Unsettling

Jews, Whiteness, and Incest in American Popular Culture

Eli Bromberg

• Editorial: Rutgers University Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781978807259
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Sociology

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.

1

A Victorian Freud

A Rhetorical Analysis of Jewish Second-Wave Feminist Criticism of Freud

This chapter argues that the rhetorical choices Jewish second-wave feminists made in critiquing Sigmund Freud reveal how even in an activist, feminist context, Jewish community protective politics dictated that Freud be depicted as white and not Jewish. Jewish second-wave feminists challenged Freud, but in so doing cast him as a universal and Victorian patriarchal figure, almost never mentioning his Jewishness. These rhetorical choices, which had the effect of de-Judaizing Freud, functioned as a form of secular excommunication. In order to accommodate second-wave feminist critiques of Freud, Jewish community protective politics whitened Freud, a rhetorical act that effectively protected the image of Jewish male patriarchy by ensuring that Freud and his flaws were discussed as representative of a universal, white patriarchy. Second-wave feminists criticized Freud for a number of reasons, but I focus on the role his theorization of incest played in this criticism because of the intersection of the Jewish incest stereotype and Freud’s ostensible culpability for facilitating men getting away with incestuous transgressions on account of his widely accepted revision of his own incest theorization.

While Freud’s incest theorizing is most famous for the Oedipus complex, a flawed theory based on the notion that children universally sexually fantasized about the parent of the opposite sex, Freud initially proposed the “seduction theory,” a flawed theory based on the notion that adult trauma could be traced to childhood sexual abuse (inclusive of, albeit not limited to, incest).¹ In essence, anxiety about Freud’s status as a Jewish progenitor of misogynistic and patriarchal ideas and, crucially, specific anxiety about his theorization of incest incentivized second-wave Jewish feminists to accentuate his white, or “Victorian,” qualities in order to avoid the appearance of holding a Jewish male icon responsible for society’s misogynist failings.

While the majority of this study focuses on the 1990s, I begin with the 1970s for three reasons: first, to show how Jewish community protective politics operate in activist circles. Even for feminists dedicated to critiquing misogynistic attitudes among men, negotiating Jewish identity often resulted in ambivalent concessions to Jewish community protective politics. Second, this community protective whitening of Freud, which emerges among otherwise progressive and secular Jews, happens concurrently with a displacement of the incest stereotypes from Jewish men onto Black men and Black families, prefiguring the displacement of stereotype that occurs with Jewish community protective politics in the 1990s. And third, this chapter harks back to how Freud himself negotiated the problem of the Jewish incest stereotype in the 1890s, revealing how Jewish community protective politics function across eras.²

That Freud’s whiteness would be asserted by his most ardent critics, among them many Jewish women, calls attention to how race (and anti-Blackness in particular) intersected with considerations of sexual antisemitism for Jews across eras and across the political spectrum. By analyzing the ways that Jewishness was invoked, or conspicuously left unspoken, in Jewish authored second-wave feminist texts dealing with incest and child abuse, as well as texts that were specifically critical of Freud, this chapter shows how anxieties about Jewish male vulnerability impacted how Jewish feminists levied their critique of patriarchy, and how authors implicitly protected Jewish men even as they critiqued white men and pathologized Black men. Regardless of intent, these choices had the effect of displacing sexual stereotypes from white Jewish men onto Black men. I do not contend that this was done consciously, but even in an otherwise progressive movement, Jewish community protective politics found Jewish second-wave feminists protecting some patriarchal interests, such as the image of white Jewish masculinity. They accomplished this via whitening (and de-Judaizing) Freud and refraining from any engagement with culturally Jewish components of male patriarchal behavior (even as this framework was used for Black men). This keen, deeply felt awareness of Jewish male vulnerability to sexual antisemitism informed how Freud was discussed and functionally secularly excommunicated in these texts.

In examining Freud criticism, we will see how Jewish community protective impulses were personal and central to second-wave feminist activism and scholarship that rhetorically protected masculine Jewish vulnerability and, in so doing, helped whiten ethnoracial Jewish identity. These veiled community protective politics informed groundbreaking works that levied vital criticisms against white male patriarchy, while avoiding mention of the particular vulnerabilities and exploitative acts of white Jewish patriarchy, even as they unambivalently voiced criticisms of Black patriarchy. I do not suggest that these authors should have differently invoked their Jewishness in levying their critiques, or that the minimal mention of their Jewish subjectivity was in and of itself problematic. I do, however, find these choices meaningful as it relates to the content of their writing, specifically, the corresponding inattention to Freud’s Jewishness, especially when juxtaposed with the racist presuppositions observable in how these authors deconstructed Black patriarchy. In comparison to Jewish second-wave feminists, Black feminist authors of this era (such as Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Gayl Jones) addressed incest and criticized Black patriarchy in specifically Black terms. The rhetorical choices that forged these second-wave feminist movements thus muted the association of incest with Jews and ultimately realigned it with the pathologized Black family. And, concomitantly, these rhetorical choices discursively facilitated Jewish women’s continued integration into the more empowered construct of “white women.”

