Ta-Nehisi Coates asks:
Frankly folks, I'm out of my league here. I want to hear more. Is there any resonance between how black women and Jewish women see themselves? Does any of that extend to inter-ethnic dating?
Actually I think there's more overlap here than anyone imagines -- Jewish women have, in the past, routinely been stereotyped as ugly, frigid, demanding, and spoiled. I didn't know many Jewish girls outside of Hebrew School growing up, because I went to public school here in DC, but I remember having entire classes set up around discussing the anti-Semitic sexism of the term "JAP" and how ubiquitous it had become at certain colleges. The whole joke of that "shiksappeal" routine on Seinfeld back in the day was that, while Jewish men think Jewish women are kind of meh, Jewish men find shiksas (non-Jewish women) irresistible. One can read Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint and Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, as virtual companion pieces. In both there's a notion of idealized white womanhood that excludes Jewish women and black women.
There are many differences which, at first glance, might seem like similarities. While some black women see interracial dating (mostly on college campuses) as a kind of "betrayal," there are also very serious concerns about Jews and interfaith dating. Having survived the exiles, the pogroms, and the Holocaust, there's a very real concern that Jews might disappear simply by marrying out of their religion. But I'd guess that parents care more about this sort of thing than the young people who do it.
There's frustration over the way Jewish women are often stereotyped, but I don't get the impression that there are many Jewish women who read Jewish men dating non-Jewish women the way some black women look at black men dating interracially. It's more that, in general, there are a lot of sexist and anti-Semitic notions of how Jewish women are that people still seem to subscribe to, and a standard of beauty that says it's better to look like Scarlett Johansson than Rachel Weisz, just like some people still think it's better to look like Mariah Carey than Megan Good.
--A. Serwer
