Journal of Modern Jewish Studies

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Jewy/screwy leading lady: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and

the critique of rom-com femininity

Jonathan Branfman

To cite this article: Jonathan Branfman (2020) Jewy/screwy leading lady: Crazy�Ex-Girlfriend
and the critique of rom-com femininity, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 19:1, 71-92, DOI:
10.1080/14725886.2019.1703631

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14725886.2019.1703631

Published online: 14 Jan 2020.

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JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES
2020, VOL. 19, NO. 1, 71–92
https://doi.org/10.1080/14725886.2019.1703631

Jewy/screwy leading lady: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and the

critique of rom-com femininity
Jonathan Branfman
Gender & Media Studies, William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
As a common platform for stigmatized outsiders, subversive Jewish; comedy; women;
comedy holds special interest for Jewish cultural studies, race; musical; anti-Semitism
feminist media studies, and critical race studies alike.
However, these fields have just begun to analyze millennial
Jewish women’s transgressive TV comedy, a subgenre
taking America by storm in series like Girls, Crazy Ex-
Girlfriend, and Broad City. Further, feminist and critical race
work on these series sometimes overlooks Jewish
difference, reflecting a wider tendency in both fields to
conflate Jews with white gentiles. To advance scholarship
on race, gender, Jewishness, and millennial TV comedy, I
analyze the CW’s musical romantic comedy series Crazy Ex-
Girlfriend (2015–2019). I argue that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
originates a new paradigm of the “Jewy/screwy Leading
Lady” and uses this figure to disrupt rom-com gender
scripts from within, especially the rom-com myth that
women can find wholeness through straight romance. My
analysis invites Jewish studies to better grasp millennial
Jewish American women’s experience and artistic
production. I likewise expand feminist theories on race in
comedy to better analyze Jewishness in romantic comedies
and millennial “precarious-girl comedies.” More broadly, I
invite these fields to converse with Jewish studies in order
to address Jewishness as a salient ongoing difference in the
twenty-first-century United States.

Introduction: race & the “Jewy/screwy” rom-com heroine

“Pretty and cheery and Jewy … smart! And a little sneaky.” This is how one
character on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend describes leading lady Rebecca Bunch, a
twenty-something Ashkenazi Jewish lawyer. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s 2015 pilot
launches Rebecca on a zany love quest, as she flees her New York law career
to woo an ex in his (very gentile) L.A. suburb. There Rebecca’s romantic obses-
sions and “Jewy” east-coast manner upend the town, sparking the plot. Rebecca
is played by Rachel Bloom (b. 1987), the show’s Ashkenazi Jewish creator, who
calls Crazy Ex-Girlfriend a “dark romantic comedy musical”.1 In response, I

CONTACT Jonathan Branfman branfman.1@osu.edu Gender & Media Studies, William & Mary, 100 Ukrop
Way, Rm 141, Williamsburg, VA 23185, USA
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
72 J. BRANFMAN

