Phoebe Maltz Bovy

@phoebebovy.bsky.social

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https://phoebemaltzbovy.substack.com https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/745513/the-last-straight-woman-by-phoebe-maltz-bovy/ Opinion ed., The CJN, contributor columnist, The Globe and Mail. Half of Feminine Chaos.

I gave my own Jewishness very little thought when it came to a side project for general audiences. I gave still-less thought to my unremarkable and non-expert thoughts about the Middle East. It would never in a million years have occurred to me, in July 2023, to view my hopes for a two-state solution as at all related to a book about straight women and decades-old Britcoms.
what we’re looking at is a siloing, wherein there is a place for Jewish books, but it’s at a Jewish Books table. That’s already a problem if the hope is that the Jewish book has some non-Jewish readers as well, although this points to a wider issue in 2010s-and-onwards book publishing, with everything needing to be categorizable along empowering-or-tragic identity lines. Granted, the siloing of Jewish books has happened for very different reasons than that of other identities. The Jewish Books table is there not to remedy past discrimination, but the ongoing sort.
Where, then, does Portnoy stand now? Will Roth still, in Trump’s America, be the go-to image, in the collective imagination, of the White Male Writer? Or will he have come full circle and get the ‘identity’ treatment once more, a “Jewish writer” again whether he likes it or not?
I do not wish to poo-poo the efforts themselves, which are worthy, at least in motivation. But what we’re looking at is a siloing, wherein there is a place for Jewish books, but it’s at a Jewish Books table. That’s already a problem if the hope is that the Jewish book has some non-Jewish readers as well, although this points to a wider issue in 2010s-and-onwards book publishing, with everything needing to be categorizable along empowering-or-tragic identity lines. Granted, the siloing of Jewish books has happened for very different reasons than that of other identities. The Jewish Books table is there not to remedy past discrimination, but the ongoing sort. But a Jewish-authored book that is not about Jewish themes, that does not belong on a Jewish Books table, is whatever the literary equivalent is of politically homeless.
Platner offered many on the left something they’re desperate for: working-class aesthetics married to uncompromising lefty politics.
There is an antisemitism-fighting strategy that presumes antisemitism to be an aberration. A fringe viewpoint you could dissuade someone of merely by pointing out how fringe it is. Be normal, you could say, and the young or confused person flirting with antisemitism might mend their ways. This was really the strategy from the postwar era onward. The Nazis had lost. This was fresh enough in everyone’s mind that Nazi-ness was self-evidently linked with being a loser. And this worked, for a time. I think of the 2004 Peep Show episode where an awkward young man named Mark finally makes a friend at work, and—much to Mark’s embarrassment—the friend reveals himself to be a Nazi. An actual honest-to-goodness Second World War-reenacting Nazi who wants to bring white supremacist rule to England. There, the joke is that Mark is such an uptight weirdo that of course a Nazi would have (mistakenly) seen, in him, a kindred spirit. We are no longer in that world. The Democrats’ 2024 attempt to cast Trump and Vance as “weird” didn’t work. Demonstrably, the GOP ticket won the popular vote. Along similar lines, you can call antisemitism weird, but if it’s widely embraced—if it is not, objectively, weird these days to be an antisemite—this is not an effective strategy for fighting it. A 19-year-old who announces he doesn’t want to work for Jews has closed some doors but opened however many others.
What I think happened, where I think things went wrong, is that many straight men registered that male looks mattered, but incorporated this information into an existing widespread-not-universal misunderstanding about women. They didn’t take it in the spirit of, we are all but mammals, making our way. They wove it into the pick-up-artistry idea that any man could get any woman if only he played his cards right. It therefore becomes that much more aggravating that a man could maxx his looks and still get rejected. Real insult-to-injury times. ‘But I’m a nice guy!’ got yes-anded with ‘but I have sharpened my cheekbones!’ And still the women didn’t care, they didn’t care! And because they’re too-online, they can convince themselves that the only men capable of finding a woman to date look like Jon Hamm.
