TOO JEWISH?
CHALLENGING
TRADITIONAL
IDENTITIES
Part 4 of 8

Re-Considering the Ethnic Body

Re-Considering the Ethnic Body identifies the differences between the actual ethnic body and the idealized "American" body depicted in mass media and popular culture. It examines how racism and stereotype have affected the artists' notions of their Jewish ethnicity. Societal discomfort with the notion of the ethnic body is dramatically examined in Adam Rolston's 1991 series of drawings on the surgical procedure of the "nose job." As a sign of Jewish identity, nothing could be more obvious than the distinctiveness of Jewish names assigned to mark Jews' "difference." In Albert. Used to be Abraham (1995), Ken Aptekar takes a 17th century Dutch portrait and overlays it with the title words, implying that the sitter in the work is a Jew who changed his name to mask his religious identity. In Art Spiegelman's critically acclaimed Maus, the Holocaust narrative is recast in allegorical cartoon form: the Jews, whom Hitler described as vermin, become the very diminutive mice at the mercy of German cats. Spiegelman reveals his family's problems with his Catholic-born, though now converted wife, Francoise. Rather than explore the problematic social test of intermarriage, Spiegelman engages the viewer in his artistic dilemma: how to represent his French wife, given the rules of the animal code he has invented.


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