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they should marry a doctor. Not a ho- mophobic joke so much as a joke about homophobia. Wieviorka adds his own commentary: “The invasive Jewish mother is no mere myth.” As a Jewish mother myself, I tried to square this with Wieviorka’s framing of this subject matter: “The most defining characteristic of Jewish jokes is that they are favorable, and not hostile, to Jews. They are made for them, and general- ly by them, or for those who appreci- ate them or at least do not reject them.” Hear me out: What if someone is Jewish, but also a woman? Wieviorka is on the cusp of ad- dressing this. He notes that his moth- er and sister enjoy Jewish-mother jokes as well, and is careful to state that he did not grow up with an overbear- ing mother. He suggests the jokes are good-natured and come from a place of knowledge that Jewish women were at the forefront of feminism: “The ‘Jew- ish mother’ was wildly successful because it arose in a context of empa- thy for an increasingly visible Jewish culture and history, and at the same time evoked a development whereby women attained emancipation while paternal authority declined.” Is that really the reason? Might there not be another explanation for the popularity of a strain of humour at (canonically sexually unappealing) women’s expense? This chipper, nostalgic take on Jewish-mother humour is at odds with how others—who happen to be Jew- ish women — have interpreted mat- ters. In a 2025 article about pioneer- ing sitcom The Goldbergs , The New Yorker staff writer Emily Nussbaum writes, “By the nineteen-sixties, Jewish women were rarely portrayed as pro- tagonists, and, when they did show up, it was often as cruel stereotypes: the spoiled princess, the homely meeskite , the castrating mother.”
Groundbreaking radio series turned sitcom The Goldbergs , a predecessor to I Love Lucy , introduced a fictional Jewish family into households of all kinds.
A longer, scholarly analysis of this phenomenon can be found in the late historian Paula Hyman’s 1995 Gen- der and Assimilation in Modern Jew- ish History . Hyman dates the origin of this strand of humour to Ashkenazi life in the late nineteenth and early twenti- eth centuries in Europe and the United States. Antisemites, Hyman explains, focused their resentments on Jewish men. These men, in turn, did the clas- sic thing of taking out their entirely legitimate frustrations on whichever women were closest by: By caricaturing Jewish men as feminized, antisemites and their fellow travelers attempted to strip them of the power and honor otherwise due them as men, especially as economical- ly successful men. Jewish men,
in turn, as they experienced emancipation and conditions of middle-class life and anticipat- ed the rewards of both, respond- ed to their disparagement in cultures influenced by antisem- itism by creating negative rep- resentations of Jewish women. Moreover, as the role of transmit- ting Jewish culture and religion shifted from men to women during this peri- od, Jewish women began to represent, for Jewish men, that which was paro- chial, stifling, and holding them back from their big adventures. Referencing a “study of Jewish- authored jokebooks” by the sociolo- gist Gladys Rothbell, Hyman explains, “Both the narrators and the male au- diences of the disparaging Jewish- mother jokes that circulated in the years
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