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I had managed to rationalize my shock and dismay when I found the narrator of Ruby fruit Jungle (by Rita Mae Brown) describing the fat Jewish girl Ba… - Evelyn Torton Beck
" "I had managed to rationalize my shock and dismay when I found the narrator of Ruby fruit Jungle (by Rita Mae Brown) describing the fat Jewish girl Barbara Spangenthau as someone who "always had her hand in her pants playing with herself, and worse, she stank. Until I was fifteen I thought that being Jewish meant you walked around with your hand in your pants." In 1974, as an emerging lesbian, I didn't want to admit that the movement's leading fiction writer was basing her humor on age-old anti-Semitic stereotypes. I simply couldn't afford to take it in. So I kept silent. In those early years of struggle it seemed unworthy to make a fuss. And worse-it seemed divisive. I could not yet claim my anger. I wanted too much to belong...Bertha Harris' novel lover shocked me by its reliance on Jewish stereotypes, associating Jews with violence, sex and money. Jewish physical characteristics are consistently seen as exotic and dangerous...while there are quite a number of Jewish characters in Jan Clausen's short story collection Mother, Sister, Daughter, Lover, not one of them has any positive attributes.
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About Evelyn Torton Beck
Evelyn Torton Beck (born January 18, 1933) has been described as "a scholar, a teacher, a feminist, and an outspoken Jew and lesbian". Until her retirement in 2002 she specialized in women's studies, Jewish women's studies and lesbian studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Beck has published a number of essays and books on Judaism. She came to wider prominence in 1982 with her book, Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology, a compilation of poems, essays, reminiscences and short stories, believed to be the first published collection of works by lesbian Jewish women in the United States.
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Additional quotes by Evelyn Torton Beck
I want the radicalism of the very outrageous, very outspoken, very political lesbian-feminists, Maxine Feldman, Robin Tyler, Alix Dobkin, and Linda Shear to be recognized as part of the Jewish radical-activist tradition in Eastern Europe. As comics, Feldman and Tyler follow the tradition of Jewish storytellers and wedding jesters (who warned the brides against marriage), whose job it was to keep the community laughing and crying, revealing it to itself: “Jewish women within the movement have often been the ones to change their names. . . . My last name is obviously very Jewish. Someone once asked me why I hadn't changed my name. I said to them, "I think you better check your anti-Semitism. Why haven't you asked Meg Christian?" (Maxine Feldman)
I started this project in a spirit of optimism, rooted in my pleasure (and relief) at finally having found a sense of congruence for the pieces of my life. I have since become increasingly sobered by the ramifications of what it can mean to want to say: I am a Jewish lesbian. The truth is that it is extremely difficult to identify oneself as a Jew outside the long shadow of anti-Semitism. It is like trying to imagine what it would feel like to be a lesbian in a non-homophobic world. So this book has become the exploration of complexities, as well as a celebration of our survival.
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