Misogyny and Antisemitism Are a Toxic Brew

Stereotyping Jewish women is dangerously common

Dr. Petrzela is a professor of history at the New School and a fellow of the Carnegie Corporation. Dr. Schreiber is a professor of art, media and cultural history and a co-director of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Institute at the New School.

“ZIO bitch!” a young man in a kaffiyeh and Black Lives Matter T-shirt barked at one of us, his ire apparently provoked by a yellow ribbon pin, a symbol of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas. The exchange was unsettling but not surprising. Even in New York, where we both live, we have often seen an extraordinary lack of empathy for the Israeli victims of Oct. 7 and outright hostility toward those who advocate for them. The epithet “Zio bitch” highlights multilayered animosities, pointing to an insidious, specific prejudice we have seen bloom this year: the melding of misogyny and antisemitism.

Though cartoonish tropes of Jewish women are ubiquitous (think of the materialistic Jewish American princess, gossipy yenta and overbearing, often overweight Jewish mother), they often barely register as bias in a progressive culture otherwise attuned to identity-based offense. Mocking American Jewish women, many of whom appear white, can be seen as punching up, a variation on calling out a so-called Karen — that is, an entitled, whiny white woman seen often in a racially charged situation.

To be a Jewish American woman is to experience a paradox: We are a minority vulnerable to exclusion yet simultaneously perceived as sufficiently inside dominant culture that we are often expected to endure, or even deserve, any opprobrium that comes our way. This prejudice was further complicated by the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. Early reports of sexual violence perpetrated against Israeli women were initially met with silence from many global feminist organizations. As evidence of this violence grew among Israelis and Jewish Americans, our horror about the reactions to this violence intensified: a graphic photograph of the ravaged body of Shani Louk, a young German Israeli woman, surrounded by armed terrorists was part of a group of photos that won a prestigious photography award. Online trolls mocked Amit Soussana, who described the violations she suffered while held captive by Hamas.

It seems to us that the reactions to this violence were informed by the fact that the victims are Jewish women, presumably imperfect victims. Furthermore, the absence of a deeper understanding of why Jewish women are so readily degraded allows ignorance to fester. Disparaging Jewish women is not new. A century ago, Progressive-era reformers fighting sex trafficking — then called white slavery — often painted the (white) women involved as innocent victims. Jewish women, however, were an exception. One reformer described a Jewish woman driven to prostitution as a “sinful Jewess” and a man who exploited women like her as “a young Jew parasite.”

In the 1920s some European films depicted Jewish women as vampires or man-murdering monsters. In the 1940s, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre argued in “Anti-Semite and Jew” that the very expression “a beautiful Jewess” bore “an aura of rape and massacre. The `beautiful Jewess’ is she whom the Cossacks under the czars dragged by her hair through the streets of her burning village.” In 1979 the feminist Andrea Dworkin quoted Sartre to argue that such antisemitic misogyny was paradigmatic of the objectification at the heart of pornography.

These dynamics endure. In June a 12-yearold Jewish girl in France was allegedly raped by boys who used antisemitic slurs while they violated her. Five thousand miles away, a Texas woman read about this attack and felt compelled to write about her own attacker, a man who she said put on Christmas music and raped her after she disclosed she was Jewish.

The mistreatment of Jewish women is not confined to exceptional, if brutal, acts of violence. A peculiar permissibility of bias against Jewish women permeates popular culture. Four years ago, the comedian Sarah Silverman commented that portrayals of Jewish women often default to a sassy friend or this terrible “girlfriend before the guy realizes what love really can be, or you’re that guy’s book agent, like, sleazy book agent, or a scumbag executive.” The Netflix series “Nobody Wants This” centers a “hot rabbi” falling for a blond shiksa (non-Jew) who is only dimly aware of Judaism but who is presented as a luminous, lovely contrast to the domineering, whining and otherwise repellent Jewish women in his orbit.

“Intersectionality,” the term coined in 1989 by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, helpfully explains how sexism and racism overlap and can reinforce each other to create unique barriers — a collective effect that often amounts to more than the sum of its parts. Ironically, the political and intellectual movement that has most embraced intersectionality has at times been a barrier to recognizing, much less fighting, the antipathy faced by Jewish women. Intersectionality is so often deployed to link the domestic fight for racial justice with postcolonialism in general and the Palestinian freedom movement in particular that the framework has been criticized as one that can exclude antisemitism or even perpetuate antisemitic tropes about nefarious Jewish power.

It’s important to note that the melding of antisemitism and misogyny can be found across the political spectrum. The problem is rampant on the right, as conservatives platform a Hitler apologist and lionize Donald Trump, a man who has been found liable for sexual abuse and scapegoated Jews in anticipation of a possible loss.

Jewish women are a soft target in this world, in which white supremacy increasingly appears intractable: We are white enough to be worthy of scorn but not enough to be reliably protected against racist and sexist structures we should be dismantling rather than perpetuating in insidious new forms.