“Two Jewesses Makin’ a Buck”: Jewish Female Masculinity & Sexual Liberation in Broad City

• In Event: Jewish Women Strike Back: Tracing and Reclaiming Jewish Women in Film and Television

Abstract

This paper extends historical analysis of the belle juive/beautiful Jewess by examining this trope in a twenty-first century text: Comedy Central’s hit series Broad City (2014 – present). Broad City’s protagonists, Abbi and Ilana, invoke the racially ambiguous trope of the beautiful Jewess to blend grotesque female masculinity with sexy glamor. Reclaiming the beautiful Jewess’s ambivalent and titillating allure, Abbi and Ilana open greater space in American popular culture to celebrate female masculinity and women’s erotic liberation. This analysis extends Jewish studies work on Jews, film, and the arts by exploring how longstanding notions of the beautiful Jewess still shape American popular culture. Further, this analysis clarifies how present-day Jewish women proactively reclaim such tropes to articulate their own cultural critiques about Jewish identity, gender inequality, and sexual agency.

Author

• Jonathan Branfman, The Ohio State University