analyze how “Jewyness” shapes the show’s dark (critical) spin on romantic
comedy. I argue that Rebecca repackages historical anti-Semitic racial, gendered,
and sexual tropes in order to mock rom-com gender scripts, especially the myth
that women can find wholeness through straight romance. In the process,
Rebecca also inverts the longstanding American image of the smothered, neuro-
tic, emasculated Jewish son by presenting a smothered, neurotic, improperly
feminine Jewish daughter. My analysis invites Jewish studies to better grasp mil-
lennial Jewish American women’s experience and artistic production today. I
likewise expand feminist comedy theory on race to better analyze Jewishness
in romantic comedies and “precarious-girl comedies.”2 More broadly, while
feminist and critical race studies tend to conflate Jews with white gentiles,3 I
invite these fields to converse with Jewish studies in order to address Jewishness
as a salient ongoing difference in the twenty-first-century United States.
The word “Jewy” teeters between cute and anti-Semitic, conveying the
ambivalent stigma that still sticks to assimilated U.S. Jews like Rebecca.
Though light-skinned Ashkenazi Jews like Rebecca are often deemed white in
the U.S. today, Jews were historically labelled nonwhite “Semites,” “Orientals,”
or “Asiatics” in European and Euro-American science, law, and popular
culture.4 This racial status came with stigmas of deviant gender and sexuality,
like the medieval claim that Jewish men menstruate,5 the nineteenth-century
depiction of Jewish women as sexually aggressive and racially exotic “Jew-
esses,”6 or the early twentieth-century assertion that Jewish men suffer high
rates of “feminine” neurosis, including homosexuality.7 Scholars of Jewish cul-
tural studies like Karen Brodkin, Daniel Boyarin, and Harley Erdman have
argued that these queer (non-normative) gender and sexual tropes were
important symbols of Jewish racial difference, overlapping with more physical
stereotypes like big noses, swarthy skin, dark curly hair, and nasal, foreign-
sounding Jewish voices.8 The French author and Nazi-sympathizer Louis-Fer-
dinand Céline captured these links between anti-Semitic gendered, sexual, and
racial stigmas in 1938 when he called Jews “unbridled fornicators” and “Afro-
Asiatic hybrids, quadroons, half-negroes, and Near-Easterners” in a single
sentence.9
This history of racial, gender, and sexual stigmas shapes U.S. media tropes like
the “Jewish American Princess,” “Jewish Mother,” or emasculated “Nice Jewish
Boy,” which cast Jewish women as excessive, pushy and/or masculinized, sexu-
ally voracious or frigid, and guilty of emasculating their Jewish husbands and
sons.10 Although U.S. racial norms have largely redefined light-skinned Jews
as “white” since the mid-twentieth century,11 such gendered tropes still
imagine something physically off about Jews. Articulating this stigma, Marla
Brettschneider writes that “the gender of Jewish men and Jewish women … is
explicitly ‘Jewed’” today, meaning that American society often still expects
Jews to perform gender and sexuality in Jewishly specific, deviant ways.12 Scho-
lars like Paula Hyman and Riv-Ellen Prell also note that Jewish American men
 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES 73

historically use such stereotypes, especially the emasculating Jewish mother, to

blame Jewish women for men’s own failures at assimilation.13
Yet many Jewish American women have translated these anti-Semitic, miso-
gynist stigmas into subversive comedy, like Barbra Streisand’s “disruptive and
deconventionalizing” Jewish rom-com heroines in the 1970s.14 Indeed, Crazy
Ex-Girlfriend’s “Jewy” Rebecca inflects a long lineage of subversive Jewish
women comedians, as well as a newer shift that Nathan Abrams calls the
“Jewish female gaze.”15 Historical anti-Semitic racial, gender, and sexual
stigmas have fuelled socially critical comedy by Jewish American women from
Fanny Brice (1891–1951) to Sophie Tucker, Belle Barth, Totie Fields, Jean
Carrol, Judy Holliday, Madeline Kahn, Barbra Streisand, Gilda Radner, Joan
Rivers, Bette Midler, Sandra Bernhard, Roseanne Barr, Elayne Boosler, Fran
Drescher, Sarah Silverman, Natasha Lyonne, Jenny Slate, Lena Dunham, Amy
Schumer, Rachel Bloom, Abbi Jacobson, and Ilana Glazer.16 Shaina Hammer-
man17 notes that Jewish male comedians often make Jewishness the butt of
their jokes, while Jewish women often use Jewishness to mock misogyny or
voice rebellious desires. One example comes from Barbra Streisand’s Funny
Girl (1968), in which Streisand plays Fanny Brice. When rehearsing dramatic
love lines, Barbra-as-Fanny repeatedly derails the romance with Jewish-accented
quips because “I couldn’t do it straight.” This line conveys tropes of “funny”
(weird) Jewish women who cannot perform normative (“straight”) gender and
sexuality, but whose deviance fuels transgressive humour.
This rebellious legacy shapes a recent shift that Nathan Abrams18 calls the
“Jewish female gaze.” While Jewish men historically hold creative power over
media depictions of Jews, Abrams notes a film resurgence of agentic Jewish
women, like the Nazi-slaying Shosanna Dreyfus in Inglourious Basterds
(2009).19 I extend the term “Jewish female gaze” to name how Jewish women
writers, directors, and stars have led recent U.S. comedies (or dramadies) like
Girls (2012–2017), Inside Amy Schumer (2013–2016), Transparent (2014 –
present), Broad City (2014–2019), Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015–2019), Difficult
People (2015–2017), The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017 – present), and Russian
Doll (2019), all starring agentic Jewish women.
In light of Jewish women’s comedic history, I echo Rebecca’s coworker by
calling Rebecca “Jewy” throughout this article. Referencing centuries of anti-
Semitism, the word “Jewy” stresses that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend depicts Jewishness
not just as a religious or cultural difference, but a queer (non-normative) embo-
diment shaping Rebecca’s every action, especially her performance of femininity
and sexuality. This “Jewy” embodiment is precisely what fuels the show’s trans-
gressive mockery of rom-com gender norms. Rebecca’s queer (non-normative)
femininity is doubly linked to Jewishness. First, Rebecca echoes the historical
tropes of Jewish neurosis and gender deviance outlined above. Second, Crazy
Ex-Girlfriend’s plot links her strange femininity to Jewishness: The series
reveals that Rebecca’s “zany” romantic obsessions reflect serious mental illness
74 J. BRANFMAN

