The Jewish Mother: Comedy and Controversy in American Popular Culture.(Critical Essay)

The comic stereotype of the Jewish mother, from domineering to grotesque, is a cultural construct developed by male writers in the United States in the 1960s, the era of political turbulence that coincided with the second wave of feminism in this country. Among other objectives, feminists hoped that their efforts to expose the misogyny behind negative stereotypes would help to end them. Yet the representation of the Jewish mother both as a nagging guardian of ethnic identity and the embodiment of its worst traits continued to pour forth in newly minted versions from the pens and comedy routines of Jewish men. Some feminist writers like Erica Jong attempted to fight humor with humor while others in novels, screenplays, and essays tried to add complexity and nuance to the image of the Jewish mother. The history of the stereotype thus follows a jagged pattern of vilification and vindication, of male action and female reaction, of call and response, that left the caricature firmly ingrained in popular imagination. Overall, feminist responses to men's comic devaluing of the Jewish mother failed to disrupt the persistence of the image. But in recent decades, as Jews' concerns about assimilation have decreased and new cruxes of female identity and vocation have arisen, the expansion of women's roles outside the family has gradually defused the comic exaggeration of the overprotective mother. Not direct critique by feminists and social commentators, but the indirect effects of shifting social expectations and goals have brought solace to the stigmatized figure of the Jewish mother.

Feminist critics of several schools of thought have developed ideas about women's laughter as a means of disrupting the structures of patriarchal discourse and ideology. They stress women's creative energy and humor as distinctive features of feminist writing with the potential to unsettle the logocentrism of male authority. Helene Cixous in "The Laugh of the Medusa" metaphorically describes women's verbal spontaneity, generosity, and jouissance as part of a defiant, liberating stance. Julia Kristeva, from a psychoanalytic perspective, writes that a pre-Oedipal phase linked to the maternal chora can resurface in texts to interrupt the symbolic order of the father. Similarly, the disruptive power of laughter is treated in Patricia Yaeger's "theory of play" as having political as well as cognitive effects. Contemporary feminist theory, then, valorizes the transformative potential of humor and language to subvert male dominance and regulation of social norms.(1) When the ranks seem to close in around a personification like the Jewish mother, comedy itself can refurbish and redeem her image. This essay, in tracing the gender wars fought over the stereotype of the Jewish mother, examines how that negative image became rooted in popular culture in the 1960s and the difficulties women writers faced in their attempts to intervene and revise it.

The myth of the manipulative Jewish mother is a complex formulation, ranging from affectionate to hostile, that grew to color perceptions of Jewish womanhood in a way that shows the triumph of comic expediency over social reality, even within a minority group that generally considered itself tolerant and liberal. Whether the Jewish mother is represented as protecting her children or demanding their loyalty, she is seen as exceeding prescribed boundaries, as being excessive. Her claims to affection, her voicing of opinions, her expressions of maternal worry are perceived as threatening in part because she acts as a free agent, not as a subordinate female according to mainstream cultural ideals. Even when she is represented as self-effacing, cast as the martyr, she is interpreted as being manipulative or passive-aggressive, secretly striving to impose her will on others. The Jewish-mother stereotype is fraught with contradictions that have not served to deconstruct it, but rather to let critics of the mother have it both ways. Jewish-mother jokes functioned to undermine women's attributes of power, to put the noncompliant older woman in her place. Through humor and ridicule, the stereotype acts to silence ethnic women by warning against their zealous energy and hidden agendas.

The indictment of mothers in American culture did not, however, originate in Jewish or ethnic humor. There was a time at mid-century when maligning the mother took a more generalized form. Maxine L. Margolis attributes the "old standby" of mother blame to the gendered division of labor in our society that makes childrearing strictly a maternal task: "If anything goes wrong, it must be the mother's fault" (260). Margolis cites as evidence the 1943 book Maternal Overprotection by David Levy, who charged that women had "made maternity into a disease" (260). Also during the 1940s, Philip Wylie's attack on "Momism" in Generation of Vipers became a best seller. Wylie went so far as to denounce mothers for weakening the social fabric of the republic and donning "the breeches of Uncle Sam" (201). The menace of the maternal eased in the 1950s as conformism and the comforts of suburban living isolated middle-class women in the domestic realm away from public affairs. It was during the social and political strife of the 1960s that trouble for the mother erupted again. The emergence of the women's movement added to the revolutionary tenor of the times. Along with the popularization of notions of Freudian psychoanalysis (the so-called "Jewish science"), Jewish entertainers crossed over to mainstream popularity and made further inroads into dominant culture. Humor is often an instrument and indicator of social change. Lois Leveen stresses the positive function of ethnic humor in mediating social acceptance of minorities. She calls it "a volatile and subversive force that proves liberating to the ethnic despite its self-deprecating elements" (44). Often Jewish comedians and writers chose the Jewish woman, the wife and Mother, as a target of satire in their repertoires for mainstream audiences. Thus the figure of the domineering mother in America came to be labeled specifically as a "Jewish mother" in public consciousness.

The stereotype indicates the sensitive spots of transition and social change for Jews. In elaborate caricatures, Jewish male writers crafted an overbearing woman, who lived vicariously through the son she pushed toward material success, while she herself unwittingly undermined his progress by her ignorance of the dominant culture. All the embarrassing baggage of ethnicity--unassimilated habits, Yiddish accent, incomplete understanding of American mores--was projected onto the mother, a representative of outmoded values. Her ethnic manner and gaucheness did not keep pace with the rapid assimilation and adaptation of her Americanized son. Her backwardness threatened to prevent his acceptance in wider social circles. Therefore, the mother, by virtue of gender and generation, functioned as a scapegoat for self-directed Jewish resentment about minority status in mainstream culture. Paula Hyman explains that historically, "faced with the need to establish their own identities in societies in which they were both fully acculturated and yet perceived as partially Other because they were Jews, Jewish men were eager to distinguish themselves from the women of their community.... The negative representations of women that they produced reflected their own ambivalence about assimilation and its limits" (169).

By the 1960s, most Jews were comfortable enough in America to reflect upon their historical adjustment from immigrant status to "native sons" through the lens of humor. The liminal position between tradition and adaptation has been described by Ralph Ellison as the quintessential American identity (Leveen 41). Jews felt most conflicted about Otherness and the desire for acceptance when they could look over social fences and see the opportunity to blend into the dominant group, if only they could shed traits of ethnicity regarded as inferior by non-Jews. The idea of "being too Jewish" was an indefensible concept that smacked of internalized anti-Semitism, but male writers used it with impunity when personified in the mother. What better strategy for dealing with prejudice than to deflect it into misogyny? The outward features of Otherness--Old World backwardness, loudness, vulgarity, clannishness, ignorance, and materialism--were heaped onto the mother.