Second-wave feminism’s consequential integration of secular Jewish identity into whiteness essentially protected Jewish men from ethnoracial pathology, establishing the terms for subsequent discussions regarding Jewish white figures and incest and helping displace that pathology onto Black men. For all its insight, this criticism of Freud failed to straightforwardly negotiate his Jewishness, Jewish vulnerability, or problematic incest theorizing in the context of his anxiety regarding the Jewish incest stereotype. While Freud was rightly criticized by second-wave feminists for building a psychoanalytic structure that too often cast daughters’ testimonies as fantasy, identifying him as Jewish while accusing him of this moral failure risked branding him as an antisemitic stereotype writ large: a Jewish man responsible for societal failure to deal honestly with the reality of incest.

In building this argument, I contextualize Freud’s own Jewish racial identity amid the pervasive geopolitical antisemitism of its era and examine how numerous classic Jewish-authored second-wave feminist texts, with the notable exception of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, consistently cast Freud as a Victorian, while never presenting him as Jewish. Considering how these authors articulated their own subjective Jewish perspectives reveals how that invocation (or lack thereof) conspicuously operated alongside anti-Black cultural logics that accommodated post–civil rights white Jewishness’s further incorporation into whiteness. The chapter concludes by contrasting these patterns with how Black feminist authors dealt with incest in their novels, memoirs, and poetry.

When Did Freud Become White?

Asking “When did Freud become white?” is certainly anachronistic. Applying “white” as a racial construct signifying power and privilege extending to and enveloping European Jews during Freud’s lifetime threatens to elide the ubiquity of antisemitism during that era. And yet, Freud today is commonly discussed as white; he is often invoked in popular American discourse as a figure representative of a sort of hegemonic, supposedly universal, “normative” racial quality. Jewish feminist criticism of Freud during the 1970s went a long way toward cementing Freud’s whiteness, as decades after his death, his critics projected a racial identity onto him.³

Though it goes unmentioned in many Jewish-authored second-wave feminist texts critical of him, Freud lived in a Europe in which Jews were targets of broad societal discrimination and racial violence for the duration of his lifetime. Freud was born in 1856 in the Austrian Empire, shortly before a wave of pogroms across Russia and Eastern Europe. He died in 1939 in the United Kingdom having escaped the Nazis and the fate of six million Jews systematically murdered during the Holocaust. Freud was secular, but his own religious nonobservance would have been irrelevant to the vast majority of antisemites.⁴ The antisemitism Freud encountered in Vienna clearly impacted his social and professional opportunities.

While contemplating Freud’s Jewishness is imperative to any comprehensive effort at understanding the historical figure, his textual engagement with race (and racism) reminds us that he also helped shape a medical discourse that impacted how Europeans conceived of racial difference. Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud’s anthropological attempt to theorize incest, endogamy, and exogamy, relies on Indigenous Australians to consider issues of family and partnering. In setting up a dichotomy of “savages” and “neurotics” in discussing sexual partnering practices, Freud creates distance between European Jews and non-European “savages.” An alignment of Jewish identity and normative “whiteness” is formulated through sexually othering nonwhite figures around an issue widely associated with European Jews at the time.⁵ As Alys Eve Weinbaum reminds us, “In Austro-German medicine and science, as in the immediate sociopolitical milieu of Freud’s Vienna, race invariably called up the constellation Aryan/Jew” (146). While Freud’s theorizing began rhetorically recategorizing European Jewishness as European, he did this as a Jewish man whose secularity provided no meaningful reprieve from the weight of systematic state-sponsored antisemitism. And yet, as the following section shows, Freud is almost invariably categorized as Victorian by Jewish second-wave feminists, a reinvention that renders him, within the anachronistic logic, as a flawed but iconic white father figure, as opposed to a Jewish man whose theorizing facilitated men getting away with incest.

A Consistently Victorian Freud

This section details how various Jewish second-wave feminists identified Freud according to racial, ethnic, national, and cultural categorizations. Classic second-wave feminist texts authored by Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex, 1970), Ellen Frankfort (Vaginal Politics, 1972), Phyllis Chesler (Women and Madness, 1972), and Susan Brownmiller (Against Our Will, 1975) all levy significant criticisms against Freud’s patriarchal theorizing, and while each of the aforementioned authors identifies as Jewish (even if not in these texts), none of these texts mention Freud’s Jewishness. Instead, they depict Freud as culturally “Victorian,” as Viennese, and, ironically, as a sort of religious father figure for secularism. But in contrast to brief but meaningful comments depicting Freud as Jewish in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), these influential texts never identify Freud as Jewish. The subsequent close readings examine how each text represents Freud and consider how Friedan’s language reveals an alternative choice that might have rendered Freud vulnerable to ethnoracial pathologizing.

