A
lot of my freshman year
Welcome Week is now
something of a blur in my
memory because of my constant, ut-
ter confusion around where I was go-
ing and what I was doing. But there’s
one thing I remember clearly.
I was pregaming in a room in my
hall with several other freshman
girls, whom I’d met and was friendly
with but didn’t really know. Between
shots of the vodka my hostess’s par-
ents bought her before they left, I
mentioned to her how nervous I was
to ask my professor if it was all right
for me to miss lecture so I could be at
services for Rosh Hashanah. A look of
surprise crossed her face — she hadn’t
realized I was Jewish.
“Listen, we won’t have any prob-
lems as long as you’re not another
jappy f--king b--ch. This school has
too many of those already.”
I laughed weakly, trying to hide my
internal panic behind a sip of sickly-
sweet pink lemonade chaser. My
hostess poured herself another shot
as if nothing had happened. I made
my excuses to leave as soon as I felt I
could safely do so without her real-
izing I’d been insulted and called my
mother, crying.
Welcome to the University of
Michigan. Don’t be so outwardly Jew-
ish. That’s b--chy.
I’d never actually met an antisem-
ite before. Sure, I knew antisemitism
was a thing, but only conceptually. I’d
grown up in a suburb that had a large
Jewish population. Until that mo-
ment, I had taken wholly for granted
the strength of my Jewish community
at home, both inside and outside of
my family’s temple.
Honestly, I had expected the Uni-
versity to be more of the same. The
University has long had a reputation
for its strong and welcoming Jew-
ish community, so much so that Hil-
lel, the foundation for Jewish campus
life, ranks the University as a top-five
Jewish school in the country. Lots of
kids from my area — from my temple,
even — end up at the University. To
my mind, I had no reason to believe
my experience as a Jewish person
on campus would be all that different
from what it had been at home.
But maybe, starting college in the
middle of the Trump era, I should
have known better. Hate crimes, after
all, including antisemitic hate crimes,
have been on the rise since the now-
former president won the Republi-
can nomination. Though he himself
rarely expressed hatred for Jewish
people explicitly, in the wake of his
success, his supporters no longer felt
the need to self-censor their own big-
otry, antisemitic or otherwise. I spoke
about this phenomenon over Zoom
with Jamie Moshin, a lecturer in the
Department of Communication &
Media who specializes in rhetoric and
American Jewish identity.
“In so many ways, I think Trump
calls in this audience that ends up be-
ing like the Proud Boys and the Char-
lottesville marchers who are looking
for someone to speak their language,
and he spoke their language,” Moshin
said. “He didn’t speak about it as loud-
ly as they did, but I think he gave them
the courage to speak loudly.”
Looking back over the exhausting
events of the last five years through
that lens, it’s easy to pick out the hate-
ful pattern Moshin’s talking about. It’s
there in the shooting at Tree of Life
synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pa., in the
plot to bomb a Colorado synagogue, in
the desecration of a Jewish cemetery
in Grand Rapids, Mich. In our own
community in Ann Arbor, it’s also
there during Saturday protests out-
side local synagogues during Shabbat
morning services.
But I can also pick it out of my
personal life with fairly little effort.
Though thankfully they’re not nearly
as explicit, the threads of discrimina-
tion are still there. The threads were
there during an instance in my soror-
ity rush process. I remember walking
happily out of what would become my
sorority for the first time, and hearing
the girl in line behind me mutter, “Ew,
I hated them. They were so… Jewish.”
Yes, my sorority is historically Jew-
ish, and yes, most of our members
on campus are Jewish. But I’d never
heard Jewishness sound like a slur,
never heard it sound as derogatory as
it did when it was coming out of her
mouth on that sunny, nerve-wrack-
ing September afternoon. To me, the
word had always been neutral: Either
someone was Jewish or wasn’t. Out
of her mouth, it wasn’t an adjective. It
was an insult.
The threads were there when I
proudly wore my new AEPhi shirt on
campus the day after receiving my bid,
which is the same day that my Wel-
come Week hostess stopped speaking
to me. Before, we’d exchanged awk-
ward hellos in the halls. Now all of a
sudden, it was like I didn’t exist. One
thing had changed: I was in AEPhi. I
had branded myself, in her eyes, as a
“jappy f--king b--ch.”
It was not a major loss — anyone
who doesn’t respect my religion or my
right to be at the institution I worked
so hard to get into has no place in my
life. Still, it was something: just that
little thread of prejudice, running
through my college experience.
