Take back the ‘Jewish mother,’ says scholar

So who is a real “Jewish mother”?

The Bible’s idealized “woman of valor” of Proverbs 31?

The ever-patient and understanding Molly Goldberg of the old radio and TV series “The Goldbergs”?

The possessive, overprotective and domineering Sophie Portnoy of Philip Roth’s ferociously satiric 1969 novel “Portnoy’s Complaint”?

Israel’s fourth prime minister Golda Meir?

Your mother? Yourself?

“I am a Jewish mother,” said Joyce Antler, but she does more than just claim the title. As a professor of Jewish history and culture at Brandeis University, she has been studying this figure — and stereotype — for her forthcoming book on the “cultural history” of the Jewish mother.

And she is not happy about much of what she has found, as she made clear in Milwaukee last week when she delivered the 2004 Faye Greenberg Sigman Woman of Valor Lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to an audience of some 140 people.

In her talk, “Our Mothers, Ourselves: Exploring the Legacy of the Jewish Mother,” Antler criticized the way the Jewish mother stereotype, so often created by Jewish male writers and comedians, has “attracted malevolence” and become “a paradigm for maternal excess.”

But men aren’t the only ones to blame; some women “are equal villains” in the story, Antler said. Some of the Jewish feminists of the 1960s and 1970s also expressed ambivalence or hostility to their mothers, seeing them as limited and frustrated “negative role models.”

And Antler concluded that Jewish women “have to take back the title of Jewish mother.” The complex story of the stereotype reflects developments in Jewish and American culture, Antler said.

The modern Jewish mother began with the great immigration of Jews primarily from eastern Europe to the United States in the 1880s to 1920s.

Popular culture manifestations of the figure as sentimentalized gentle nurturer — perhaps expressing sorrow for the “family closeness that immigrants lost” — appeared in the first sound movie “The Jazz Singer” (1927) and the song “My Yiddishe Momma,” and culminated in the popular Molly Goldberg character.

As Jewish children of immigrants began growing up and feeling more at home in America than did their parents, some began to rebel. Moreover, Freudian theories of child development and such works as Philip Wylie’s 1942 book “Generation of Vipers” asserted that mothers could have “damaging effects” on families by being overprotective, manipulative, and domineering.

This began to be reflected in humor about Jewish mothers, such as that by Jewish comedians in Catskills resorts. And this trend seemed to culminate in Sophie Portnoy, whom Antler described as “a caricature to end all caricatures.”

By the 1980s, some Jewish feminists began to decry the stereotype and to celebrate their mothers. A new generation of Jewish women writers, such as Allegra Goodman, are creating richer and non-stereotyped Jewish mothers in literary fiction, Antler said.
But the Jewish mother as a comic stock figure “still abounds today, especially on television,” said Antler.

Antler’s lecture was sponsored by the UWM Center for Jewish Studies and co-sponsored by: the UWM Golda Meir Library; the Milwaukee Jewish Historical Society, a program of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation; the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Women’s Division; the Wisconsin Society for Jewish Learning; and the UWM Center for Women’s Studies.