The most memorable and fully elaborated caricature of the Jewish mother was produced by Philip Roth in his 1969 novel Portnoy's Complaint, a best seller that made his reputation.(2) While some male critics lauded Roth's narrator as "a spokesman for aggrieved Jewish sons" (Kiernan 35), Jewish women felt betrayed. Charlotte Baum recounts a meeting of a Jewish women's reading group shortly after the publication of Portnoy. The women were outraged over the characterization of the mother that distorted their own memories of the hard work, labor organizing, and sacrifices of their mothers and themselves: "if anyone had complaints to make, it was they!" (Baum, Hyman, and Michel x-xi). Tillie Olsen in Silences, her classic essay on the lack of realistic portrayals of women in literature, repeats this story and poignantly asks' why have Jewish women writers not given voice to their own experience of the mother? (183). Some women writers, in fact, did take up the challenge, but compared to the highly successful male attacks that fired the popular imagination, defenses of the Jewish mother received little attention. As a satirical harpy the Jewish mother became a comic icon, while reinterpretations of the character by women writers failed to generate interest. Rehabilitating the image of the Jewish mother proved a thankless task, in part because the stereotype dovetailed so effectively with archetypes of the dangerous female, usurper of patriarchal power, just when women seemed on the verge of becoming newly dangerous and politicized through the women's movement.

The archetype of the domineering, meddling woman persists in folk motifs and literature throughout history and across cultures. Vilification of the woman was neither new nor exclusively Jewish. As a transgressor, she is found in Biblical warnings against the shrewish wife in the Book of Proverbs; in ancient Greece she is enshrined in the works of Hesiod and in the legend of Socrates's wife Xanthippe. Literary examples include the object of the Roman poet Juvenal's Sixth Satire, Shakespeare's bloodthirsty Lady Macbeth and untamed Kate, and the henpecking wife of Rip Van Winkle, inscribed by Washington Irving in the beginnings of our national fiction.

She has been more violent, she has been less comic, but the twentieth-century version of the domineering woman in literature and popular culture is distinctly an invention of Jewish-American humor. Canonical literature in the United States until the 1960s, in fact, is notable for the virtual absence of the mother figure. For most of literary history, young male protagonists are characterized as orphans. Forced to become rugged individuals early in life, they embody the Emersonian trait of self-reliance: Ishmael, Huck Finn, Nick Adams. Even Holden Caulfield in the 1950s (created by Jewish novelist J. D. Salinger) returned home to find his mother conveniently absent. It is ironic, therefore, that when a mother enters the American literary scene in the 1960s, she enters through the side door of ethnic literature and turns out to be a Jewish mother, by definition excessive in her mothering.(3)

Her image combines the misogyny of both the American and the Jewish patriarchal traditions. As an ethnic woman, she bears what feminists call double oppression and surplus visibility: she is Mother writ large. Along with exaggerated maternal concerns, she personifies garish ethnic manners and materialistic, middle-class pretensions. She is a virtual grab bag of contradictory vices: she is aggressive, parochial, ignorant, smothering, crass, selfish but also self-martyring. Most dangerously, she is accused of "Filling the patriarchal vacuum"! (Portnoy 45). Her power, therefore, is ascribed both to self-aggrandizement and to a weakening of male dominance; she becomes a site of displaced anxiety about the subversion of gender roles in America.

Riv-Ellen Prell, in Fighting to Become Americans.' Jews, Gender, and the Anxiety of Assimilation, analyzes the ways in which gender has served to symbolize Jews' relationships to nation, family, and the consumer economy. Undesirable qualities, often both American and Jewish, were coded as female. Ridicule through female stereotypes emphasized Jews' desire for upward mobility and acculturation along with their worry about prevailing attitudes of the non-Jewish community toward them: "The relationship between Jews' growing access to the wider culture and the increasingly strident images of Jewish women suggest that Jews may well feel that the price of admission to America is a rejection of critical aspects of oneself as a Jew. Projected onto mothers, wives, lovers, and partners are the loathsome and unacceptable qualities of affluence constantly represented as Jewish rather than middle-class"(13).

Concerns about appearances to the outside, gentile society (encapsulated in the phrase "shonda to the Goyim" or "embarrassment in front of non-Jews") were heightened by minority status and sensitivity about old prejudices about Jewish greed dating back to medieval moneylenders. The ambition to rise on the economic ladder functioned as both positive motivation for modern Jews and a shameful reminder of negative stereotypes. The situation was especially perplexing because of the crux of ambivalence in American culture itself about materialism, which was celebrated, on the one hand, as a route to national progress but was suspect, on the other, for violating Christian warnings about filthy lucre. According to Prell, "scholars of ... stereotypes understand them most often to be projections onto the minority of the dominant group's fantasies about its own needs and desires" (12).

The caricature of the transgressive Jewish mother, in short, became a convenient Rorschach test open to multiple interpretations and contradictions. Her social construction helped ease the tensions of cultural transition for second and third generation Jews. Although it was the father's economic position that signified the status of the household to those outside the ethnic group, it was the mother's position inside the family that signified shifting attitudes and quandaries about ethnicity within it. In the decades after World War II in the United States, satirical portrayal of the Jewish mother became an accepted outlet for Jews' feelings of pride about their gains through assimilation and also for self-doubts about the resulting erosion of group identity and cohesiveness.

The negative stereotype of the Jewish mother casts so large a shadow in the later part of the twentieth century that it obscures previous images of the mother in Jewish literature and lore. The Jewish mother, in fact, cut a very different figure in American immigrant literature, where she was drawn in loving, sentimentalized portraits by sons in Yiddish and Jewish American novels, autobiographies, and plays. Melvin Friedman points out that, in Call It Sleep by Henry Roth, A Walker in the City by Alfred Kazin, and Making It by Norman Podhoretz, "the self-effacing mother and wife ... reacts with extreme courage to poverty and displacement. She is a tree figure of the diaspora, with a built-in sense of suffering and survival" (158). Al Jolson's film The Jazz Singer in 1927 presented her to mainstream audiences as a loving and forgiving mother, whose loyalty to her son and acceptance of his assimilation overcame the wrath of the father.

