I was a teenage J A P

I’m not disparaging Japanese people here; my J A P-ness has nothing to do with the old World War II era slur of the Japanese people or immigrants to the United States from Japan. I was called a JAP throughout college because I’m a woman from a historically (although not practicing) Jewish family.

J A P = Jewish American Princess

J A P is a little like today’s Karen but Jewish, although it had little to do with wealth or behavior. My family was far from wealthy. My dad was in retail, and things could get rough, so my parents, while not cheap, were careful with large purchases. We lived in a nice but small house in a near suburb. I went to a state university when state universities were dirt cheap. I paid for my last year with a scholarship I won with good grades.

For all my J A P-i-ness , I never felt very princessy. I wore the typical 1970s uniform of ripped-hem jeans and a knit shirt. I spent most of college studying and graduated with a high rank, the expectation of my family. After two pretty lousy roommates who thought my role in the dorm room was to pay half while they used it to play house with their boyfriends, I found my ideal roommate, a young woman from a small town in the western part of the state. Her major was Chem E, a very tough major. We both studied a lot.

I have written about anti-Semitism I experienced in college before. I was attacked in my dorm room by a neo-Nazi from the group made famous by the Blues Brothers' line: “We hate Illinois Nazis.” Yup, the one from Marquette Park in Chicago. His older and wiser roommate clobbered him, and he left me alone after that. But, that was the sort of anti-Semitism I was expecting — from Illinois Nazis.

What I wasn’t expecting, and was far more frequent and insidious, was the anti-Semitism from other Jewish people, mostly Jewish young men, and mostly in the form of disparaging our looks and calling us J A Ps. There was nothing we J A Ps could do or say about it either. If we complained, they deemed us even more J A P-y. In hindsight, their responses were very Trumpian. They didn’t think their disparagement of us was inappropriate. It was all our fault because we were too ugly to date or desire.

To be clear, I’m not talking about a one-off comment or joke. Their denigration of us was frequent and permeated almost every meal in the dorm’s dining room and every dorm party. They even held a “J A P of the Year” contest and nominated a bunch of women. I was so under the radar that I didn’t have to put up with a nomination, and I was a little happy that the women banded together and voted for a guy who had to bear the title in a little poetic justice.

Some of the Jewish women embraced J A P-i-ness. They acted like they reveled in the label and decided on a uniform of pajamas and fuzzy slippers. Never having had much Jewish geography in my life to begin with, coming from an atheist family that had been Jewish in prior generations, I just ignored the insults, and dated non-Jewish guys, which went well until it was time to meet the anti-Semitic parents.

To this day, I am still somewhat shy about discussing this part of my college life because I still blame myself a little bit, even after realizing the whole 1970s college J A P thing was anti-woman and anti-Semitic. I also wonder if I’ll get a barrage of unsympathetic comments blaming me. It’s hard to break away from bigoted denigration, particularly when it comes from your own kinsmen (of sorts).

[UPDATE: Well, it actually happened. Some anonymous commenter with 2 followers had nothing better to do but come on to this post and invalidate my experience and urge me to take it down for some unexplained greater good. Too bad, honey, it happened, and all you did was illustrate my expectations that my experience will be invalidated because I’m only a Jewish woman who doesn’t matter. I’ve been fighting these Nazi Republicans for decades. Where have you been?]

My only explanation for Jewish young men’s hatred of Jewish young women in the 1970s is that it was a holdover from the Holocaust. Baseless criticism of Jewishness ran so deep in white society that many Jewish people who had assimilated into American or European society jumped on the bandwagon. That’s why it was such a big deal when Bess Myerson won Miss America in 1945, a feat that a Jewish woman could be deemed beautiful at all.

Most of the Jewish guys I knew in high school and college ended up marrying non-Jewish women or marrying much later. Some went through a series of divorces. In later years, I had a friend who was an Asian woman. She complained that Jewish men’s interest in her and her friends bordered on fetishist. I’m not sure if I think that’s true, but that was her point of view as a subject of their attention. Maybe they were creeps. They were sure creepy toward me. But maybe there was some anti-Semitism in her comments too. I wonder if Asian men treated Asian women as badly. I have heard complaints from Black women about how Black men treat them.

I think that racism and bigotry can really break a group of people. The hatred that permeates society is internalized by people trying to fit in and weaponized within the targeted community to require conformity or enforce marginalization. Maybe these young Jewish men felt bad about themselves. Or, maybe, as I suspected at the time, they felt entitled to better than the women the world made it a priority to hate.

The good news is that now I don’t care.