debate. The “Larry David” character on Curb (a fictionalized version of the real person) is basically who George would be if he were successful. Then there’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the ac- tress who played Elaine, who comes from the same Dreyfus family as Alfred Dreyfus of the Dreyfus Affair. Her character reads as Jewish to anyone familiar with the Upper West Side of Manhattan and the likely background of a white woman with curly dark hair and friends like Jerry and George. Elaine is totally Jewish. Until, of course, you remember that there is a plotline surrounding her “shiksappeal”—an exploration of the (purported) phenomenon of Jewish men being attracted to non-Jewish women. (Who were these fictional Jewish men of 1990s Manhattan, whose quest for a distinctly non-Jewish woman led them to Elaine? It made no sense!) Then there were the “JAPs,” like “shiksa” a term now viewed as a quasi-slur, but that was common parlance in the 1990s, as well as a definite on-screen type. The characters one thinks of as Jewish American Princesses were not necessarily Jewish. To take another example of a female character whose Jewishness was more sub- text than text: Rachel Green from Friends , portrayed by non-Jewish actress Jennifer Aniston, is not outright describe as Jewish, but ticks so many boxes (the love of shop- ping, the Long Island nose job childhood, the orthodontist fiancé named Bernie Farber, the name) that she hovers in that same Schrödinger’s Jew zone, Jewish and not at the same time. Thus the Hey Alma article headlined, “Is Rachel Green Jewish?” Or, indeed, an identical Vulture headline. A casual viewing of the show makes clear that Ross and Monica are Jewish (their father is, and there are the occasional refer- ences to their own Jewishness), but where Rachel is concerned, does not spell it out. Nor do statements from behind the scenes. Per co-creator David Crane, “‘In our minds I guess [Rachel] was Jewish,’” which is not the unequivocal statement it might seem. Intent is not everything! Nor is the 2014 tweet from someone identifying himself as a former Friends writer that Hey Alma treats as definitive: “Rachel is Jewish. I think.” A lot of thinking and guessing going on. The ultimate, though, would have to be Cher Horowitz, the protagonist of 1995 film Clueless . Cher with her shopping bags, Cher with her wealthy lawyer father, Cher with her daddy’s-girl naiveté (trying to seduce a gay male classmate), and—hard to miss—the last name “Horowitz”: she was surely as Jewish
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