The history of Jewish women in America also shows that, contrary to the stereotype of the backward mother, in the major waves of immigration around the mm of the twentieth century, women adapted quickly to urbanization and the customs of the New World. In the shtetls of Eastern Europe, Jewish women had served their families by conducting business in the marketplace so that their men were free to spend time in study and prayer. In America, the concept of appropriate gender spheres was different, and as soon as family finances permitted, the woman stayed at home to concentrate on domestic duties and childrearing. Thomas Sowell interprets the Jewish mother's maternal worries as vestiges of Old World habits carried over to America. In the Pale of Settlement (the area of Poland and Russia from which most Eastern European Jews came), virulent anti-Semitism meant that Jews lived under the constant threat of violence and pogroms. Even in the best of times, Jewish boys were in danger of being kidnapped to be Russified by "six years of training in Greek Orthodox schools, followed by the twenty-five years of military service to which all Russian males were subject" (Sowell 78). (My own paternal grandfather emigrated at the turn of the century to escape this conscription.) The image of the ever-vigilant, overprotective Jewish mother, Sowell notes, is "understandable in view of the Jewish experience in eastern Europe, where Jewish children who wandered off might never be seen again.... The life pattern of centuries was not readily broken in America" (82).

Thus, maternal anxiety in Jewish comedy, like the tear in the voice of Al Jolson's jazz singer, is a reminder of a darker past. When growing prosperity in America enabled Jews to move out of the ghettos into less crowded neighborhoods and eventually into the suburbs ("the gilded ghettos"), the more affluent, middle-class lifestyle meant increasing isolation and a narrowing of gender roles for a woman. If previously she had worn a heroic face to sons of the first generation struggling in America, in the postwar period she rapidly lost prestige as her son gained it. Her departure from the workplace and public sector, along with American subordination and idealization of the fragile, sheltered woman, weakened her role. When she spoke out to question male decisions or to voice maternal concerns, she was scorned as too loud and aggressive, lacking in gentile refinement and manners. The victim of gender bias was labeled the transgressor.

With the introduction of her comic incarnation in the 1960s, the Jewish mother became the favorite target of the Jewish son, the parent who could be blamed for his own sense of vulnerability, accused of jeopardizing his American male birthright of untrammeled freedom. When American myths of masculinity push the son to strike out for the open road, his Jewish mother's pleading draws him back and reminds him of obligations to home and family. Her enjoinders embarrass him by subverting his stance of machismo and independence, threatening his mental composure (if not mental health), and arousing anxiety and (that word most associated with her) guilt. She refuses to observe the boundaries between proper parental concern and overprotection. For her, there are no boundaries in relation to her child. Her voice overflows with unsealed emotion and verbal excess. She is charged both with expressing too much love, thus delaying the son's individuation, and with expressing too much criticism, thus undermining his self-confidence.

Several Jewish writers make the joke that no Jewish male can become an adult while his mother is still alive. This barb echoes the anti-Semitic charge in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, in which the sensitive male, Robert Cohn, is mocked as "a case of arrested development" (44). Jewish writers absorb the fear and resentment of the outer society's hostility to them and transfer it to the inner family circle where it can be laid safely at the feet of the woman because of her lower status in the patriarchal pecking order. Prell writes that "intercultural stereotypes shape intracultural ones"(18). Humorists from Philip Roth to Woody Allen delight in tracing male feelings of inadequacy back to the mother. She is held responsible for both the outside world's misunderstanding of the Jewish male and for his own anxieties about a lack of requisite masculine toughness. The Jewish mother stereotype in popular culture refocuses a generalized uneasiness about female desires to "civilize" and tame the wayward male, thus emasculating him by making him a "mama's boy." At the same time, it activates specifically Jewish fears about the high price of ethnicity in a reluctantly pluralistic society. The mother's presence is an uneasy reminder to the Jew of his own secondary status, his lingering worry that anti-Semitism will eventually catch up with him.

A confluence of social factors in the 1960s resulted in a series of books by male writers that popularized the Jewish mother as "a new culture monster" who found "considerable resonance in the public imagination" (Altman 109). Philip Roth refers to the 1960s as a "demythologizing decade" because of the political disillusionment created by the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, but he fails to connect the mythologizing of the Jewish mother to the radical youth culture and the male response to the women's movement ("Reading Myself" 404-17). Jewish writers drew upon the routines of stand-up comedians to privilege the son and recast the mother as his comic antagonist: Bruce Jay Friedman in A Mother's Kisses (1964), Dan Greenberg in How to Be a Jewish Mother (1964), and, at decade's end, Wallace Markfield in Teitlebaum's Window (1970). But it was Roth's depiction of Sophie Portnoy in Portnoy's Complaint (1969) that set the standard. While both parents come in for solid rounds of criticism in the novel, Roth's caricature of the Jewish father has faded over the years while his caricature of the mother survives in robust health. The mother's exaggerated demands and worries made her a perfect target for Roth's linguistic energy: her verbal excess mirrors the son's own. The narrator-son laments that his mother has mined his life by "scolding, correcting, reproving, criticizing, faultfinding without end" (45).

Locked behind the Venetian blinds of her scrupulously cleaned house, a woman like Sophie Portnoy lived according to a strict gender system that offered few outlets for her talents and ambitions. Small wonder that women were forced to live vicariously through the sons and husbands they sent out into the world. Betty Friedan diagnosed their plight in The Feminine Mystique (1964) as "the problem that has no name" and helped to found the National Organization of Women in 1966, one year before Sophie Portnoy made her debut in the pages of Esquire Magazine. Women's calls for greater equality, opportunities, and redress of grievances ran headlong into resistance from Jewish male writers, a group that often prided itself on attitudes of liberalism and tolerance. By portraying women as uppity, excessively verbose, and demanding, men implied that there was little reason to take women's complaints seriously. The attack on motherhood, traditionally the female role of greatest influence, further undermined women's social and political credibility.

Feminists who objected to the stereotype and attempted to rectify it ran into formidable obstacles. Eventually the backlash against feminism called feminist thinkers strident and lacking in humor. Women were damned if they defended the mother, damned if they didn't. When they pointed out the overt misogyny of the personification, they were dismissed as spoilsports. Yet, the stereotype arose at a juncture that created a particularly painful bind for Jewish women, who often felt assailed on all sides. Feminism was pushing them to venture into the "real world" beyond the domestic sphere, where they had long relied on their roles as wife and mother for a sense of identity and cultural validation. At the same time, Jewish men were mocking their ethnicity, thus scorning their sense of cultural commitment in upholding Jewish values and religion.

Into this milieu of ingratitude stepped Grace Paley in the mid-1970s with an essay in Esquire entitled simply "Mom." Paley defends the Jewish mother and poignantly calls up childhood memories from the immigrant generation of a woman who fell victim to a "mocking campaign" that Paley traces as far back as the 1930s and ultimately to Freud. "The chief investigator into human pain" had looked into his book of "awful prognoses" and sealed her fate. Paley is pessimistic about a daughter's ability to revive the image of the loving Jewish mother after the ravages of male scorn: "Unfortunately, science and literature had turned against her. What use was my accumulating affection when the brains of the opposition included her son the doctor and her son the novelist? Because of them, she never even had a chance at the crown of apple pie awarded her American-born sisters." Instead the Jewish mother "was destined, with her meaty bossiness, her sighs, her suffering, to be dumped into the villain room of social meaning and psychological causation" (85-6).

