Culture, Mishegas, Sex & Gender

Who are you supposed to be?

Maya Escobar bugs me out.
A “Guatemalan Jewish Interdisciplinary Artist,” Escobar has female Orthodox apologia down to a T.


She also nails the JAP with a monologue so infuriatingly vapid and unaware it’s as excruciating as the real-life experience.
These performances are part of a project she calls Acciones Plásticas:

In the series Acciones Plásticas, I created a multi-faceted “doll”, assuming the role of designer and distributor, and even posing as the actual doll itself. My product is “marketed” in five distinct styles: The Orthodox Jew©, The JAP©, The Chach©, The Sexy Latina©, and The Mayan©. Each doll is a satirical characterization of the many roles that have been projected upon me, and into which I have, to some extent, inevitably fallen.

You can watch the rest of the videos here.
She also makes shomer negiah panties. I wonder if she ever saw…

6 thoughts on “Who are you supposed to be?

  1. Chaim writes: “JAP”?
    Yeah, you know, “Jewish American Prince” It’s Jewish guys who are totally interested in money, and in looking a certain way, and they have y’know Jewish features you can tell they’re Jewish when you look at them by the way they talk and dress and look. Y’know. You wouldn’t want to be caught dead around these icky, inferior people. They’re so declasse.
    Oh wait, right, only Jewish women qualify as money grubbing, Jewishy-looking and stupid nowadays. If you say it about Jewish men, you’re a racist anti-semite.
    Let’s not get into nasty names for Jewish women, shall we? This is as ugly a stereotype as “money-grubbing Jew,” and about as real (Yeah, there are Jews who grub money – does that mean we get to throw that kind of language around? Especially internally?).
    I can remember a period not too long ago when people were selling “slap-a-JAP” t-shirts on college campuses, the graphic was a woman, clearly Jewish, wearing what were at the time some “New Jersey” identifiers in dress and hair, wielding a credit card. She was portrayed as having big red lips and being overweight. There wasa circle with a line through it. One of my roommates bought one of these – I’m about as far from the stereotype as a person can get and still be a member of the human race, but I would not allow him to wear that shirt around me, to the extent that I told him if he wanted to wear it, he needed to move his a** out of my apartment first, because I found it highly offensive as if I went around wearing a “dirty chink” t-shirt (He was Chinese. We did manage to resolve this, although I don’t think he actually ever got my objections).
    Some of these t-shirts advised not stopping at a slap. Let us please not revive this really ugly thing.
    See Evelyn Torton Beck “From Kike to JAP: How misogyny, anti-semitism, and racism construct the Jewish American Princess”
    There’s a short excerpt here: http://condor.depaul.edu/~mwilson/multicult/jap.html
    and here is a nice bibliography on the topic of Jewish misogyny:
    http://www.brandeis.edu/projects/fse/judaism/juda-bib/juda-bib-antisemitism.html

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