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with Annie. Not because she relates to wanting to get into bed with a young Diane Keaton, but because she relates to being the one who wants, while not looking or acting like the sort of person someone would want back. Not every nebbishette is a frump and not every frump a nebbishette, but there is some overlap. Nebbishette is more pose than identity category. A woman can play at being the nebbishette but have a boyfriend, ten boyfriends, whatever. The nebbishette defies gender norms by being the funny one, not the pretty one. She’s not getting her- self a girlfriend, but she might take on the role as token straight woman in a group of gay men. (Grace Adler from Will & Grace, 1998–2020, has nebbishette elements.) She is not a rebel who couldn’t care less about doing womanhood “right.” She’s cisgender, she’s straight, her septum is not pierced. She understands her- self to be getting womanhood wrong, and is ambivalent about it: she’s a little sad about what it means in terms of her allure, but also a little proud of her own intelligence and individuality. And in this, there is something appealing about the nebbishette— something that is I think worth high- lighting. The nebbishette offers a model for thinking about female heterosexual- ity that is absent from the current land- scape. She’s a woman who wants men, but whose presence onscreen has noth- ing to do with men wanting her. The quintessential nebbishette simply does not inspire thoughts of passion in men. Behold, the passage that prompted me to coin nebbishette. Of her time interning in the John F. Kennedy White House, writer and filmmaker Nora Ephron wrote, in The New York Times , in 2003, “I am prob- ably the only young woman who ever worked in the Kennedy White House whom the president did not make a
of women JFK slept with. Were any Jew- ish? I don’t think so.” To be a nebbishette is to be open about understanding that you are not what all men are after. This is a kind of radical position for a straight woman to take. Straight women are understood as having two modes: objecting to men’s unwanted advances or enjoying the attentions of men we are interested in. The nebbishette does not try to construct a mythology about how hot she is. She does not regale with anecdotes about how often she gets carded. She is not, in her self- deprecation, fishing for compliments. She is a realist about what she has to offer and its limitations. The convention is that female het- erosexuality is about the desire to be desired. Well, I’m not sure the neb- bishette wants this, or even knows what to do with it when it happens. And it does happen! Nebbishettes are just what some men are looking for. But it’s not really about men, anyway. It’s about nebbishettes, and what they want. THE NEBBISHETTE’S JEWISHNESS EXACTLY HOW Jewish is the nebbishette? “The Nebbish is always Jewish, even if he’s not actually a Jew, to the point where he’s become synonymous with Jewish manhood itself, embed- ded, if you will, in his DNA.” So wrote Rachel Shukert in Tablet in 2012, in an essay that rightly included George Costanza from Seinfeld. A stickler, or a point-misser, might flag that George isn’t Jewish. Well, he is and he isn’t. He’s played by Jason Alexander (a Jew- ish actor) as an amalgam of the real-life figures of Larry David and Woody Allen (both of whose Jewishness and nebbish-ness is self-evident), and who, in the show, is the son of textbook
pass at.” (This was not, for her, an entirely positive thing: “He was the handsomest man I had ever seen.”) Ephron wondered whether her ill- advised choices in clothes or hairstyle at the time were to blame, then consid- ered another possibility: “Perhaps it’s because I’m Jewish—don’t laugh, think about it, think about that long, long list charm does not quite carry over where female ones are concerned. Jewish women are also people, with subjectivity and everything. But what’s legible in a male romantic lead as unconventional
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