inflicted by her abusive Jewish mother, Naomi, played by Jewish Broadway star
Tovah Feldshuh. While many rom-com heroines have no mother,20 Naomi con-
stantly intrudes. Dripping klezmer music, Yiddishisms, and other Jewish cues,
Naomi embodies tropes of the overbearing Jewish mother that seem straight
from a Philip Roth novel.21 But unlike Portnoy’s Complaint,22 Crazy Ex-Girl-
friend presents tensions between two Jewish women, equating generational
with gendered difference. Rebecca is a younger Jewish woman distanced from
the immigrant experience, whose subtler Jewishness manifests as milder
Jewish femininity, but she can never fully escape her mother’s influence to
perform normative American womanhood. In contrast to the “Jewy” Naomi
and Rebecca, I use the dated term “gentile” to mark characters from the non-
Jewish majority. In Symptoms of Culture, Marjorie Garber traces “gentile” to
its shared root with “gentle,” which “initially meant well-behaved because
‘well-born’” (75, 79). This gentle, genteel subtext makes the word “gentile”
useful for my analysis, as it inverts the queer, disruptive connotations of “Jewy-
ness” in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s “Jewy” heroine specifically disrupts rom-com gender
norms. Popular since the 1930s, rom-coms depict light love stories ending in
monogamy, usually between white, straight – and I add, gentile – lovers.23
Rom-coms often star a “feisty screwball leading lady,” whose “excessive
speech, aspirations, and energy” drive the plot,24 but whose “cute” quirks still
permit tame, domestic endings. This excessive rom-com heroine is today’s
most popular version of the “unruly woman,”25 a woman who refuses passive
femininity. While scintillating viewers with unruly women, rom-coms affirm
that these autonomous ladies can still find happiness through straight
romance without rocking the patriarchal, heteronormative status quo.26 In con-
trast, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend exposes this romantic goal as laughable and harmful.
I argue that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend achieves this critique by originating a new
trope of the “Jewy/screwy leading lady,” a phrase that intentionally draws on
pejorative slang for mental illness. Calling Rebecca a Jewy/screwy leading lady
first acknowledges the links between Rebecca’s “craziness” and Jewishness:
Rebecca refigures longstanding Jewish stereotypes of neurosis and gender
deviance, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend narratively links these traits to her overbear-
ing Jewish mother. Second, the phrase “Jewy/screwy” highlights how Rebecca’s
“Jewy” neurosis and gender deviance initially help her fit idealized screwball
heroine traits, but then lead her to warp those traits out of control until she
self-sabotages all attempts at love, marriage, and normative femininity. Rebec-
ca’s eccentricities, like dropping her career to move for a man, first seem
sweetly funny within the rom-com conceit that “love conquers all.” Yet
viewers slowly realize that such tropes disguise serious illness, as Rebecca’s
failed romances (and run-ins with her Jewish mother) lead her to attempt
suicide in season three.27 As Rebecca puts it, her obsessive romantic behaviour
“starts off cute, but then it escalates … like burning down houses,” abducting one
 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES 75