What is it straight women are imagined to get out of gazing at the pretty lady on the magazine cover? Well according to the theory of universal female sexual fluidity, the thinking (the wishful thinking on the part of many straight men and far smaller numbers of not-straight women) is that it’s a sex thing. ‘Straight’ women aren’t straight in the same sense that straight men are straight, and either want to sleep with the cover model or fantasize about being as desired as she is. Straight womanhood, in these understandings, either includes attraction to other women, or is fundamentally about understanding oneself to be an attractive woman, or, in the pop-culture version of these, a bit of both. I have a different theory: the beautiful woman is on the cover of the women’s magazine because the woman’s magazine is a vehicle for selling stuff to women. It’s not that it’s pleasurable to look at her. It’s that looking at her reminds you that you don’t look like that, and that she does, and that makes you think, subconsciously, that if you buy the stuff sold therein, you would look like her, and if you and she entered a room, you’d be as likely as she is to make an immediate impression.
Even Jewish events that don’t centre Israel get treated as pro-Israel rallies by their anti-Zionist/antisemitic detractors. Take The Great Nosh, a Jewish food festival in New York that the JTA also covered. It is effectively the culinary version of what Rabbi Jacobs proposes. It is not an Israel event, but rather an all-purpose Jewish one that doesn’t exclude Israeli elements. That was still ‘Zionist’ enough for Breads Bakery employees to organize in part because of the chain’s participation in that festival. Or let’s make this simpler still: consider Jewish community centres. Consider synagogues. Jewish institutions, as they exist, baseline subscribe to the idea of mainly being about local Jews but also nodding to Israel. For the detractor set (I don’t even call them pro-Palestinian because that is an insult to Palestinians), any trace amount of support for Israel by any definition is excessive. Any microscopic droplet of non-renunciation of Israel gets used in North American and beyond, as a pretext to avoid the locale, or to shrug (or worse) if it gets protested, defaced, or physically attacked. Replacing an Israel Day Parade or Walk With Israel with something called Bundism, Bagels, and a Smidge of Zionism would not pass muster. Anyone who was going to be mad at a gathering of Jews whose purpose was anything other than renouncing Israel is going to have that same sentiment.
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The Last Straight Woman: On Desiring Men by Phoebe Maltz Bovy (Author) Format: Hardcover #1 New Release in Literary Criticism & Theory
Antisemitism is a bridge across the culture-wars abyss, connecting people with otherwise diametrically opposed worldviews. The white supremacist and the multiculturalist progressive can agree that Jews are the problem. Bipartisanship, it’s called, in the American political context. Antisemitism offers all manner of ‘you gotta hand it to ‘em’ moments. Oh look, this professional racist agitator must really care about Palestinians because they want Israel wiped off the map!
Cover of THE LAST STRAIGHT WOMAN.
Bryan Cheyette, commenting on the absence of antisemitism in many academic works dealing with oppression, attributes the gap to Jewishness being folded into an untextured Whiteness that operates indiscriminately upon Jews and non-Jews alike. “Where,” he asks, “within this supposed ‘common culture’ does ‘the Jew’—other than as an aspect of dominant ‘white’ oppression—fit?”Footnote 47 And the problem is worse than he lets on: Jews are not just another flavor of White. They epitomize Whiteness, they exemplify its vices as “the iciest of the ice people.”Footnote 48 Jewishness is perceived as “a form of almost hyper-whiteness,” its ultimate avatar.Footnote 49 Pushed to its limit, “Jewish simply displaces white.”Footnote 50
But then, while reading and thinking about Feminist Antisemitism something clicked. The subtext became text. With the same degree of clarity that, I suppose, the antisemite achieves when they ‘realize’ that Jews are at the centre of all the world’s woes, I had this sudden understanding about where Jews fit within contemporary social justice frameworks. I’d been on the cusp of getting this for years, talking around what was right in front of me. Now I see it: It’s not that Jews are white, can be white, are white-passing, or experience certain aspects of white privilege. Such things all have elements of truth but are ultimately irrelevant to the bigger picture. What’s relevant is that Jews are the white people, the whitest ones, the people meant when white people are up for discussion in progressive contexts.
Book event, launch of Phoebe Maltz Bovy, The Last Straight Woman, May 21, 6:30-8pm, Flying Books, 784 College St, Toronto, ON.
Dunham’s success itself is discussed in conspiratorial terms, as though the only possible explanation is a cabal dedicated to foisting her on an unwilling public. It can’t be as simple as her being a talented and hardworking person with good timing. It has to be that some sinister, puppet-strings-maneuvering they are making you pay attention to this lady, one who in a natural order you wouldn’t know existed.