Jewish second-wave feminist authors often characterized Freud as a product of a repressed Victorian society and framed their criticisms of his patriarchal theories on that formative culture. Ellen Frankfort published Vaginal Politics, a thorough condemnation of various systemic instances of sexism and misogyny within the health-care industry. Addressing Freud’s influence on medicine, Frankfort writes, “Like many older doctors practicing today, Freud was, however, the products [sic] of a repressed Victorian upbringing and an authoritarian education” (202). Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness indicts sexism in psychology and the categorization of women as “mad” as a historical tool for oppressing women. Chesler identifies Freud’s tone in the “Case of Dora” as “cold, intellectual, detective-like, controlling, sexually Victorian” (80). Chesler never identifies Freud as Jewish, nor does she identify either Anna O. or Dora as Jewish. In Against Our Will, a touchstone of rape scholarship and history, Susan Brownmiller labels the psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch a “traitor to her own sex” (350) for her thesis on female masochism; Brownmiller considers both Deutsch and Freud as products of their culture, defined quite narrowly; Deutsch’s “attitude was in keeping with the Victorian times in which she and Freud lived” (351). Brownmiller makes no reference to Freud’s Jewishness, despite her analysis of Jewish women as victims of rape in Europe during pogroms and the Holocaust. Instead, she marks Freud as “Victorian,” subsuming his Jewishness with a shorthand for a broad-brushed mainstream culture that Frankfort describes as “repressed,” and Chesler describes as “cold” and “controlling.”

References to Freud as a father figure were also commonplace. Brownmiller calls Freud the “father of psychoanalysis” (Against Our Will, 305), and Judith Lewis Herman, in her comprehensive study Father-Daughter Incest (1981), describes Freud as “the patriarch of modern psychology” (9). While Herman sets Freud up explicitly as a cultural father figure, she never roots him in any specific historical cultural context; she marks him as neither Jewish nor Victorian.

No text does more to present Freud as Victorian, father figure, and culturally iconic, while still avoiding any mention of his Jewishness, than Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. Firestone’s influential text outlines socialist terms for feminist revolution and spends a chapter analyzing Freud and Freudianism, labeling the phenomenon a “misguided feminism” (38). Firestone distinguishes between Freud and Freudianism—the contemporaneous mainstream popularity and influence of a watered-down version of psychoanalysis. But despite asserting that she interrogates Freud’s “cultural bias” (13), the chapter focuses almost entirely on his American cultural impact. Firestone writes, “If we had to name the one cultural current that most characterizes America in the twentieth century, it might be the work of Freud and the disciplines that grew out of it” (38). Indeed, the chapter mocks American preoccupation with Freud by considering him as a cultural phenomenon wholly extracted from his historical context: “Freudianism has become, with its confessionals and penance, its proselytes and converts, with the millions spent on its upkeep, our modern Church. We attack it only uneasily, for you never know, on the final day of judgement, whether they might be right” (38).

Firestone’s acerbic writing, throughout her chapter on Freudianism, punctures the image of Freud as godlike figure. But the extent to which she draws our attention to Freud as a religious figure also reinforces the association. Firestone says of Freud, “at the end of each new critique we find a guilt paean to the Great Father who started it all. They can’t quite do him in” (39). Numerous constructions identify him as a recognizably Christian figure (references to church, confessionals, and proselytes all contribute to this imagery), revealing a fascinating contrast with the man’s historical secular Jewishness. Firestone’s diminishment of Freud also enshrines him: his singular impact constitutes the one cultural current characterizing twentieth-century America and simultaneous evidence of his false godhood. Yet Firestone consistently engages Freud’s “cultural bias” in limited terms: “Both Freudianism and feminism came as reactions to one of the smuggest periods in Western civilization, the Victorian Era, characterized by its family-centredness, and thus its exaggerated sexual oppression and repression” (41). Throughout, Firestone anchors her assessment of Freud’s “cultural” characteristics with familiar nods to “Western civilization,” “Victorian Era,” and Vienna. His Jewishness never comes up.

And yet, despite her criticism of Freudianism, Firestone’s assessments of Freud’s failings are, occasionally, sympathetic: “Given [Freud’s] own psych...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. A Victorian Freud: A Rhetorical Analysis of Jewish Second-Wave Feminist Criticism of Freud
• 2. Incest, Exogamy, and Jewishness on Roseanne
• 3. Woody, Wood Yi, and Communion Wafers: Ethnoracial Signifying in the Woody Allen Incest Narrative
• 4. Blood Libel Humor and Incest Easter Eggs: Family and Destruction in Deconstructing Harry, Irrational Man, and Blue Jasmine
• 5. “Till a Khusin Comes Along”: Cousins, American Africanism, and Rape in Henry Roth’s Mercy of a Rude Stream
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author