Elizabeth Stern

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Jewish Gender Stereotypes in the United States

Stereotypes of Jews have existed from their arrival in the New World to the present. Jews were portrayed as greedy, unscrupulous, and unrefined. However, Jews also created stereotypes about one another based on class, gender, and religion. Specifically, the Ghetto Girl, Jewish Mother, JAP, and others reflected tensions between genders about the place of Jews in the economy and culture.

Elizabeth Stern

Elizabeth Stern was an American-Jewish writer, essayist, and journalist. She achieved success within a number of realms and balanced a number of competing roles: fiction writer, journalist, social worker, wife, mother, and an American woman leading a secular life who examined the importance of cultural heritage.

Autobiography in the United States

As the status and roles of women in American and Jewish life changed over the twentieth century, more and more American Jewish women turned to autobiographical writing as a means of documenting these changes and addressing questions of American, Jewish, and female identity. Jewish women created accounts of the immigrant experience, feminist or activist involvement, political and literary involvement, Holocaust survival narratives, as well as coming-of-age memoirs.

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