For Jewish male writers, the "villain room of social meaning and psychological causation" proved a fruitful workshop. The low estimation of the mother in psychoanalytic paradigms from Freud to Lacan to contemporary theorists allowed Jewish writers to vent comic spleen as they dissected the contradictions and psychopathology of their own everyday lives. The techniques of obliqueness and irony suited their purposes. Alex Portnoy's frustrations about growing up Jewish in Newark, New Jersey, during the Depression are deflected onto his parents: "The guilt, the fears--the terror bred into my bones! What in their world was not charged with danger, dripping with germs, fraught with peril? ... Who filled these parents of mine with such a fearful sense of life?" (37).

The comic question suggests a serious answer, of course, one grounded in Jewish history, that long chronicle of economic deprivation and violent anti-Semitism. Jews' worries about matters of survival eased in the United States, but were replaced by a different, more subtle set of insecurities. Their feelings of vulnerability were complicated and intensified in the aftermath of the Holocaust, just when the goal of acceptance by mainstream America seemed within reach. Sensitive issues about assimilation, religion, class, and gender were reactivated for Jews. Internalized feelings of insecurity and difference became yeasty material for writers. As the social and economic rewards of merging into the mainstream enticed the Jewish son away from ethnic origins, he assuaged feelings of disloyalty by blaming his mother, keeper of his Jewish conscience (or Freudian "superego"), for holding him back.

Thus the Jewish mother was devalued and stigmatized as a regressive force during the very period when she might rightfully have expected to share credit for the elevation of her children in economic and social status. As Jews rose in the professions and business, writers and comics used self-mocking humor to chide the mother for the very values that were keys to their success: the drive for education, aggressiveness, and social ambition. Furthermore, the stereotype of the Jewish mother was developed and perpetuated in fields where Jewish culture made its greatest impact on dominant culture: stand-up comedy, literature, and film. As Jewish humor evolved from a medium of intragroup cohesiveness into a popular performance for those outside the group, the satiric portrayal of the Jewish-mother was sharpened. Gladys Rothbell writes that when negative caricatures are considered "sympathetic in-group humor," the bias against women is easily ignored (123). Then, when those jokes cross over into mainstream popularity, the misogynistic humor becomes "not only a social construct but also a successful commercial commodity." The anti-Semitic stigma of the stereotyping is tolerated along with "the basic classist, ageist, or sexist nature" of the Jewish-mother jokes (127). A more positive interpretation of ethnic jokes is offered by Lois Leveen, who argues that humor allows the joke teller to display knowledge of ethnicity that makes common cause with the object of the mockery. Thus, "ethnic jokes may indicate that it is not the ethnic individual who is laughable, but rather the stereotype--and those who believe the stereotype to be truthful and accurate--at which the joke teller and the joke listener laugh together" (43).

I suspect that humor serves multiple purposes and is more polymorphously perverse than any single approach or explanation can describe. It may reinforce resentments across gender lines but also relieve them. It may openly denigrate ethnic traits but also obliquely praise them. Some portraits of the Jewish mother criticize her mothering techniques while paying backhanded tribute to their effectiveness. The contradictory knot of character traits in the stereotype suggests affection for a figure who lavishes watchful attention on her child and resentment of the power she wields. In Jewish Humor: What the Best Jewish Jokes Say About the Jews, Joseph Telushkin cites as paradigmatic a story about a worried Jewish mother who takes her adolescent son to see a psychiatrist. After several visits, the doctor informs the woman that the boy is suffering from an Oedipus complex. "Oedipus, Shmedipus," she replies, "as long as he loves his mother" (30). The woman's uneducated response reveals not only her ignorance of psychoanalytic theories, but also her embarrassing inability to recognize the boundary between healthy filial affection and incestuous excess. Her Jewish inflection and malapropism are comic vestiges of backwardness that nonetheless emphasize her assertion of the primacy of the mother-child connection.

Ambiguity and doubleness, affection and resentment of the mother, shape

familiar conflicts in the Jewish son's perspective in literature and film. Vignettes about the damaging Jewish mother offer classic Oedipal explanations of male development that on the surface seem to alleviate male self-blame yet can ricochet to expose male deficiencies. In comedies by Philip Roth or Woody Allen, the psychoanalytic framework is often used to highlight the son's befuddled condition. In these melodramas of beset Jewish manhood (to twist Nina Baym's phrase), the protagonist's central struggle is not with the outside world but with the self embroiled in the family romance. His efforts to separate from the mother and the ferocity of her resistance, an unexpected switch from conditioned female passivity, propels the comedy.

Portnoy's Complaint, in fact, began in its first installment as an extended variation on the Jewish-mother joke. In free-association discourse delivered on the psychiatrist's couch, Alexander Portnoy at 33, the age at which Jesus was crucified, lambastes his mother for her faults and his own, real and imagined. The epigraph to the novel is a mock definition from the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders, a description of a new complaint "in which strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. [M]any of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship." This synopsis squarely places blame for the patient's neurotic suffering on the mother, disregarding paternal influence and the son's free will. Yet as Portnoy protests about maternal overprotection, his self-serving discourse illuminates the recesses of his own mind. His monologue covers a range of anxieties about individuation, ethnicity, and femininity, including male fear about feminine aspects of the self. "There's more here than just adolescent resentment and Oedipal rage," Portnoy warns (71), and that "more" is the telltale premise of psychological investigation and literary interpretation.

The opening chapter, titled "The Most Unforgettable Character I've Met," introduces the mother through the young boy's eyes, a lens of magical realism that shows a dangerous fascination with her:

   She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of 
   school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in 
   disguise. As soon as the last bell had sounded, I would rush off for home, 
   wondering as I ran if I could possibly make it to our apartment before she 
   had succeeded in transforming herself. Invariably she was already in the 
   kitchen by the time I arrived, and setting out my milk and cookies. Instead 
   of causing me to give up my delusions, however, the feat merely intensified 
   my respect for her powers. And then it was always a relief not to have 
   caught her between incarnations anyway. (1) 

Torn between indebtedness to the mother and resentment of her, Portnoy grows increasingly hostile as he ages. With the onset of male puberty, the mother's greatest power becomes her ability to influence her son through guilt, which Charlotte Baum, Paula Hyman, and Sonya Michel define as "that most exquisite instrument of remote control" (236). It is the mother's struggle to restrain her son's libido and the son's efforts to free himself that fuel Portnoy's story. Indeed, once Sophie Portnoy with her countless admonitions and suspicions is left behind, the novel loses comic force. There's no place like home in Portnoy's narrative because that's where the mother is, "the most unforgettable character" the reader meets in the text.

