I begin this piece with a massive thank you and apology to the University of Chicago housing staff. A few weeks ago, shortly after returning to school and before the work for the grading quarter had become intense, while absentmindedly perusing the UChicago Housing policy book , I came across the section concerning bedbugs. I suppose that the power of suggestion infiltrated my mind since, days later, I was convinced that despite no one else in my dorm reporting issues, bedbugs had infested my room. Those little dark specks on my yellow sheets were surely droppings; lint would be a far too logical explanation. For a week, I donned the pajama equivalent of battle-armor to bed every night, and not one inch of skin was exposed. I was on the verge of overheating, sure, but it was a small price to pay for safety from insect bites. Housing called a local exterminator, and after a two-hour inspection of my room he concluded that it was totally clean. There were no bedbugs. Oops. Why and how did I possibly become so convinced that I had bedbugs with such a sufficient lack of evidence? Not only was I convinced, I became increasingly anxious about the prospect and could not possibly determine why. I initially concluded that it was just because of my neurotic tendencies. It was just part of my shtick.
Then a couple of days ago, I stumbled upon the Buzzfeed article, “18 Awesome Benefits of Having a Jewish Best Friend.” Most of the list consisted of harmless and tacky jibes at various Jewish holiday traditions, but #5 caught my eye: A Jewish best friend “can help you diagnose your ailments, as they have had tons of practice.” Instinctively, I thought of myself, and whether this was at all reflective of my experience. After briefly dismissing it, I realized that—wait a second—I do do this, at least with myself. I don’t like medicine, yet I have enough tendencies of a hypochondriac to examine and supposedly diagnose myself with every kind of malady. Was this, as Buzzfeed implied, a Jewish quality?
The neurotic Jew is one of the most well-known, and also perhaps most accepted Jewish stereotypes. The same image of an overprotective yet fundamentally sweet woman comes to most of our minds when we hear the term “Jewish Mother,” regardless of whether this captures our experience with actual Jewish mothers. As New York Times blogger Daniel Smith mentions in a 2012 piece on the issue, however, Jews do not have a monopoly on this type of neurotic anxiety. Jewish mothers are not the only overbearing parents. Yet the stereotype continues.
Furthermore, though it’s something I currently embody, I didn’t always. In middle school, I remember mentally poking fun at the generalization, wondering—and laughing—at the disparity between the stereotype and me. Though my “transformation” must have happened gradually over time, I can pinpoint one moment as a particular catalyst. My freshman year of high school, some classmates tagged me in part of a Facebook photo that read “Everyone’s Jewish Mother.” Maybe one could make the argument that by the end of high school, I played this role to some of my friends, but certainly not at the beginning. I was being identified with a stereotype that I didn’t embody because of a single quality—I was openly Jewish. In retrospect, I honestly do not believe that my classmates’ intentions were ever deriding or derogatory, but this was how I interpreted them at the time. At fourteen, the prospect of being mocked terrified me, and on some level, perhaps I rationalized that in embodying the stereotype, any comment about it wouldn’t be mockery. If I took pride in something true about myself, it would make any attempted mockery irrelevant. This echoes something else that Daniel Smith writes: that Jews take pride in their neuroticism as a defense mechanism against those that would demean them for it.
This says something important about that nature of any stereotype, Jewish or not: they are self-fulfilling. In order to defend herself from it, a person internalizes it, ultimately becoming that which everyone says that she is. Even now, when people occasionally mention the stereotype of the neurotic Jew, I feel my sense of anxiety swell, even if I don’t note the correlation at the time. While I am partly responsible, therefore, perhaps I am not the only one who owes UChicago Housing an apology. And in my case, the embodied stereotype is fairly harmless. We need to take heed, however, and not just for Jews. The consequences of internalized generalizations can be far greater than a little bit of bedbug paranoia.
Dani Plung is a student at the University of Chicago.
