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From: gsmith@brahms.BERKELEY.EDU (Gene Ward Smith)
Newsgroups: net.jokes.d,net.women
Subject: JAP jokes
Message-ID: <11871@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Sat, 15-Feb-86 04:41:05 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.11871
Posted: Sat Feb 15 04:41:05 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 16-Feb-86 06:06:23 EST
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: gsmith@brahms.BERKELEY.EDU (Gene Ward Smith)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 79
Keywords: Jewish, American, Princess
Xref: watmath net.jokes.d:1518 net.women:9026


  The following article is reprinted (without permission) from the
Friday 14 Feb 1986 San Francisco Chronicle in its entirety.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
                    "Behind Jewish Princess Jokes"
                          by Michael Taylor

  Q: What does a Jewish American Princess make for dinner?
  A: Reservations.

  A Berkeley professor who studied thousands of Jewish American Princess
jokes over the past five years has concluded that such jokes are an attack
on women and feminism.

  Alan Dundes, a professor of folklore at the University of California,
said young Jewish women are depicted as selfish brats because the tellers
of the jokes may feel "threatened" by feminism.

  Dundes reported on his study in the current issue of the Journal of
American Folklore.

  In such jokes, popular in the United States since the late 1970s, the
Jewish American Princess hates to eat, loves to shop and rarely agrees
to have sex with her husband.  "Why does a Jewish American Princess close
her eyes during sex?  So she can pretend she is shopping."

  The professor discounted widely held theories that such jokes are anti-
Semitic.  He found, instead, that the jokes are anti-women.

  "I suspect that the jokes may be a reflection of anti-feminism," said
Dundes.  "(They) came into favor at a time when women's liberation and
feminist ideology were becoming increasingly well known and may have been
regarded as threatening by old-order male chauvinists."

  Many of the jokes were sexually explicit.  One of the most well-known
suggests that, to keep a Jewish girl from making love, you marry her.

  "From the mail point of view," Dundes wrote, "the (Jewish American
Princess) represents the modern woman who wants to be taken care of
but who doesn't want to cook or participate willingly in sexual inter-
course.  She seems to be all take and no give!  This may be why some
of the ... joke texts project what appears to be unadulterated male
misogynistic hostility."

  Dundes, a noted authority on contemporary American folklore, also
found that the princess cannot "be understood in isolation from the
Jewish American Mother."

  Dundes' sources for his report include such disparate volumes as
"The American Journal of Orthopsychiatry," "Portnoy's Complaint,"
"Gross Jokes," "Totally Gross Jokes," "Utterly Gross Jokes."

  The 59 scholarly citations in the study range from "Unreal Humor of
the Kugel and Bagel" to "The Culture of the Shtetl."

  The professor found what such storytellers as Myron Cohen and Jackie
Mason have been telling audiences for years in less august terms: that
the Jewish mother is "overly solicitous of her children's welfare
(especially her son's health)" and wants "her daughters to marry well
(preferably doctors or lawyers)."

  What she frequently gets for a child is the Jewish American Princess,
who "is spoiled, and spoiled rotten," Dundes wrote.

  "What is a Jewish American Princess' favorite wine?" "I wanna go to
Hawaii."

  In the end, Dundes finds that this all "is much more than a Jewish
issue."

  The Jewish mother can be "any American mother ignorant of the possible
ill effects of overindulging her children," just as any "indulged child-
ren ... may grow up to be Jewish American Princesses."

  The article, incidentally, is dedicated to Dundes' "Jewish mother and
my two Jewish American Princess daughters."

ucbvax!brahms!gsmith    Gene Ward Smith/UCB Math Dept/Berkeley CA 94720
ucbvax!weyl!gsmith      "When Ubizmo talks, people listen."