You Never Call! You Never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother

You Never Call! You Never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother, by Joyce Antler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 321 pp. $24.95. Why has the Jewish mother been the figure that so may people love to hate for so long? (p, 2), Joyce Antler asks in the opening pages of her eminently readable history of the Jewish mother. Tracing popular images of Jewish mothers in America and the reflections of American Jewish women themselves about mothering from the 1920s to the present, Antler demonstrates that in fact the Jewish mother has not been universally hated in America. Rather, a very particular now familiar image of the Jewish mother as[a]gressive and manipulative, living vicariously through her children, especially sons (p. 8) gained ascendancy only after World War II and was only one among a range of depictions of Jewish mothers circulating in American popular and literary culture during the twentieth century. This ascendant negative stereotype contrasts with the diverse mothering experiences of American Jewish women across the generations. American Jews' use of comedy to mitigate ambivalences surrounding assimilation, as well as gender and generational tensions within Jewish communities and individual families, Antler shows, propelled this specific stereotype to its dominant position, where in the hands of Jewish comics, actors, writers, feminists, and post-feminists, among others, the image continued to morph and serve as a site where several generations of American Jews worked out their anxieties about what it means to be Jewish in America. In the process, Antler forwards a convincing argument that the Jewish mother stereotype was universalized, becoming a symbol for anxieties about American mothers more generally. Antler's meticulous effort to historicize the meaning of Jewish motherhood is an important contribution to American Jewish and women's history. Perhaps most importantly, her study goes a long way toward combating the pernicious misogyny often embedded in Jewish mother jokes and baiting. Beginning with the conflicting but essentially positive Yiddishe Mama depiction popularized by Sophie Tucker, Al Jolson, and Hollywood producers during the 1920s and 1930s, each chapter in turn traces the complex evolution of Jewish mother images. Critical actors in the transformation of this more positive representation into the familiar nagging Jewish mother of the late twentieth century were maleBorschr Belt comics and male literary figures of the 1950s and 1960s. Before Jewish audiences at Catskill resorts, male comics refined Jewish mother jokes as an expression of the tensions surrounding assimilation and modernity. When these jokes passed into mainstream media, they lost their insider status, as well as the nostalgia that to some degree tempered insult. …