To escape the mother's gravitational pull and assert his independence, Alexander Portnoy uses a tactic familiar to readers and observers of Jewish sons in American comedy: he seeks as a love object the non-Jewish woman or shikse, a woman who is the antithesis of the mother in appearance, culture, and mental attitudes. Thus, the mockheroic drama of Jewish humor combines the male erotic quest with the quest for assimilation. From Alex Portnoy to Woody Allen to Jerry Seinfeld, love in the arms of a non-Jewish woman symbolizes the embrace of the gentile world. The struggle for filial autonomy is equated with the quest for mainstream acceptance that requires repudiation of both ethnicity and the ethnic mother in the pursuit of a mate.

By the 1970s, when Tillie Olsen issued her call for a defense of the Jewish mother, two feminist responses had already appeared: one was Grace Paley's meditation on "Mom," discussed above, (published, ironically, in the same magazine that carried Sophie Portnoy) and the other was Erica Jong's comedy, Fear of Flying (1973), which contains a pointed rebuttal to Portnoy. Jong's iconoclastic, ribald, and scathingly funny novel became the sexual manifesto of the women's liberation movement and established her as a spokeswoman for her generation. It won praise from critics Henry Miller and John Updike. Bookstores had a hard time keeping it in stock. In the novel, the protagonist Isadora Wing is a journalist, poet, and former analysand, who travels to Europe to report on a psychiatric conference in Vienna with her psychiatrist husband. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, amidst the sensationalism of Isadora's disclosures about sexual affairs and erotic fantasies (including the "zipless fuck"), her reflections on the Jewish mother received scant attention.

Jong's portrait of the mother, in a chapter entitled "Pandora's Box or My Two Mothers," is a deliberate attempt to complicate and revise the reductive image of the Jewish mother crafted by male writers. Jong's narrator makes duality the key to her conflicting feelings about her mother as a good and a bad parent, in short, a mother who defies stereotyping. Indeed, Isadora Wing's mother is introduced as a direct rebuttal to Portnoy: "I envy Alexander Portnoy. If only I had a real Jewish mother--easily pigeonholed and filed away--a real literary property"(161). Wing's stereoscopic view of the mother may fall into the trap of binary categorizing shunned by later feminist critics, but it rightfully condemns the male view of the mother as an oversimplification. By satirizing the distortion and commodification of the Jewish mother in male comedy, Jong underscores the need for the corrective vision of female experience.

Socio-economic differences admittedly separate Isadora's privileged German-Jewish mother, Judith Stoloff White, from lower middle-class Sophie Portnoy, with her eastern-European roots and accent, but Jong tries to pry the mother figure away from stock expectations. Her feminist reconsideration urges the view that between the extremes of the mother-as-cipher in mainstream fiction and the mother-as-monster in Jewish male fiction lies a range of possibilities to be explored. Judith Stoloff White is but one sketch of a literary alternative to combat the prevailing stereotype. Yet, in Jong's highly allusive prose, she is significantly nicknamed "Jude" for the patron saint of lost causes.

Jude is a tour de force, a refashioned version of the Jewish mother as a bohemian, a rebel against convention who critiques mainstream culture. Isadora Wing begins her description with a set of paradoxes. Applying the Catullan formula odi et amo to the mother, the daughter complains that "My love for her and my hate for her are so bafflingly intertwined that I can hardly see her" (Jong 161). Jude was never retiring or inhibited, as Isadora points out, but a forceful, artistic personality. She bears none of the crassness of the formulaic Jewish mother but maintains, instead, an air of cultivation, mystery, and aloofness. She is a free spirit who embarrasses her child not by her backwardness but by her progressiveness, her individualistic way of dressing and behaving. She has been a communist, an artist, a hippie, and is a devoted mother who has given up "poetry and painting for arty clothes and compulsive reupholstering" (162). She frustrates her teenage daughter's "passion for ordinariness"(161) by dressing for Parents' Day at school in "tapestried toreador pants and a Pucci pink silk sweater and a Mexican serape" (163). As an educated, assimilated woman, Jude Stoloff White has the self-confidence to defy decorum and to teach her child to question authority. Ultimately, Jude challenges the American double standard of social freedom for men (including sexual freedom) but rigid control for women. Her daughter's later rejection of conventional sexual mores in favor of sexual liberation can, therefore, be attributed in part to maternal influence.

For Jude the Jewish mother instills not fear in her child, as Sophie Portnoy did, but social daring. She offers two cardinal rules:

1. Above all, never be ordinary.

2. The world is a predatory place: Eat faster! (162)

These injunctions satirize the aggressiveness and food fetishism of the Jewish mother stereotype, but also offer in condensed, secularized form a feminist satire of the law (or decalogue) of the father. Jong appropriates the son's Oedipal rebelliousness and recasts it from a female perspective. The "two mothers" of Isadora's narrative are contrasting yet complementary halves of maternal representation: the demanding, directive mother of ethnic humor and the idealized, companionable mother of mainstream culture who is supportive and fun-loving, a woman who takes her daughters ice-skating on the pond in Central Park.(4)

As the good mother, Jude laughs at her daughter's jokes as if she were a composite of Milton Berle, Groucho Marx, and Irwin Corey, an overt reference to the female humorist's apprenticeship to Jewish stand-up comedians. The mother regards Isadora as a literary prodigy at age eight and later encourages her daughter's "adolescent maunderings" (167). Therefore she stands in stark contrast to the critical, emasculating mother of male humor as a woman who instills artistic confidence and psychological self-sufficiency in her child. She is the mother as presiding genius of the female artist's literary career. But even her good side baffles her child, for Isadora, like Portnoy, is enmeshed in the task of self-definition and ripe for rebellion. Yet any form of rebellion that Isadora can imagine--her choice of a Chinese-American spouse, for instance--can be interpreted from another angle as a departure from the "ordinary" and therefore as a fulfillment of her mother's first cardinal rule. "Surely no girl could have a more devoted mother, a mother more interested in her becoming a whole person, in becoming, if she wished, an artist? Then why am I so furious with her? And why does she make me feel that I am nothing but a blurred carbon copy of her? ... That I have no freedom, no independence, no identity at all?" (168).