I’m not the only one to feel like
that. I spoke to LSA sophomore Yonit
Robin, Michigan Hillel’s finance chair
and Delta Phi Epsilon member, which
is also a historically Jewish sorority,
about her experience in Jewish cam-
pus life. She, too, had been branded as
a “
JAP” before.
Though the term was originally a
derogatory slur against Japanese peo-
ple during World War II, it eventually
came to have an additional meaning,
which is unrelated but common: the
Jewish American Princess. The JAP
is essentially a rude caricature of a nor-
mal young Jewish woman, who, be-
cause of her religion and hobbies, is au-
tomatically deemed spoiled and bratty.
Generalizations around shopping, bat
mitzvahs, sororities and summer camp
abound; so does snark around alleged
sexual promiscuity. An Urban Diction-
ary definition of a JAP reads, “this girl
dresses only in clothing that costs more
than it’s worth (ex. Abercrombie, uggs,
etc.) and is always getting what they
want. The Jap is constantly shopping
and buying this overpriced clothing,
along with a ridiculous amount of jew-
elry and expensive, needless crap. The
Jap is known for her very annoying,
nagging voice.”
“I think that there’s an assumption
that, because you’re in a Jewish soror-
ity, you automatically fall under that
category,” Robin said. “There’s kind of
a stereotype that kind of comes along
with that, which I wasn’t really aware
of before I joined, but there’s definite-
ly a stereotype that comes up a lot of
the time.”
It’s sort of a Catch-22: Jews histori-
cally weren’t welcome in traditional
Fraternity & Sorority Life (FSL), so
they formed their own organizations.
Even now that they’re at least nomi-
nally welcomed into the houses that
once shunned them, many Jewish
students feel more comfortable in his-
torically Jewish organizations like so-
rorities AEPhi, DPhiE and Sigma Del-
ta Tau and fraternities such as Alpha
Epsilon Pi or Zeta Beta Tau, which
remain mostly Jewish. These houses
also often provide Jewish program-
ming such as Shabbat dinners, though
they do now accept non-Jews. And so
students in these houses, for choosing
organizations where they feel most at
home, are often judged for their per-
ceived lack of effort at fitting in as well
as criticized for their reluctance to as-
similate and explore outside the bub-
ble of sororities and summer camps —
even though they’ve been historically
unwelcome outside of it.
The double standards surrounding
Jewish FSL don’t stop there though,
as Deborah Dash Moore, Univer-
sity professor of History and Judaic
Studies, explained to me over Zoom.
When largely Christian or non-reli-
gious fraternities have lavish formals
in Chicago or Canada, they’re college
kids having fun. When predominant-
ly Jewish houses have similar events,
they’re flaunting their money, an ac-
cusation that plays on other harm-
ful stereotypes of Jewish people as
greedy and self-serving. When largely
Christian or non-religious soror-
ity girls wear expensive, fashionable
clothing, they’re cool and trendy, but
when Jewish sorority girls do the
same, they’re JAPs “spending daddy’s
money.”
These stereotypes extend beyond
Jewish students in FSL, but it’s in this
social sphere that we often see them
more clearly, Moore explained.
“It’s not just Jewish behavior, it’s the
intersection of Jewish ethnicity with
class standing with age of the students
and what is considered to be appropri-
ate or okay for 18, 19, 20-year-old men
to do, and conversely for the same age
women to do,” Moore said. “There’s a
double standard, especially if they’re
(Christian FSL students) white. It’s not
just their class standing and their be-
havior, but that they’re white: They’re
part of the dominant group.
Moore further commented on
the role of these stereotypes, saying
they’re a way to still label Jewish stu-
dents as outsiders.“What these Jew-
ish stereotypes tend to do is to signal
that Jews are not part of the dominant
group,” Moore said. “They’re ways to
put down Jews in their aspirations
to join this upper class standing with
which comes the license to misbe-
have. Jews don’t have a license to mis-
behave.”
The JAP stereotype is also interest-
ing because it actually originates from
Jewish men in the mid-20th century
complaining about how much more
demanding it was to date Jewish
girls. The reason these women were
allegedly higher-maintenance was
because of American consumer cul-
ture. For women especially, visible
consumption such as fancy clothes
and nice cars were (and indeed, still
are) status symbols. Jews at the time,
still not quite assimilated into the
mainstream in the U.S., wanted to be
seen in that ideal American light. So
they turned to visible consumerism as
their avenue, thus gaining themselves
a reputation as spoiled.