Is anti-Dunham-ism a form of antisemitism? That might be a stretch, but it relates to her brand of specific cultural Jewishness (urban, cosmopolitan, “too much,” and unapologetically parochial in certain respects). I definitely think it played into the drumbeat of overstatements about her so-called “privilege.” (She’s the child of artists who are successful enough I take it but not household names or gazillionaires.) She does not come across as a Real American in the Sarah Palin sense.
Some of the decenter-Israel moment? movement? is not so much advocacy for a change to occur, but an acknowledgment of a longstanding reality: there are diaspora Jews, particularly ones in the United States whose families arrived in the early 20th century or earlier, who simply feel no connection to Israel, and experience Israeli flags at Jewish community centres or whatever as confusing. They don’t have Israeli family and friends, and their Jewish culture is multigenerationally local. Theirs is a Jewishness of Woody Allen and delis, maybe of synagogues or temples, maybe not. What’s the modern-day nation-state of Israel to them? This sort of decentring isn’t strictly speaking decentring, though, because these are Jews who had never centred Israel to begin with. It’s like when someone describes a Jew whose first solid food was pureed ham as being an assimilated Jew, as if there were some primal distinctly-Jewish state from which they assimilated, some self they’re being disloyal to, simply in being exactly who they are. On the whole, decentring Israel goes together with criticizing its behaviour or existence. It lines up with a sense that it is a liability to be associated with the Jewish state, and with a hope (naïve, as I see it) that if one could simply unlink anti-Zionism and antisemitism, once and for all, the latter would vanish.
But it’s a clever argument style. Your opponent is unhinged, emotion-driven, flustered by your calm presentation of facts. They’ve lost their footing because you’ve demonstrated the weakness of the foundation of their very belief system. That they’re BIG MAD proves how right you were.
But to me, they look like the equivalent, to Sketchers, of what a natural-cereal alternative is to Fruit Loops: similar to the thing, but the color was drained from them, in such a way as to indicate that the thing must be good for you.
“I grew up thinking that Israel was my culture and my lineage. That’s how American Jewish institutions teach it, and it’s just not true,” she said. “My family is not from Israel-Palestine. My culture is Eastern European Yiddish.”
Jewish Country Houses edited by Juliet Carey and Abigail Green (Profile Books/Brandeis University Press) On the British sitcom To the Manor Born (1979-1981), a posh and haughty Englishwoman named Audrey fforbes-Hamilton finds herself widowed and financially obliged to sell her stately home in the countryside and move into a none-too-shabby outbuilding. The buyer is one Richard DeVere, proprietor of Cavendish Foods, previously residing in London. A new-money tycoon. The nerve of him, buying property that rightfully belongs to the aristocracy! Richard may be self-made, but he wants to do right by his new environs. He just hasn’t a clue how to take on that role. If you’ve ever watched a TV show before, you can guess where this is headed. Audrey and Richard become a couple, thereby fusing old money and new. New, and suspect: Richard, it turns out, was born Bedřich Polouvicek. While he seems every bit the British gentleman, Richard’s roots are exposed whenever his clingy, heavily accented mother shows up. “We came over in 1939, from Czechoslovakia,” Mrs. Polouvicek informs a horrified Audrey, who had until that point thought the elderly woman was Richard’s maid. “Do you mean he isn’t English at all?”  Audrey’s husband is not just new money, but an obscenely wealthy Eastern European foreigner.
The 2010s feminist mantras about women’s right to take up space, to be loud (West co-founded Shout Your Abortion for goodness’s sake), are in contradiction with the 2020s fixation on “decolonization.” Decolonization in this context is not the removal of a foreign occupier, it is not a terrorist attack, it is a green-juice cleanse.
Having failed to deflect outside criticism of what are, per Adult Braces, some textbook bad-husband behaviours via claims that demanding monogamy was racist and heteronormative, having failed to convince anyone that his identifying as non-binary now and using he/they pronouns meant he couldn’t possibly exemplify what 2010s feminist sites like the ones West wrote for would call toxic masculinity, Oluo landed the only place left for someone backed into a corner: pivot to Palestine.