ex’s mom, and sleeping with another’s dad.28 Crazy Ex-Girlfriend implies that
Naomi’s Jewy influence has instilled Rebecca with typical screwball rom-com
traits (like zaniness, wit, and agentic sexuality), but has also made Rebecca too
“screwy” (too crazy, pushy, dirty, and queer) to reach a rom-com happy ending.
Yet when Rebecca fails at love, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend does not deride her as a
deficient woman. Instead, it mocks the rom-com gender scripts that Rebecca
botches, like the myth that straight romantic love can bring a woman fulfilment.
If Rebecca’s “Jewy” mother fuels Rebecca’s own “Jewy/screwy” mental illness
and romantic failures, each of these failures launches a feminist critique of the
rom-com genre. These periodic critiques build up to the series finale, in which
Rebecca triumphantly rejects three long-term male suitors (on Valentine’s
Day) to focus on “telling my own story” through music, adding that “romantic
love is not an ending … it’s just a part of your story.”29 Joshua Louis Moss writes
that in many romantic plots, the comedic “Jewish deviant acts as disruptor” of a
white gentile’s cohesive identity or chronology.30 Instead, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s
“deviant,” “Jewy/screwy” heroine disrupts cohesive media narratives of feminin-
ity, romance, and fulfilment. This critique distances Crazy Ex-Girlfriend from
films like Better Than Chocolate (1999) and Maid in Manhattan (2002),
which defy the rom-com genre’s whiteness or straightness while upholding its
goal of “monogamous coupledom.”31 Rebecca also differs from Jewish rom-
com leads like Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl (1967)32 or Fran Drescher in
The Nanny (1993–1999),33 who tweak rom-com gender scripts by depicting par-
ticularly assertive or lustful heroines. Instead, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s Rebecca uses
Jewish tropes to craft a more radical “funniness” (comedy/strangeness) that
debunks rom-com gender scripts altogether.
For Jewish studies, my analysis highlights millennial Jewish American artistic
expression, especially on gendered Jewish assimilation. As a neurotic, impro-
perly feminine Jewish daughter, Rebecca inflects the pattern of “trying too
hard” within Jewish assimilation. Zygmunt Bauman writes in Modernity &
Ambivalence that assimilating Jews are often marked by their very effort to fit
in, while “real” insiders (supposedly) fit dominant norms by instinct.34 Likewise,
Rebecca’s Jewish mother inflicts her with a “Jewy/screwy” difference that only
grows clearer as Rebecca strives to fit the gendered norms of her rom-com
genre and gentile locale. As a smothered Millennial Jewish Daughter, Rebecca
opens new questions about how young Jewish women today experience Jewishly
gendered difference in ways that distance them both from their parents and from
gentile peers. The monstrous depiction of Rebecca’s mother also raises questions
about how Jewish millennials may internalize and reproduce anti-Semitism in
their efforts to assimilate.
My analysis also expands feminist media scholarship on race/ethnicity in
romantic comedies.35 This literature notes that when white gentile screwball her-
oines act quirky, their eccentricity appears as an individualized trait. The oppo-
site is true for women who are not white – and I add, for Jewish women like
76 J. BRANFMAN