It’s no accident that this insult was
directed specifically towards Jewish
women: The JAP stereotype is also
rooted in misogyny. Initially, this was
borne out of resentment from Jew-
ish men. But soon, the JAP stereo-
type was co-opted into the common
vernacular, and there it grew from
semi-joking insult into a full-on de-
rogatory term. While the term was
hurtful coming from Jewish people,
it is unequivocally offensive coming
from non-Jews.
E
ven more concerningly, in
the common vernacular, the
JAP stereotype plays into the
centuries-old antisemitic myth that
Jews are controlling all of the world’s
banks and money for their own profit.
These stereotypes have been used
to violently harm and discriminate
against Jewish people for centuries.
“(The JAP) is an antisemitic stereo-
type, there is no question,” Moore said.
“That then gets spread to the larger
society and picked up by non-Jews as
well … That’s a real problem. It’s a ste-
reotype. Wealthy, young Jewish wom-
en who spend money, that doesn’t
mean that they’re JAPs. It means that
they’re wealthy, young Jewish women
who spend conspicuously.”
Still, though, these harmful stereo-
types persist in everyday language.
Sometimes it’s out of ignorance.
Sometimes it’s out of genuine hatred.
Sometimes it’s somewhere in be-
tween. But the threads of antisemi-
tism persist. Perhaps it should be less
surprising that these stereotypes have
taken on so strongly in the state of
Michigan, which has a storied history
of racism and antisemitism from Hen-
ry Ford to Father Charles Coughlin to
the KKK. And on top of that come
the issues around out-of-state admis-
sions, which play into long-standing
contempt for wealthy Jewish people
from urban areas. This contempt is
not unique to Michigan by any means;
the Anti-Defamation League reports
that similar prejudices are wide-
spread across the country, and not
limited to the non-wealthy.
The state of Michigan has been de-
creasing public education funding for
decades, so the University has turned
to out-of-state students, who pay
nearly double the in-state tuition, to
keep its finances stable. This has been
criticized by those who argue that the
out-of-staters can pay their way into
the spots that should be going to in-
state students.
And since a significant propor-
tion of Jewish students are from out-
of-state and are often fairly wealthy,
these pre-existing tensions then inter-
sect in ugly ways with the perception
of Jews as rich, greedy and self-serv-
ing to breed contempt in many against
the University’s Jewish population.
None of this is to say that in-state
students are less wealthy and/or less
tolerant; but instead to point out how
this important debate plays into long-
standing antisemitic tropes.
“That type of resentment is partly a
class resentment,” Moore said. “Work-
ing-class and middle-class Michigan
natives do lose seats to students who
come from, say, the coasts, and many
of these students are Jewish, they pay
a lot more money … I’ve had in-state
students who say to me, ‘This was the
first time I ever met a Jew.’ And they
only know what they’ve read, what
they’ve heard, what’s in the air.”
The stereotype just becomes the
most logical answer to these ques-
tions in a larger society with baked-in
antisemitism, Moshin said.
“If you’re someone who has not had
a lot of experience with Jewish people,
there are so many narratives about
Jews and money,” Moshin said. “That
is such a common narrative that gets
told over and over and over again, and
so it’s part of our cultural knowledge of
what it means to be Jewish. So when
people go on very limited knowledge
and very limited experience with ac-
tual Jewish people, and what they have
is this story, then I think you read into
that elitism, you read into that Jewish-
ness, and it just becomes part of the
cognitive schema. We’ve built up these
cultural narratives that we immediate-
ly tap into, especially if we don’t have a
particularly deep knowledge of it. So it
just becomes the easy explanation for
everything.”
The results of this prejudice can be
easy to miss if you’re not looking out
for it. The insults and stereotypes are
hidden deeper in the subtext of many
conversations.
Both Rabbi Fully Eisenberger, di-
rector of the Jewish Resource Cen-
ter on campus, and Tilly Shemer, the
executive director of University Hil-
lel, discussed with me their efforts to
counter this prejudice and make their
organizations havens for Jewish stu-
dents on campus. They’ve expressed
how they’ve had to try to help stu-
dents who have felt attacked for their
faith on campus.
“That line of when something
crosses over into antisemitism can
differ for different students,” Shemer
said. “Whether people realize it or
not, there’s hateful and offensive lan-
guage that can be used towards Jew-
ish students that can feel more pain-
ful to them as a minority group, and
it’s important for Jewish students
to be able to have the space to share
with their campus community when
they feel targeted and when they feel
offended.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
statement
Jewish geography: How Jewish students find
space on campus amid rising antisemitism
BY ABIGAIL SNYDER, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT
ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE WIEBE
Wednesday, March 24, 2021 — 11
Read more at MichiganDaily.com