. Simultaneously, the emergent Sabra — the virile, native-born Israeli Jew, distinct from the bookish diaspora Jew — provided a new rubric by which American Jews could assess their masculinity, even as they chose not to immigrate.
Meticulously researched and wide-ranging, Carrying a Big Schtick deftly describes twentieth-century American Jewish history through the lens of masculinity.
Brian Hillman is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Towson University.