Rebecca. Linda Mizejewski, for instance, explains that Queen Latifah’s rom-com
Bringing Down the House (2003)36 uses racial tropes to drive the usual rom-com
clash of zany heroine with male hero, in this case a white, middle-class man
played by Steve Martin. The film links Latifah’s unruly (assertive, sexual,
street smart) femininity with generic stereotypes of lower-class blackness,
rather than casting her as an exceptional woman.37 Latifah’s blackness also
shifts the usual rom-com plot, as Bringing Down the House refuses to pair her
with Martin despite their chemistry: Martin’s character returns to his white
gentile ex-wife, while Latifah’s heroine pairs with an “oddball Jewish lawyer”
whom she calls “freakboy.”38
So what happens when a rom-com’s heroine is the “oddball Jewish lawyer?” In
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, how do racial, gendered, and sexual Jewish tropes shape
Rebecca’s new image of the Jewy/screwy millennial Jewish daughter? And how
does this new figure alter the gendered, sexualized, and racialized tropes of
rom-com’s screwball leading lady, opening these norms to critique? Feminist
work on rom-coms has not yet analyzed Jewish difference, reflecting a
broader tendency in feminist studies to conflate Jews with white gentiles. This
inattention to Jewishness throughout feminist studies is especially striking in
light of today’s resurgent American anti-Semitism, exemplified by the 2018
Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. This resurgence highlights that even light-
skinned American Jews continue to experience white privilege and racial vio-
lence at once. By analyzing Rebecca’s Jewy/screwy femininity, I invite feminist
media studies to ask how Jewish identity still symbolizes racialized, gendered,
and sexualized difference in U.S. pop culture.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend not only illustrates this Jewish symbolism within the
rom-com genre, but also in a new TV phenomenon that Rebecca Wanzo calls
the “precarious-girl comedy.” 39 Per Wanzo’s definition, precarious-girl come-
dies star awkward millennial women who use self-abjecting comedy to depict
their own struggles “to adult”40 in the face of isolating and immobilizing circum-
stances.41 Focusing on Issa Rae’s series Insecure (2016 – present) and Lena
Dunham’s Girls (2012–2017), Wanzo proposes a white/black binary in precar-
ious-girl humour: While Black protagonists like Insecure’s Issa navigate long-
standing racist associations between blackness and abjection, abjection
constitutes an unaccustomed new stigma for white middle-class protagonists
like Hannah (Lena Dunham) on Girls.42 Yet I note that Hannah, like her
creator Dunham, is a Jewish woman who simultaneously inherits white privilege
and a history of anti-Semitic racial abjection. Like Girls, many of the series that I
associate above with the “Jewish female gaze” are also millennial precarious-girl
comedies whose abject humour draws on old anti-Semitic tropes. By reading
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend simultaneously as a romantic comedy and precarious-girl
comedy, I nuance Wanzo’s binary to recognize how white, middle-class millen-
nial Jewish “precarious girls” cite anti-Semitic histories to fuel their self-abjecting
jokes – in Rebecca’s case, jokes about her precarious mental health and love life.
 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES 77

This meeting of historical Jewish stigmas with recent TV comedy trends

underlies Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s innovation of the “Jewy/screwy” Millennial
Jewish Daughter. If rom-coms offer a reductive script for happy “adulting,”
Rebecca uses her own “Jewy” precarity to question that script from within.

“Failed romance”: Jewish mother as the root of “Jewy/screwy”

femininity
“I know it sounds like I’m falling in love / Well when we’re findin’ a mate, it’s our
parents we’re thinking of / My relationship with her was my first failed romance
/And now finally the cute boy’s asking me to dance.”
–Rebecca Bunch, describing her mother in the song “Maybe She’s Not Such a Heinous
Bitch After All.”

To position Rebecca’s Jewish mother (Naomi) as the source of Rebecca’s Jewy/

screwy mental illness, failed femininity, and disastrous love life, Crazy Ex-Girl-
friend paints Naomi as a monstrously overbearing mother. Naomi’s antics
include harmless stereotypical Jewish mother behaviours like guilting Rebecca
into a Passover visit,43 but she also commits true abuse, like drugging Rebecca
with anti-anxiety pills.44 She also violates Rebecca’s sexual boundaries, like chat-
ting about “vaginal rejuvenation” when Rebecca was a child.45 Naomi narrates
her abuse within tropes of the smothering Jewish mother, telling Rebecca that
“I love you too much. I wake up every morning sick with worry wondering
where you are … I am consumed by my love for you.”46
Naomi’s line about love that “consumes” also highlights her link to horror
tropes of monstrosity. The horror genre strongly associates motherhood with
abjection and the “monstrous-feminine.”47 For instance, horror films link
motherhood with excrement, like in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, when Naomi makes
her first grand entrance singing “Where’s the Bathroom?!”48 her song blends
klezmer melodies with theme music from Jaws (1975)49 to invoke a literal
film monster. In “Horror & the Monstrous Feminine,” Barbara Creed deems
Jaws a metaphor for monstrous motherhood, an insatiable stomach that
engulfs all in its path.50 Such images echo the horror trope of mothers who dis-
solve protagonists’ physical and mental boundaries between self/Other,51 the
boundaries that, according to psychoanalysis, children must build against
mothers in order to develop coherent selves. Likewise, Jewish male writers his-
torically depict Jewish mothers as “mad devourers whom they must flee lest their
identities be eaten up.” In Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Jewish mother Naomi constantly
threatens such monstrous violation – for instance, when she invades Rebecca’s
home, rifles through her condoms, orders Rebecca to procure sex for her, and
(perversely twisting motherly nurturance) feeds Rebecca spiked milkshakes.
And conversely, when Rebecca finally orders Naomi to “respect me and my
boundaries,” this splitting marks a key step on Rebecca’s path toward romantic
78 J. BRANFMAN

