The Jewish Mother: Comedy and Controversy in American Popular Culture

As the mother figure is universalized and emptied of specific Jewish identity in the 1990s, she can devolve into a character who is merely cold and calculating. Whereas Sophie Portnoy was dangerous because of her overweening affection, some recent incarnations of the Jewish mother depict her as remote and unloving. The energy and vulgarity of the mother are toned down to mere reflexes of self-involvement in Barbra Streisand's 1997 film "The Mirror Has Two Faces," written by Richard LaGravenese (based on a French title). Lauren Bacall plays a vain and selfish Jewish mother of two daughters, whose only teaching about the Sabbath, one quips, was that Bergdorfs would be less crowded. The moral features of this mother, beautiful on the outside but cruel on the inside, mark her as an antifeminist woman, one who is willing to undermine the confidence of her daughter Rose, a Columbia professor of literature (played by Streisand) and to prevent the daughter's romantic fulfillment by schemes to keep the daughter living at home as the mother ages.

Even when the Jewish mother appears fully Americanized, she still brings to light old insecurities about appearances, and ultimately about the unacceptable risks of appearing either Jewish or old in American society. Rose is unattractive though charismatic and talented. The mother is a former beauty who is aging. The loyalty of the daughter and treachery of the mother show that the vilified Jewish mother has undergone many incarnations since her inception and returns again to haunt her child with new issues. The few women writers who have positioned the mother as a sympathetic character at the center of her own story have not gained sufficient mass to displace the grotesque stereotype, but they have managed to offer suggestive possibilities and fresh thinking on the theme.

Nora Ephron's film This Is My Life (1992), based on a novel by Meg Wolitzer and adapted for the screen by Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron, is a case in point. The film is not defensive or angry; it is less a response to the Jewish mother stereotype than a female-centered narrative about a mother caught in the feminist dilemma of balancing the demands of family and career. The film is narrated by both the mother, Dottie Ingels (Julie Kavner), and her oldest daughter, Erica (Samantha Mathis). Each major scene, as Sylvia Barack Fishman observes, "begins with a voiceover by the elder daughter and then continues in the voice of the mother. The overlapping voices seem to ask, `Whose life is this anyway'"? (163). This dual voicing suggests both collaboration and traditional rivalry as the mother and daughter pursue their separate but connected struggles for independence. The ups and downs of their story depict a strong relationship of mutual respect and affection, ruffled only temporarily by competition and resentment.

The film modifies the Jewish-mother construct with brief allusions to the stereotype and innovative departures from it. Here the woman stands not as the butt of comedy but as a vital creator of comedy, the voice and performer of her own life. Dottie Ingels begins as a single mother struggling to support her two daughters in Queens after her husband has deserted the family. When she inherits some money, Dottie seizes the chance to move her family to Manhattan, where she enters the field of stand-up comedy. Wearing dotted clothing as her trademark, she fashions homespun humor from the material of her everyday life. Her jokes are gentle and humane, her themes are connection and relationships. She offers her daughters the "life lesson" that everyone in the world is only two phone calls away from everyone else.