The impulse to blame the mother thus re-emerges as a female method of defining selfhood, but with important gender differences. Jong's novel, which appeared five years before Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, embodies in comedic form theoretical insights about the continuity of female identity and a daughter's complex attenuation of relational bonds with the mother. Isadora frets that the umbilical cord which connects her to her mother has never been cut. Like other women writers who stress filial attachment, Isadora asserts, for better or worse, along with Anne Sexton, that "A woman is her mother" (77).

Jong's heroine theorizes, in psychoanalytic fashion, that somehow the puzzles of heterosexuality are the crux of her otherwise inexplicable fury at the mother. "Sex," she confesses, "was the real Pandora's box." The daughter's sense of entrapment and release is expressed in a mythological metaphor that (in addition to the obscene pun) is drawn from outside both Jewish and Freudian frames of reference. The allusion to Pandora invokes a female figure of Greek mythology who is blamed for unleashing all evils and illness upon the world. In reclaiming this misogynistic myth, Jong taps the subversive nature of female creative and sexual forces. She, like Cixous, links her views of female autonomy and erotic desire to a revisionary construct that is mythic yet female-centered, classical but not explicitly Freudian. Jong makes the mother-daughter relationship part of an experiment in female laughter that interrupts male paradigms and works to liberate both the Jewish mother and daughter from falsification.

But comedy often trades in stock types. It is hard to fight over-simplification and stereotyping with more nuanced interpretations. Jong's attempt to widen the frame of imagery failed to spring the Jewish mother from the trap of comic conventions. In the following decade, the 1980s, an increasing number of works by women took up the cause and treated the Jewish mother with new seriousness and respect: Lee Grant's film of Tillie Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle, Anne Roiphe's novel Lovingkindness, and Laurie Colwin's novel Family Happiness. Grant's film depicts the memories and death of a defiant, aged radical. Roiphe represents the Jewish mother as a feminist professor who resists the urge to try to control her daughter's life, despite the girl's conversion to a sect of Jewish orthodoxy that the mother despises. Colwin in her novel creates a sympathetic protagonist who juggles the responsibilities of the so-called sandwich generation as she struggles to be both a dutiful mother and a dutiful daughter, even while seeking her own erotic fulfillment. And in a poignant story, this time called "Mother" (1985), Grace Paley again focuses on the underappreciated subject of her title, a deceased woman who in life seemed to occupy a place only on the margins of her daughter and husband's attention.

But this constellation of works about Jewish mothers who are not domineering did little to efface the cultural imprint of the negative stereotype. Women writers continue to repudiate the charge that Jewish mothering is bad mothering. A mother's ambition for her child may be exaggerated into a comic flaw, but, when interpreted sympathetically, can also testify to maternal desire for the child's best interests within a highly competitive, materialistic society. How a child internalizes such messages varies according to the child's individual character. The actual influence of Jewish mothering as a component in achievement has received more comic attention than serious study. Despite the mother's prominence in Portnoy's Complaint, Roth's own mother is barely mentioned in his autobiography, and surprisingly little has been written about the mothers of twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals Freud, Einstein, or Bettelheim.(5) Ironically, it is John Updike, the WASP literary giant of American letters, who champions the Jewish mother. He creates a tender portrait of her beneficent influence on her son the writer in Bech: A Book (1970). In the final chapter, Bech recounts the day his mother took him out of school to witness the awarding of medals to literary luminaries at a theater in New York. Years after her death, when he receives the coveted medal at the same ceremony, he fleetingly imagines he glimpses in the audience the face of the mother who believed in and inspired him.

In Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Adrienne Rich offers an explanation of the common tendency of literary sons to turn the mother from an instrument and indoctrinator of patriarchal values into its chief opponent. Rich terms this hostility "matrophobia," not hatred of the mother, but the fear of becoming the mother (235). A child must wrestle with the compromises and self-doubt that the mother represents, caught as she is in the misogyny of the larger social order. "Easier by far to hate and reject a mother outright," Rich observes, "than to see beyond her to the forces acting on her" (235). The mother is blamed for weakness if she is passive and accused of seizing male prerogatives if she is not. Resentment of the mother, a pawn in patriarchal society, obscures the real source of power and injustice that the child must eventually confront in a hierarchical world, the law of the father. Erica Jong's protagonist glances at the structural dimensions of this dilemma when she laments: "I couldn't rail at my Jewish mother because the problem was deeper than Jewishness or mothers" (165).

The comic son may use matrophobia to mask his similarities to the mother by ridiculing her and devaluing women in general and all traits connected with the feminine in particular. The male view of the Jewish mother is complicated by the conjunction of homophobia and matrophobia. The Jewish son's position as Other evokes fear that his difference from mainstream society will expose him to questions about his manliness. Self-conscious in a relentlessly psychological age, the Jewish humorist therefore attempts to eradicate any visible traces of attachment to the mother which could leave him open to charges of effeminacy, an insidious weapon in the arsenal of anti-Semites that derives from homophobia. This defensive strategy, intended to deflect attention away from his own shortcomings, may nonetheless unintentionally expose his latent insecurities. The master of this technique of simultaneously concealing and revealing psychic failings, of course, is film writer and director Woody Allen.

In "Oedipus Wrecks," Allen's contribution to the omnibus film New York Stories (1989), the Freudian pun of the title sums up the predicament of the familiar Allen persona, the Jewish son as anxiety-ridden adult. In this film, matrophobia takes the milder, more conventional form of fear of marrying the mother, a theme reinforced by the piano refrain of the soundtrack, "I Want a Girl (Just Like the Girl That Married Dear Old Dad)." In talking to his psychiatrist, the story's protagonist Sheldon Mills (Woody Allen) blames his erotic troubles on his mother (Mae Questal) and expresses the wish to be rid of her. He relates a dream of her funeral in which he drives the hearse bearing her body to the cemetery. Sam Girgus compares Allen to Philip Roth "in his self-conscious exploitation of Freud to intensify the effect of voicing the unspeakable" (Films 11). Allen's satire, like Oedipal parodies in postmodern literature by Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, trades on the cultural currency of psychoanalytic theory, but also reveals the beginning of a decline in its cultural sway. Girgus writes that humor "subverts the absolute authority of psychoanalysis, while psychoanalysis exposes the potential of a hidden dimension of secret meaning to humor" ("Roth and Allen" 121).

