{"id":59480,"date":"2018-04-12T10:41:04","date_gmt":"2018-04-12T15:41:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ou.org\/life\/?p=59480"},"modified":"2018-04-22T08:39:35","modified_gmt":"2018-04-22T13:39:35","slug":"on-carey-purcell-and-jewish-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ou.org\/life\/inspiration\/on-carey-purcell-and-jewish-men\/","title":{"rendered":"On Carey Purcell and Jewish Men"},"content":{"rendered":"

Immediately prior to Passover, I posted an article on Anti-Semitic Canards<\/a><\/strong>, a phenomenon that is all too common in what is supposed to be an enlightened era. Carey Purcell\u2019s bewildering and poorly-received diatribe on dating,<\/em> which came out in the\u00a0Washington Post\u00a0<\/em>over the course of Passover, continues that theme quite nicely \u2013 at least as “nicely” as that adverb can apply when one finds racially-based invective in a major news source.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start at the beginning.<\/p>\n

Purcell penned an ostensibly tongue-in-cheek essay entitled \u201cI am tired of being a Jewish man\u2019s rebellion<\/a><\/strong>.\u201d Unfortunately, her attempts at being edgy were left in the dust by her successes at being offensive as she invoked a variety of stereotypes.<\/p>\n

The author begins by identifying herself as \u201ca WASP\u201d (white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant). She is identifiable as such because \u201cI\u2019m blond, often wear pearls and can mix an excellent, and very strong, martini. Manners and etiquette are important to me, and when I\u2019m stressed, I often cope by cleaning.\u201d Many readers took her self-description as in contrast to Jewish women, who must be rude, slovenly and dumpy. That may be reading a bit much into it but, later in the piece, Purcell metaphorically positions herself in the role of an exciting, motorcycle-riding bad-girl and Jewish women as boring 9-5 bankers, so there is a basis for readers to draw that conclusion.<\/p>\n

Purcell goes on to describe how she seriously dated two men who \u201cconsidered themselves culturally, but not spiritually, Jewish. At the very least, they were the most lackadaisical Jews I\u2019d ever met.\u201d One of these men had a mother whom Purcell describes as \u201cextremely overbearing, somehow getting my cellphone number and calling me, asking where her son was.\u201d Purcell says that this single phone call made her \u201cincredibly uncomfortable\u201d and she \u201ctold him I didn\u2019t want this kind of involvement to be part of our relationship.\u201d Immediately after relating this incident, Purcell laments that \u201cI wasn\u2019t invited to the seders that his family held, despite my saying I had loved attending them with my friends.\u201d Many readers saw in this a sense of entitlement on Purcell’s part. After all, despite being in what she describes as a serious relationship, Purcell vehemently objects to his mother calling once, then she wonders why she doesn\u2019t merit an invitation.<\/p>\n

Purcell continues by describing how \u201cboth men went on to find serious partners who were, in fact, Jewish,\u201d concluding that \u201cdating me had been their last act of defiance against cultural or familial expectations before finding someone who warranted their parents\u2019 approval.\u201d Accordingly, Purcell is no longer dating Jewish men despite the fact that \u201c(a)t almost every event I go to, they approach me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Purcell was criticized for quite a number of things about this essay: the way in which she contrasts her desirable blonde self with the clearly-inferior Jewish women in whose favor she was presumably jilted; her self-proclaimed adherence to manners in one of the rudest articles ever composed; invoking the \u201coverbearing Jewish mother” stereotype; smearing an entire religion based on a sample size of two, and more.<\/p>\n

The essay\u2019s very publication was also quite astonishing from an editorial standpoint. As many pointed out, it would never have been run had \u201cJewish\u201d been replaced by \u201cblack,\u201d \u201cLatino\u201d or any other minority group. (In a previous article<\/strong><\/a>, I described how criticizing Jews is considered \u201cpunching up\u201d and therefore fair game.)<\/p>\n

Finally, Purcell blames her breakups on her boyfriends\u2019 religion \u2013 even though they are \u201cthe most lackadaisical Jews\u201d she\u2019s ever met \u2013 but she acknowledges that \u201calmost half \u2026 of married Jews in the United States have a spouse who isn\u2019t Jewish.\u201d So maybe it isn\u2019t Jews, Ms. Purcell. Maybe it\u2019s you.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s one point that I found largely overlooked in the reactions to this essay, and it\u2019s perhaps the most dangerous of all the stereotypes Purcell invokes: the idea that Jewish men \u201cdefile\u201d non-Jewish women. Such a charge is bad enough when we actually marry them but Purcell alleges that Jewish men use non-Jewish women and then discard them in favor of Jewish women. No, nothing bad could come of that claim!<\/p>\n

