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Watch the Throne

Today on Tablet

by
Marc Tracy
January 14, 2011

Contributing editor Rachel Shukert prepares us today in Tablet Magazine to root for Miss Massachusetts, a.k.a. Loren Galler Rabinowitz, who this weekend will become the first Jew to compete in the Miss America pageant since Bess Myerson won it in 1945. While not overselling it, Shukert sees Rabinowitz’s candidacy as potentially a return to form for American Jewish women:

Bess Myerson could have (and perhaps should have) ushered in a worshipful golden age of Jewish femininity. Unfortunately, this was not to be the case. As Jewish men began to shape American pop culture of the postwar years, they often asserted their independence from the painful (or embarrassing) history through less-than-flattering portrayals of their mothers and sisters and cousins, robbing Jewish women of their femininity and sexual power in the public imagination for generations. … male “Jewish” traits—intellectual sophistication, sensitivity, even neurosis—were portrayed as endearing and even sexually combustible to the right (Gentile) woman; Jewish women (as I scarcely have to tell you) were portrayed as loud, pushy, materialistic, emasculating, crass, and seemingly devoid of any complicated inner life. If they were at all attractive, it was in spite of their Jewishness, not because of it, or the attractiveness had come at great (often surgical) expense.

The pageant is Saturday.

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.