In Allen's film, the humor takes a memorably visual, Felliniesque, form as the image of the Jewish mother is literally inflated beyond all bounds. The screenplay is a romance based on the son's failed desire to escape filial loyalty. Like other male comics, Allen's character enacts a double regression that lies at the heart of American-Jewish humor: a regression to childhood resentments and to ethnic origins. Sheldon Mills is a fifty-year-old lawyer whose efforts at assimilation have paid off in the ostensible rewards of worldly success: he is a partner in a "conservative" (i.e., non-Jewish) New York law firm, he has changed his family name from Millstein to Mills, and he is engaged to a blond shiksa (Mia Farrow). His adaptation to the gentile world would be complete were it not for his Jewish mother. Shortly after Mills confesses the wish that his mother would "just disappear," he takes her with his fiancee's family to a magic show. In the theater Sadie Millstein is reluctantly called up on stage to demonstrate a trick by climbing into a magic box. Once shut inside, she actually vanishes only to reappear days later as a huge talking head hovering above the skyline of Manhattan. From this supernal position, looking like a cross between the Wizard of Oz and My Yiddishe Mama, Sadie oversees her son's activities and delivers a running commentary on his childhood traits and adult lovelife to gathering crowds on the New York City sidewalks.

This carnivalesque ploy is a realization of the son's worst nightmares: his own Jewish mother as a public spectacle. Sadie's criticisms of her son and his impending marriage are broadcast from on high as public pronouncements. The personal becomes the political as even the mayor (Ed Koch in a cameo role) gets involved, responding to Sadie on the evening news. The Jewish mother personifies the return of the repressed, a voice of inner conscience that refuses to be hidden. And the mother finally triumphs. Mills's fiancee cannot bear the pressure and leaves him. Only after Sheldon has chosen a proper Jewish mate--a woman who resembles his mother in eyewear, intonation, and the desire to fatten him up does Sadie Millstein consent to come down. Allen's visual icon shows the Jewish mother to be overpowering, omniscient, "humiliating," as Sheldon says, and, like Sophie Portnoy, connected to magic. With the inflated vengeance of Sadie Millstein, Allen revivifies the old stereotype and proves that in comedy nothing succeeds like excess.

Jewish humor, like much ethnic humor, depends upon the burdens of dual consciousness. Allen, along with Roth and Jong, shows how the unresolved tension between ethnicity and assimilation produces mental discord that reinforces a sense of Otherness. Allen's paranoid persona reenacts the quintessential predicament of a minority member caught in the stage of both self-regard and looking over his shoulder at mainstream observers. The Jewish mother, with her repeated calls to return to the fold, serves as a keeper of the faith. Because her exaggerated features and verbal lack of inhibition transgress the bounds of social decorum, she simultaneously humiliates and saves her child from the perils of "ordinariness." Even when she most heightens the child's desire to merge into the crowd, her presence is a reminder that denial of one's origins is not honorable. Her image reactivates familiar ambivalence and frustration about passing. The Jewish mother is mocked and abused, but her refusal to release her child to the status quo of mainstream culture confers an ironic sense of post-lapsarian heroism on her American offspring.

The Jewish son, then, need not light out for the territory in search of the raw material of life; for him the raw material of life resides at home. The hero's (or anti-hero's) most challenging adventure consists of negotiating the family romance. His quest for autonomy continues well past adolescence and circles back to the relationship with the mother. Insistent variations on the Oedipal theme connect the stereotype of the Jewish mother to the misogyny of psychoanalytic theories which, in versions from Freud to Lacan to recent work by Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, continue to blame socio-sexual maladjustment, Oedipal "wreckage," on the mother. Esther Rashkin writes that "We are all, to use [Abraham and Torok's] invented locution, mutiles de mere or `mother-amputees' (rhymes with the common French expression mutiles de guerre: `war-amputees' or `war-invalids')" (17-18). This theoretical punning again reveals the gap between mythology and reality about women, for statistically the vast preponderance of domestic violence, including in Jewish families, is directed against women.

But the notion of an adult man as a "mother-amputee" fits the subject of Albert Brooks's 1996 film Mother. Brooks (born Albert Lawrence Einstein of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother) universalizes the image of the Jewish mother but retains and ironically reverses key elements of the mother-son parody. He distorts the principles of both psychoanalysis and feminism by creating a protagonist who arrogantly dismisses psychoanalytic interpretations of his own plight but glibly appropriates feminist explanations for that of his mother. The film opens when California science-fiction writer John Henderson (Brooks) has just divorced for the second time. He attributes his failures with women and a bad case of writer's block to an unsupportive, flawed relationship with his mother (Debbie Reynolds). To resolve his personal and professional problems, he unilaterally decides to move back into his mother's house as an "experiment." Stereotypical Jewish mother-child role reversals are set up as the adult child intervenes in the mother's life.

He does not need a psychiatrist, John tells his brother, because a psychiatrist didn't raise him; his mother did. This rejection of psychoanalysis foreshadows the irony of a classic Oedipal triangle in which the two brothers, one overly critical of the mother and the other overly attached to her, vie for her attention. Despite John's objections to psychological explanations, the mother functions as the sexualized prize and arbiter in this fraternal rivalry when the brothers come to blows on her doorstep.

After John Henderson moves back home into his old room, he discovers a stockpile of his mother's youthful writings stored in his closet. He then confronts his mother with her own unfulfilled literary ambitions and hypothesizes that her thwarted talent caused her to resent her role as full-time mother and caregiver when he was born and resulted in the chilly relationship between them. This interpretation of the past proves cathartic for him: "I see you as a failure, Mother, and it's wonderful," he boasts. The mother acquiesces to his theory, since it appears to "help" him, she says. The therapeutic insight releases them from locked antagonism and seems to grant each a new lease on life and creativity.

The film ends with a quintessential, male, "on-the-road" scene for John, as he returns to Los Angeles, while his mother buys a computer and takes up writing again in his old room. Brooks adds a double-helix twist to matrophobia by creating a son who has unwittingly become a writer like his mother and a mother who belatedly re-emerges as a writer like her son. (Quick glimpses of work-in-progress on their respective computer screens suggest that she is the better writer.) Brooks appropriates feminist ideology by making the son a wisdom figure who raises the mother's consciousness about the personal price she has paid in sacrificing her creative aspirations for her role as mother. Yet her vocational awakening is secondary, an accidental consequence of the son's psychological quest.

As the mother figure is universalized and emptied of specific Jewish identity in the 1990s, she can devolve into a character who is merely cold and calculating. Whereas Sophie Portnoy was dangerous because of her overweening affection, some recent incarnations of the Jewish mother depict her as remote and unloving. The energy and vulgarity of the mother are toned down to mere reflexes of self-involvement in Barbra Streisand's 1997 film "The Mirror Has Two Faces," written by Richard LaGravenese (based on a French title). Lauren Bacall plays a vain and selfish Jewish mother of two daughters, whose only teaching about the Sabbath, one quips, was that Bergdorfs would be less crowded. The moral features of this mother, beautiful on the outside but cruel on the inside, mark her as an antifeminist woman, one who is willing to undermine the confidence of her daughter Rose, a Columbia professor of literature (played by Streisand) and to prevent the daughter's romantic fulfillment by schemes to keep the daughter living at home as the mother ages.

