A Voice of Her Own: The New Young Jewish Woman in Gail Parent's Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York (1972), Louise Blecher Rose's The Launching of Barbara Fabrikant (1974), and Susan Lukas's Fat Emily (1974)

Abstract

ABSTRACT:The 1970s gave voice to a number of female Jewish authors who subverted stereotypes of Jewish women through the creation of complex, deeply funny Jewish female protagonists that reimagined and celebrated Jewish femininity. This paper considers Gail Parent's Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York (1972), Louise Blecher Rose's The Launching of Barbara Fabrikant (1974), and Susan Lukas's Fat Emily (1974), three novels that repurpose the "Jewish American Princess" (JAP) stereotype to empower the Jewish daughter and to dismantle the image of young Jewish femininity previously set forth by male authors like Philip Roth. This paper contextualizes and analyzes each of the three novels in conversation with Letty Cottin Pogrebin's conception of the "Jewish Big Mouth" and Nathan Abrams's definition of the "New JAP with Attitude," ultimately making the argument that the Jewish female protagonists in these novels were simultaneously progressive in their clear articulation of active female Jewish voices in American popular fiction and conservative in their reliance on mid-century tropes about JAPs and "Jewish Ugly Ducklings." In doing so, these novels act as a bridge between the mid-century images of young Jewish femininity perpetuated by authors like Roth and the more nuanced, female-driven representations of Jewish women seen in contemporary popular culture.