ABSTRACT Title of Document: SPEAKING FROM A STRANGE PLACE: REFIGURING CONTEMPORARY BODIES OF JEWISH AMERICAN WOMEN'S ASSIMILATION Amy Karp, Doctor of Philosophy, 2012 Directed By: Associate Professor, Sheila Jelen, English Department Jewish American assimilation in the United States is considered a finished, and successful, project. This narrative of successful assimilation is used as a foundational example of enculturation in the United States in numerous bodies of study, including whiteness studies, cultural studies, and Jewish studies. The usage of Jewish American male experiences as the basis of this narrative creates the notion that Jewish American women achieved assimilation through their male counterparts. Though this metonymic usage of male experience for all Jewish American experience has largely gone uncontested in scholarship, a plethora of Jewish American women's writing has emerged contemporarily in which this metonymic usage of Jewish male experience for the entire story of Jewish American assimilation is being questioned. In these texts, visual and written, ghostly and strange happenings suggest that for some Jewish American women assimilation may be an ongoing project and that new tools of understanding are necessary to understand their stories, so different from the already sedimented male narratives of the Jewish American assimilation story. In this project, memoir (Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel), fiction (Empathy by Sarah Schulman), and television drama (The L Word by Ilene Chaiken) created by Jewish American women writers is examined in order to re-imagine narratives of Jewish American assimilation. With the use of theory from a variety of bodies of study as well as Jewish American women's fiction produced before and after World War II, Jewish American assimilation is illuminated as an ongoing project in which some Jewish American women inhabit the identity of strangers. The strangers encountered here illuminate not only the failings of assimilation, and its attendant narratives, but also resistances to assimilation and its violence’s. Further, the encounter with strange characters in the process of assimilating created by Jewish American women imagined to be successfully "Americanized," provides insight into the necessary tools of discipline and normalization in the construction of citizenship and belonging in the United States. SPEAKING FROM A STRANGE PLACE: REFIGURING CONTEMPORARY BODIES OF JEWISH AMERICAN WOMEN'S ASSIMILATION By Amy Karp Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2012 Advisory Committee: Professor Sheila Jelen, Chair Professor Maxine Grossman Professor Katie King Professor Randy Ontiveros Professor Martha Nell Smith © Copyright by Amy Karp 2012 ii Acknowledgements FOR MARVIN ISRAEL KARP April 18th, 1938-November 6th, 2011 Without whom this project would not have been possible. May you and those who came before you find peace in the great beyond. But children had it worst of all, for although it would seem that they had fewer memories to haunt them, they still had the itch of memory as strong as the elders of the shtetl. Their strings were not even their own, but tied around them by parents and grandparents--strings not fastened to anything, but hanging loosely from the darkness. Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated AND FOR CAROLINA GOMEZ MONTOYA For sharing the present with me and for helping me envision a future in the light of the past. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements....................................................................................................... ii Table of Contents......................................................................................................... iii Chapter 1. Assimilating the Strange: Jewish American Assimilation and Its Queer Remainders ....................................................................................................................1 Chapter 2. Posing a Problem: Prozac Nation and Jewish White Masks......................51 Chapter 3. The L Word And Its Evasions: Jewish Presence and Absence on the Queer Screen ........................................................................................................................102 Chapter 4. Writing from the "Remnant": Sarah Schulman's Empathy and the Possibilities of the Stranger.......................................................................................155 Chapter 5. Conclusion ...............................................................................................201 Works Cited...............................................................................................................214 This Table of Contents is automatically generated by MS Word, linked to the Heading formats used within the Chapter text. 1 Chapter 1. Assimilating the Strange: Jewish American Assimilation and Its Queer Remainders 2 Born into a world already in process, all of us begin—belated. The sense of belatedness is particularly keen for American children of Jews who survived Hitler. They come ‘after’ the destruction of European Jewry. They enter a place with no visible ruins, invisibly scarred by what happened elsewhere, earlier. Janet Burstein, Telling the Little Secrets My story is the story of the exile of the Jews: a story of discovery, of picking up and discarding, of mending the worn fabric of a life, and sometimes throwing away the sharp shards of identity found in the back of a dark closet. Lynn Meredith Schrieber, “Meeting in the Middle” Because my “engagement with the unsayable” is at once systematic and deeply intuitive and is rooted in historical as well as psychological contexts, it seems appropriate not only to offer my readings, but also to document the process by which I came to these troubling conclusions, which have wide interpretive ramifications. Evelyn Torton Beck, “Kahlo's World Split Open” As a society, we live with the unbearable by pressuring those who have been traumatized to forget and by rejecting the testimonies of those who are forced by fate to remember. As individuals and as cultures, we impose arbitrary limits on memory and on recovery from trauma; a century, say, for slavery, fifty years, perhaps for the Holocaust. Susan Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self 3 Preface Jews born in the United States after World War II are understood to have inherited white, assimilated, middle-class identities. However, visual and written texts created by contemporary Jewish American women writers, such as Elizabeth Wurtzel, Ilene Chaiken, and Sarah Schulman, establish Jewish American assimilation as incomplete for many, and untenable for some. They create Jewish women characters unable to rid themselves of the markers of their Jewishness, relegated to the status of perpetual stranger for their failures. The characters (fictional and autobiographical) I will examine here--Elizabeth Wurtzel, Jenny Schecter, and Anna O--are pushed towards the periphery of identities toward the edge of assimilation1 as symbols of dangerous strangers. This assimilating process, for many Jewish women, is an ongoing project in need of vigilant reiteration in ways that Jewish male assimilation is not, perhaps due to the unequal expectations for feminine and masculine performances of self. Jewish American women, I argue, must continuously work at assimilating, through employing different performative and performance strategies, including physical and behavioral modification. Further, different time periods and locations have called for (and continue to call for) different strategies of bodily discipline. Jewish American women who are unable to perform an assimilating self are relegated to the position of strangers, neither insider nor outsider. The more visible Jewish 1 This assimilation is referred to as a move into 'whiteness' in most bodies of study that address Jewish assimilation and so that is largely how I will discuss this phenomenon here. However, the absorption of Jewishness into whiteness does not mean you can find Jews in the histories of whiteness, belying some of the problematics of the language usage. 4 American women have become, the more those who mostly closely resemble a stereotypical idea of “Jewish women” must work to rid themselves of these offending markings. There is of course no definitively “Jewish” body, but through the dissemination of popular culture images of Jewish women, a perceived Jewish body emerges, with real consequences for those who have bodies most closely associated with the stereotyped image. Currently, Jewish Americans are categorized as white, middle-class Americans. Although there was once the “threat” of Jewish Americans being categorized racially as Hebrew, today Jewish Americans are included in the racial category of “white” on the U.S. Census. Eric Goldstein, in The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity writes: In 1909, Jewish communal leaders became worried over the increasing tendency of government officials to classify Jews racially as ‘Hebrews’...Many Jews feared that the government's adoption of the ‘Hebrew’ classification might be the first step toward their eventual exclusion from the rights of white American citizens. The American Jewish Committee successfully lobbied Congress and the Census Bureau to remove the new racial category from the census forms. (102-103). The story of Jewish assimilation as told in academic