and emotional health.52 Yet this healing process inverts rom-com expectations,
as Rebecca finds wellness through solo self-improvement rather than courtship.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend also emphasizes Naomi’s deviant Jewish femininity via
the comedy trope of the “straight-man.” From Shakespearean comedies to
sitcoms and stand-up, a common strategy is to insert a straight-man, a
“normal person” who is shocked by another’s antics.53 These reactions make
other characters seem zanier in contrast, and model how viewers should inter-
pret jokes. The term “straight-man” highlights a raced, classed, sexualized, and
gendered notion of normal, rational viewpoints. For example, queer media scho-
lars note how straight or “straight-acting” men sometimes play comedic
straight-men to queer(er) counterparts, like the butch Will to flamboyant Jack
on Will & Grace.54 Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, like Seinfeld before it,55 links the
straight-man perspective to gentility: Gentile characters constantly react as
straight-men to Rebecca’s Jewy/screwy antics. Yet whenever Naomi enters, the
younger and more assimilated Rebecca becomes the “straight(er)-woman,”
shocked by her mother’s shamelessly Jewy behaviour. And unlike Seinfeld,
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend equates this less-assimilated Jewishness with infectiously
queer (nonnormative) gender and sexuality: The show not only links Naomi’s
Jewyness with her own monstrous motherhood, but depicts Naomi as the root
of Rebecca’s “Jewy/screwy” neurotic, inappropriate femininity.
Naomi’s first song on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend exemplifies this routine by pitting
cartoonishly Jewy, deviant Naomi against “straight(er)-woman” Rebecca.
Naomi’s first visit to Rebecca’s apartment starts with the song “Where’s the
Bathroom?!”56 Like the title, Naomi’s first lyric stresses her “unfeminine”
candour about excrement: As Rebecca opens the door, Naomi growls
“Where’s, the, BATHROOM?!” Before Rebecca can answer, Naomi launches a
tirade against Rebecca’s “hovel” in “nowhere, USA,” Rebecca’s weight-gain
from “greasy, goyish57 food,” and Rebecca’s choice to swap her “big-shot” law
career for a “California Dream.” Ranting at breakneck speed over klezmer
music in a Jewish Long Island accent, Naomi invasively grabs Rebecca’s
“chunky” stomach, peers down Rebecca’s cleavage to spot her eczema, and
paws through her bedside drawer. Finding condoms, Naomi warns “you
won’t get a husband this way,” that is, by sleeping around, but with bewildering
speed, Naomi also demands “are you sure that you’re not gay?” since Rebecca is
wearing no makeup. Yet when Rebecca answers “I’m not gay” (her first words in
the song), Naomi scolds “Don’t interrupt me, you’re always with the talking! It’s
the least you can do since you lived inside me for nine months!” This rapid-fire
nagging both infantilizes and sexualizes Rebecca. In case Naomi’s Yiddishisms
fail to link this behaviour with her “Jewyness,” Naomi also veers off-topic to
sing, “Oh! Did you hear? A bishop in Wisconsin said something anti-Semitic,
so the temple has decided to boycott cheddar cheese!”
During this tirade, Rebecca plays the straight-woman reacting to Naomi’s
bizarre “Jewy” antics, antics which can be read as un-motherly/unfeminine or
 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES 79

