“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-year-old 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.