You may not realize it but pop culture is replete with the idea of Jewish men pursuing non-Jewish trophy women. Just a few examples: Philip Roth\u2019s novel Portnoy\u2019s Complaint<\/em>; the play Abie’s Irish Rose<\/em>; Woody Allen\u2019s movie Annie Hall<\/em>; the song Shiksa* (Girlfriend)<\/em> by the band Say Anything. On TV, the examples are endless: Bridget Loves Bernie<\/em>, Mad Men<\/em>, The Big Bang Theory<\/em>, Curb Your Enthusiasm<\/em>, Sex and the City<\/em>, Downton Abbey<\/em>, and many others all include the trope. Seinfeld even coined a term for it: shiksappeal<\/em> (a portmanteau of \u201cshiksa*\u201d and \u201csex appeal\u201d).<\/p>\n

Some may shrug this off as a harmless joke but the Nazis didn\u2019t think it was so funny. Rather, they called it Rassenschande<\/em> (race disgrace) and Blutschande<\/em> (blood disgrace). Hitler used this idea to foment anti-Semitism. In 1924, Julius Streicher argued that Jews who had sexual relations with non-Jews should be subjected to capital punishment. Such marriages were officially outlawed by the Nuremberg Laws in 1935; one would assume that extramarital relationships were even more heavily frowned upon. German women who permitted such an offense to be committed would have their heads shaved and be paraded through the streets wearing signs that said, \u201cI have given myself to a Jew.\u201d A pamphlet distributed in German schools warned that \u201cA woman defiled by the Jew can never rid her body of the foreign poison she has absorbed. She is lost to her people.\u201d (It should be noted that this charge is not limited to Jews. The Nazis started with Jews and expanded the idea to other races. The KKK used similar scare tactics to rile mobs against black men accused of relations with white women.)<\/p>\n

It’s not been that long since White Supremacists were marching in Charlottesville screaming, \u201cJews will not replace us!\u201d Do we really need to perpetuate a stereotype that Jewish men lustily pursue the more-desirable non-Jewish women? And if marrying them is bad, how much worse is Purcell\u2019s scenario that Jewish men use non-Jewish women for practice before tossing them away in favor of those inferior Jewesses? I\u2019d really rather not go there.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know Carey Purcell. She might be a perfectly lovely person who tried to write a lighthearted piece only to find that it hit a sour note. While she certainly should have realized that she was broadly generalizing based on the most anecdotal of evidence, I\u2019m confident that her intention was not to offend (and she did, in fact, issue an apology). But intentional or not, Purcell does invoke a number of stereotypes, some more dangerous than others. I don\u2019t expect her to know all the intricacies of Jewish history \u2013 I didn\u2019t even see many Jews make the Rassenschande <\/em>connection in their critiques of her work \u2013 so she may not have realized the full import of her words. Nevertheless, when we see people invoking anti-Semitic canards, even unintentionally, we have an obligation to move quickly and decisively to shut them down.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

*I do not approve of the use of this word. I use it grudgingly as necessary to cite these works.<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n

\n

Rabbi Jack Abramowitz is Torah Content Editor at the Orthodox Union. He is the author of six books, including\u00a0The Tzniyus Book<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0The Taryag Companion<\/a>. His latest work,\u00a0The God Book<\/a>, is available from\u00a0OU Press<\/a>\u00a0as well as on\u00a0Amazon<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Immediately prior to Passover, I posted an article on Anti-Semitic Canards, a phenomenon that is all too common in what is supposed to be an enlightened era. Carey Purcell\u2019s bewildering and poorly-received diatribe on dating, which came out in the\u00a0Washington Post\u00a0over the course of Passover, continues that theme quite nicely \u2013 at least as “nicely”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":384,"featured_media":59496,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_cloudinary_featured_overwrite":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[85],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspiration"],"yoast_head":"\nOn Carey Purcell and Jewish Men - OU Life<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In a Washington Post essay, Purcell invokes a number of anti-Semitic stereotypes. 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