“Nicki Minashkenazi”: Carnivalesque Speech in “Broad City” and “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”

• In Event: Gender and Genre Shifts in American Jewish Culture

Abstract

In his latest book Jewish Comedy: A Serious History (2017), Jeremy Dauber contends that although Jews have often been called “the people of the book,” there has recently been “a movement among scholars to reclaim their histories as people with bodies” (129). Seeking to complicate this binary between the book and the body, I suggest that literariness does not disappear from explorations of Jewish-American identity that turn to the body, even as the book itself loses its status as the primary arena (and metaphor) for conceptualizing Jewish identity. Specifically, I look at the role of Bakhtinian speech in asserting a distinct feminist Jewish-American identity in two contemporary television sitcoms: “Broad City” (2014-2019) and “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” (2015-2019). Whereas authors like Cynthia Ozick and Nicole Kraus consider literary translation – a textual phenomenon – to be the ultimate trope for diasporic Jewish identity, comedians such as Ilana Glazer, Abbi Jacobson and Rachel Bloom turn instead to a spoken translational language, in its dialect-ical, acoustic qualities, as a vehicle better fit for mobilizing the semiotics assets of Jewish languages. I argue that by parodically experimenting with various speech gestures taken from Yiddish and Hebrew, these comedians design new carnivalesque language forms to promote gender subversion and social inclusivity. In this regard, their relations to Jewish languages and to feminist politics become mutually constitutive because of this unique intersection of gender and Jewish speech genres.

Author

• Danny Luzon, University of Haifa, Department of English Language & Literature