Unsettling: Jews, Whiteness, and Incest in American Popular Culture

By analyzing how various media told stories about Jewish celebrities and incest, Unsettling illustrates how Jewish community protective politics impacted the representation of white male Jewish masculinity in the 1990s. Chapters on Woody Allen, Roseanne Barr, and Henry Roth demonstrate how media coverage of their respective incest denials (Allen), allegations (Barr), and confessions (Roth) intersect with a history of sexual antisemitism, while an introductory chapter on Jewish second-wave feminist criticism of Sigmund Freud considers how Freud became “white” in these discussions. Unsettling reveals how film, TV, and literature have helped displace once prevalent antisemitic stereotypes onto those who are non-Jewish, nonwhite, and poor. In considering how whiteness functions for an ethnoreligious group with historic vulnerability to incest stereotype as well as contemporary white privilege, Unsettling demonstrates how white Jewish men accused of incest, and even those who defiantly confess it, became improbably sympathetic figures representing supposed white male vulnerability.  

Table of Contents:
Introduction Chapter 1: A Victorian Freud: A Rhetorical Analysis of Jewish Second-Wave Feminist Criticism of Freud Chapter 2: Incest, Exogamy, and Jewishness on Roseanne Chapter 3: Woody, Wood Yi, and Communion Wafers Chapter 4: Blood Libel Humor and Incest Easter Eggs Chapter 5: “Till a Khusin Comes Along” Conclusion Acknowledgments About the Author  

About the Author :
ELI BROMBERG completed his PhD in English and American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2017. He has taught at Fordham University, the University of Hartford, Hofstra University, Mount Holyoke College, and UMass. He's been published in The Forward, In geveb, Shofar, and Studies in American Jewish Literature.

Review :
Bromberg breaks the silence and pushes discomfort to the margins as he unpacks notions of American Jewish Ashkenazi exceptionalism without overlooking how Jewish whiteness, an embodied American process, exists as an anomaly... Innovative. - Katya Gibel Mevorach (author of Black, Jewish and Interracial: It's Not the Color of Your Skin but the Race of Your Kin an) In this provocative and timely book, Eli Bromberg dares to examine how anti-Semitic sexual stereotypes centered on the incest taboo continue to shape representations of Jews and Jewishness in American culture. Bromberg brings oft-silenced topics to the fore, exposing the “protective politics” of Jewish communities and unsettling paradigms...a fascinating contribution to the fields of Jewish cultural studies and comparative race studies. - Lori Harrison-Kahan (author of The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary) "Bromberg presents a well-written critical analysis of the intersections of Jewish ethnoreligious identity, white racial identity, and gender that lays important groundwork for future work in the area. Those who read this text will have a more advanced understanding of the intersections of these categories in the context of the situations described....[A]n important contribution to the fields of race and ethnic studies and Jewish studies because it pioneers many previously undiscussed and under-discussed topics simultaneously." (Ethnic and Racial Studies) "Unsettling: Jews, Whiteness, Incest in American Pop Culture by Eli Bromberg" (New York Jewish Travel Guide) "A timely and theoretically sophisticated contribution to studies in Jewish social politics, popular culture, and critical race studies. It shines a bold light on the ways in which Jewish vulnerability to sexual antisemitism, rooted in centuries of anti-Jewish belief, has continued to enable and reward complacence with the demands of racist and patriarchal power structures as a requisite for American Jews’ own conditional inclusion within the paradox of 'universalist,' white-dominated American culture. It furthers contemplation about the predicaments of Jewish identity in a context that awards conditional privileges to those whose security is easily dismantled by underlying prejudice and who are thus compelled to reinforce existing power structures in the name of self-defense." (AJS Review)