Jewish Women on Stage, Film, and Television Jewish VVomen on Stage, Film, and Television Roberta Mock palgrave macmilan JEWISH WOMEN ON STAGE, FILM, AND TELEVISION Copyright © Roberta Mock, 2007. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007978-1-4039-7989-6 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-73850-2 ISBN 978-1-137-06713-5 (eBook) DOI10.1007/978-1-137-06713-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: August 2007 1098765432 1 Transferred to Digital Printing 2011 For my mother, Sharon Mock, the funniest Jewish broad I know. Contents Illustrations Vlll Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Performing the Jewess Part I La Belle Juive 1 Jewess-ence: Woman and Disease 19 2 Celebrity and Consumption 49 Part II Spectacular American Bodies 3 Big Jewish Mamas 75 4 JewingUp 97 Part III Passing as "Real" 5 "Fuck 'Em If They Can't Take a Joke!" 123 6 Mimicking Whiteness 145 Notes 167 Sources 203 Index 219 Illustrations Sarah Bernhardt, lithograph by Paul Berthon 18 Photograph of Sophie Tucker 74 Photograph of Sandra Bernhard 122 Acknowledgments My thanks are due to the numerous people who contributed in a variety of ways to the making of this book. Professor Christopher McCullough, my friend and neighbor, steered it through (too) many years as a doctoral proj ect. Professor Viv Gardner and Dr. Dee Heddon provided constructive crit icism and guidance at the point I thought it was "finished." Of course, it wasn't. I am grateful to the many colleagues who listened patiently at research seminar presentations and conferences and would particularly like to note those who offered feedback at International Federation of Theatre Research and Theatre & Performance Research Association annual confer ences. My attendance at these conferences was made possible by the Faculty of Arts Research Committee at the University of Plymouth, which also fmancially supported costs related to the preparation of this book, as well as periods of teaching relief and sabbatical. My colleagues in the Theatre & Performance Department generously took over many extra responsibilities during these periods. I would particularly like to thank Ruth Way, Chris Hall, David Coslett, Terry Enright, Phil Tushingham, Linda Fitzsimmons, Colin Beardon, Baz Kershaw, David Ian Rabey, and Jeremy Diggle for their support over the years. The completion of this book was enabled by a Research Leave Grant provided by the Arts & Humanities Research Board (now Council). Some of what you are about to read has already appeared in print. Material in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 appeared in a survey essay, "Female Jewish Comedians: Grotesque Mimesis and Transgressing Stereotypes;' in New Theatre Quarterly (1999). Since writing this article, I have (perhaps inevitably) changed my mind about a few of its assertions. Some sections on Bette Midler in Chapter 5 have previously been published in an article entitled "HeteroQueer Ladies: Some Performative Transactions between Gay Men and Heterosexual Women;' in Feminist Review (2003). This article has also been republished as a book chapter in Birgit Haas, ed., Der postfeministische Diskurs (Wiirzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 2006). Finally, some sec tions of Chapter 6 have been previously published as "Without You I'm Nothing: Sandra Bernhard's Self-Referential Postmodernism;' in Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2001). In all cases, the material that x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS reappears in Jewish Women on Stage, Film, and Television has been substan tially expanded and recontextualized. In the latter two articles, there was no explicit mention of the subjects' Jewishness in the analysis. I thank the publishers and editors for the opportunity to make my ongoing research public and for their helpful comments in preparing the articles. I would also like to thank Mr. Stephen Sondheim for his permission to reprint the lyrics he wrote for Barbra Streisand in Chapter 4. Although I have decided not to list all the wonderful friends who have contributed to this project just by living through it with me, I would like to single out Rachel Dunk for helping me to navigate image rights. Finally, 1'd like to express my indebtedness to my family for their love and understanding in nurturing and nursing the compulsion that became this book: my spectacular daughter, Siobhan; her father, David, whose encour agement made it possible to start it in the first place; my grandmother, Esther; my late grandfather, Irving, to whom I owe my abiding interest in comedy, writing, and popular performance; my late father, Farrel, who would have been very proud to know that this project has been completed at long last; my brother, Adam, who has always been the funny and nice one; Laura, ever chic and gracious; and my mother, who recognized the lit de "Sarah Heartburn" in me and to whom it is dedicated. But if this book exists at all, it is due to the efforts of my beloved p.p., not only for his ruth less editing, but for continuing to remind me that there is a day after eter nity and that perhaps it's already here. Introduction Performing the Jewess T oward the end of the nineteenth century, to avoid increased persecu tion and violence, the Jews of Eastern Europe began to emigrate west ward. Traditional religious and cultural life in the shtetl (a small town with a largely Jewish population) started to disappear as European Jewishness began the task of secularization. The individual Jew had to redefine and renegotiate his understanding of Jewishness in order to conform to domi nant cultural expressions that he was encountering for the first time. As a result, he was treated with increasing suspicion for "acting" like a member of that dominant culture. Throughout Western Europe by the fin de siecle, Jewish people were accused of hiding their "essence" through mimicry and deception, and this accusation of deception was justified "scientifically." Judaism as a religion and a way of life was transformed into Jewish "race" in anti-Semitic terms when assimilation made it difficult for non-Jews to recognize the "difference" of Jewishness.1 It could be said, however, that assimilation made it equally difficult for the Jew to recognize himself. Most performance cultures quote, to a greater or lesser extent, the "every day" performative identities of the wider social, religious, and political cul tures that create them. So as a modern secular Jewish performance tradi tion began to develop, it expressed its Jewishness in terms of the tension between marginal and dominant cultures. My use of the male pronoun "he" above was not an accident; understanding of most traditionally patri archal cultures, whether marginal or dominant, has tended to be based on both male perspectives and male experience. Few cultures, however, are as homogenous as they'd like to believe: neither the performative identities nor the resulting staged performances of Jewish men strictly corresponded to those of Jewish women-that is, to "other" Jews who not only have been treated differently within the dominant cultures in which they were situ ated but also who have performed their Jewishness within their own Jewish communities in fundamentally different ways. Women were (and still, in