Even when the Jewish mother appears fully Americanized, she still brings to light old insecurities about appearances, and ultimately about the unacceptable risks of appearing either Jewish or old in American society. Rose is unattractive though charismatic and talented. The mother is a former beauty who is aging. The loyalty of the daughter and treachery of the mother show that the vilified Jewish mother has undergone many incarnations since her inception and returns again to haunt her child with new issues. The few women writers who have positioned the mother as a sympathetic character at the center of her own story have not gained sufficient mass to displace the grotesque stereotype, but they have managed to offer suggestive possibilities and fresh thinking on the theme.

Nora Ephron's film This Is My Life (1992), based on a novel by Meg Wolitzer and adapted for the screen by Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron, is a case in point. The film is not defensive or angry; it is less a response to the Jewish mother stereotype than a female-centered narrative about a mother caught in the feminist dilemma of balancing the demands of family and career. The film is narrated by both the mother, Dottie Ingels (Julie Kavner), and her oldest daughter, Erica (Samantha Mathis). Each major scene, as Sylvia Barack Fishman observes, "begins with a voiceover by the elder daughter and then continues in the voice of the mother. The overlapping voices seem to ask, `Whose life is this anyway'"? (163). This dual voicing suggests both collaboration and traditional rivalry as the mother and daughter pursue their separate but connected struggles for independence. The ups and downs of their story depict a strong relationship of mutual respect and affection, ruffled only temporarily by competition and resentment.

The film modifies the Jewish-mother construct with brief allusions to the stereotype and innovative departures from it. Here the woman stands not as the butt of comedy but as a vital creator of comedy, the voice and performer of her own life. Dottie Ingels begins as a single mother struggling to support her two daughters in Queens after her husband has deserted the family. When she inherits some money, Dottie seizes the chance to move her family to Manhattan, where she enters the field of stand-up comedy. Wearing dotted clothing as her trademark, she fashions homespun humor from the material of her everyday life. Her jokes are gentle and humane, her themes are connection and relationships. She offers her daughters the "life lesson" that everyone in the world is only two phone calls away from everyone else.

When Dottie reaches for stardom, a heavy schedule of engagements on the West Coast keeps her away from home, and her girls resent the separation. Dottie's male agent consoles her with the advice that "Children are happy when their mother is happy." "No they're not," Dottie counters, "Everyone says that, but it's not true. Children are happy when you're there." Thus Dottie rejects the glibness of contemporary psycho-babble to perceive the truth underlying her daughters' feelings. When the girls run away, Dottie realizes that she is not willing to jeopardize their happiness for her shot at success in show business. This scenario reverses the usual direction of guilt: it is not a means of control employed by the mother but rather a tactic used by the daughters to bring the straying mother into line. Dottie is the Jewish mother recast as a contemporary working woman caught in a net of conflicting obligations. She perseveres by dint of down-to-earth candor, bravery, and insight. Always a devoted mother, Dottie vows to subordinate the demands of her stage role to her maternal role, although the film ends without specifying exactly how she will accomplish that.

The film explores a common dilemma for the modern woman, the tug-of-war between career and family, and it affirms the primacy of maternal responsibilities. Yet, as a variation on the Jewish-mother motif, the problem admits no satisfactory resolution: the stereotype insists that the mother is self-centered and ignorant, blind to her offsprings' suffering, but also domineering and overprotective. Any reversal of the negative stereotype carries with it the internal contradictions. Dottie, as exemplar of the positive Jewish mother, cannot surmount contemporary problems: her personal ambition for stardom propels her out into the world, but the needs and desires of her daughters draw her back home. She is appreciated by the strangers in her mainstream audience for her talent, warmth, and charisma, the same qualities that make her children yearn for her presence. In contrast to the failed artist-mother depicted by Jong or Brooks, she does not postpone her own creativity because of motherhood but takes risks to express it in the very branch of male-dominated comedy where the stereotype of the Jewish mother originated.

The acceptance and popularity of Jewish humor in the entertainment industry--stand-up comedy, film, television, recordings, and literature--have contributed to the Jewish minority's increasing sense of security and success in the United States. This position of relative comfort is reflected in changing ethnic attitudes and images. Comedy rides on the edge of discomfort. During a period of cultural transition, the stereotype of the Jewish mother was constructed to signify and mock Jews' concerns about the process of Americanization. Those concerns have since given way to other preoccupations. As traces of Jewish self-doubt about assimilation and acceptance wane, the figure of the mother has been divested of ethnic content. She has lost much of her provocative power and comic zest as a result. In the three 1990s films discussed above, the Jewish mother appears less hyperbolic, more muted, and thus flattened. Pictured as a less parochial, more universalized figure, she now negotiates contemporary issues of female identity: aging, sexuality, the competing obligations of career and family. Although the Jewish mother was portrayed as recalcitrant about change in the 1960s, in recent screen incarnations she is more progressive. She has moved with the times. But she remains a cautionary figure, who warns her child (and the audience) about the perils of complacency in a fast-paced, narcissistic society. Theories of comedy postulate that laughter can subvert, disrupt, and critique the prevailing social order, revealing pressure points in the collective consciousness. As the position of the Jewish mother has shifted from the cultural margins toward the center, she can now be used to indicate cruxes of cultural ambivalence for all Americans.

Notes

(1.) A standard explanation of French feminists' work is offered in Moi, Ch. 6 and 8. For a synthesis of feminist theory in relation to ethnic humor see Leveen.

(2.) Some critics still regard Portnoy's Complaint as Roth's most enduring work. See, for example, Menand, in reviewing American Pastoral, who concludes that the newer novel is "darker, difficult, more mature; but Portnoy is forever" (94).

(3.) A notable exception to the lack of mothers in American literature occurs in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, a text often relegated to high-school reading lists. Women's sentimental fiction, which contains vivid portrayals of the mother, was disregarded by canon makers before feminist criticism. The decades of expanding the American canon since the 1960s have brought in portraits of the mother from many ethnic literatures: African American, Native American, Latino/a American, and Asian American. The mother in Toni Morrison's Beloved has attained canonical status and those in Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club and Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate have also crossed over into popular culture through films.

(4.) This aspect of the mother is comparable to the Latina daughter's perception of the all-American mother as "a girlfriend parent ... a Mom" (Alvarez 136).

(5.) Dinnage notes this biographical dearth of information about mothers.

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Martha A. Ravits is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Oregon, where she has taught for many years in the English and Women's Studies Programs. She has written on Jewish holocaust literature and is currently working on a book about women and vocation.