Generation JAP

by Elicia Brown
Special To The Jewish Week

While I’ve been busy lamenting my 5-year-old’s obsession with Disney heroines, another princess has quietly staged her return.
Re-enter: The JAP.
This time, reports suggest, the term Jewish American Princess connotes a more daring style — a feminist, sassy, tongue-in-cheek flair. Like those who proudly refer to themselves as “Queers,” “Dykes” and “Hebes,” these self-proclaimed JAPs adopt the ethnic slur as their emblem. Alana Newhouse, a Forward writer, calls it “an ironic badge of honor,” in article in The Boston Globe.
The most recent issue of Moment Magazine wonders if we should think of such women as “a she-force — savvy feminists armed with the power of irony, waging battle against the oppression of one word.”
With the click of a mouse,

you can buy T-shirts emblazoned with Jewish Princess in a delicate pink cursive script. You can watch a YouTube clip of “Jewish American Princess,” a documentary which took top honors at the Delray Beach Film Festival in 2006. You can peruse the praises earned by “The J.A.P. Show,” in which “four Jewish American princesses of comedy” performed stand-up routines in Manhattan throughout much of this past year.
Or you can — if you’re me — find yourself both repelled and compelled by this phenomenon. From one perspective, this reclamation is a wry and subversive move. But Webster’s Dictionary defines JAP as “a stereotypical well-to-do or spoiled American Jewish girl or woman.” Not everyone is bound to get the joke.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin, an author, activist and founding editor of Ms. magazine, doesn’t find it funny. “Regardless of feminist revisionists’ well-intentioned efforts to give the term ‘Jewish American Princess’ a positive spin, it is and always will be a problematic label. ... I certainly wouldn’t want my daughters or granddaughters to be tarred by this slur.”
I arrange a meeting with Tamar Blanchard, a junior at a girl’s yeshiva high school in New Jersey, who delivered a polished presentation on the term “JAP” last fall at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan. Tamar, who is 16, took part in an unusual research project coordinated by Ma’yan, the Jewish Women’s Project, in which a group of teenage girls polled their peers around the country about their attitudes toward various aspects of adolescent Jewish life, including the term “JAP.” The sample focused primarily on the northeastern United States.
“And when was the last time you heard the word?” I ask Tamar, after we get down to business at an Upper West Side Starbucks.
Tamar sips her hot chocolate and looks off into the distance. A reserved but poised girl, Tamar might be carefully formulating her answer, or perhaps drawing on reserves of stamina after a late night. “Yesterday,” she says finally.
The term “JAP” may have fallen out of vogue in the ‘90s, but among a certain demographic, it is very much prevalent today. Of the 196 girls surveyed in the Ma’yan study, only one remarked, “I don’t use this word.” Asked to define the term, the respondents didn’t mince words. “Bratty Jewish girl,” wrote one. “Spoiled,” wrote another. “Snotty,” wrote a third. While a majority would not call themselves “Jappy,” a majority would ascribe the adjective to their friends.
Tamar noted that the insult has lost its edge since many girls don’t associate the term exclusively with Jews. On the other hand, says Tamar, “the J is still there.” “It might turn people off to Judaism,” she says. It makes Judaism “seem very vacuous.” Like Pogrebin, Tamar says she can’t understand how “you could spin that in a good way.”
But I get a different sense of the word from Natasha Bunzl, a Fieldston High School sophomore, who also helped coordinate the Ma’yan study. Though Natasha understands that the label doesn’t reflect well upon Jews, she says that she hears it on a daily basis, and that “in New York, where materialism is wide-spread, being a princess, being princessy, people emulate that. It’s not a nice thing but it’s not entirely negative either.”
As for me, I would hate for my young daughter to be stereotyped in this manner. But I worry less about the “J” in JAP than the culture of entitlement and privilege (Jewish and not) which keeps the word alive. More than anything, really, I hope my daughter’s self-esteem never depends upon a prince charming — or a Prada handbag. n
Elicia Brown’s column appears the first week of the month. E-mail her at eliciabrown@hotmail.com.