within horror tropes of the monstrous mother. While Rebecca is usually the
show’s loud, pushy voice, she can barely fit a word in, responding instead
with helpless facial expressions. When Naomi reemerges from the bathroom
to a blend of klezmer and Jaws music, Rebecca also throws her eyes wide in
horror, peering side-to-side as if dreading a monster’s attack – and indeed,
she jerks in fear when Naomi resumes singing. Though Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
usually portrays Rebecca as the zany character hatching screwy schemes, she
also models sensible confusion at Naomi’s line about Wisconsin: boycotting
cheddar cheese seems an illogical measure against anti-Semitism. This lyric
also implies that Naomi’s irrationality, part of her broader deviant femininity,
stems from an irrational Jewish community. In contrast, Rebecca highlights
her own assimilation by rationally noting this absurdity.
Rebecca’s role as the “straighter,” more feminine, more assimilated Jewish
woman amplifies Naomi’s extravagantly “Jewy” femininity, but Rebecca always
seems aware that Naomi’s influence is warping her own womanhood. In fact,
Rebecca’s effort to achieve ideal rom-com femininity involves fleeing her
Jewish mother (moving cross-country), and perhaps fleeing Jewishness itself.
For example, later in the series, Rebecca admits that she finds her ex, Josh
Chan, so alluring because “Josh is a symbol of effortless normalcy from which
[she] always felt excluded.”58 Josh specifically embodies gendered normalcy:
anxiety-free, muscular, and handsome Californian masculinity. The fact that
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend portrays Josh, a Filipino-American man, as the embodiment
of American masculinity is one of the show’s breakthroughs in racial diversity.
Yet Josh’s normativity also signals that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend links gendered
deviance to Jewishness: Josh’s effortless masculinity stems from his gentile Cali-
fornian upbringing, the inverse of Rebecca’s Jewish New York childhood.
This link between Rebecca’s “Jewy” mother and Rebecca’s own Jewy/screwy
femininity grows most explicit in the episode “I Never Want to See Josh
Again” (2017), in season three. Following a mental breakdown, Rebecca flees
home to Scarsdale, NY. She is shocked when Naomi treats her kindly and
even offers her strawberry milkshakes. Naomi’s unprecedented mothering
motivates Rebecca sing “Maybe She’s Not Such a Heinous Bitch After All.”
Though she still “genuinely hate[s]” Naomi, Rebecca says that her hatred is
now “more like the way normal girls hate their moms” (original emphasis).
This lyric underlines that Rebecca is not a “normal girl;” not a girl with norma-
tive feminine gender, desires, and sexual practices. The song stresses this non-
normative femininity by veering into queer, incestuous territory as Rebecca
compares her new feelings for her mother to “falling in love.” Rebecca even
describes past hostilities with Naomi as “my first failed romance.” This incestu-
ous metaphor implies that Naomi lurks at the root of Rebecca’s failed adult
relationships. “Maybe She’s Not Such a Heinous Bitch After All” also hints
that Rebecca’s mental health and love life could be healed if only she could fix
her relationship with her Jewish mother. Yet Rebecca envisions this healed
80 J. BRANFMAN

Jewish mother-daughter relationship in queer, incestuous terms, singing that

“finally the cute boy,” meaning her mother, “is asking me to dance.” This lyric
links Naomi with tropes of phallic Jewish women while presenting an incestuous
model of “positive” Jewish mother-daughter relations. Rebecca even twinkles her
eyes at her mother and coyly tucks her hair behind one ear, common signals for
flirtation in rom-coms. This shtick reinforces the sense throughout Crazy Ex-
Girlfriend that Rebecca’s monstrous Jewish mother has irreparably damaged
Rebecca’s femininity, condemning Rebecca never to be a “normal girl.”
As predicted, this Jewish mother-daughter healing session combusts, launch-
ing another failure at rom-com womanhood and a fresh critique of rom-com
gender scripts: Rebecca discovers that Naomi is only serving strawberry milk-
shakes to slip her crushed-up red anti-anxiety pills, to calm Rebecca down so
she’ll agree to enter a mental hospital. Reemphasizing the “Jewyness” of
Naomi’s monstrous motherhood and Rebecca’s mental illness, Naomi explains
that she got these pills “for the High Holidays.”59 Realizing that her mother
wants to commit her to a hospital (reject her), Rebecca flees back to California.
En route, Rebecca’s despair drives her to attempt suicide by swallowing those
same red Jewish High Holiday anxiety pills. This “Jewy” suicide attempt is the
peak of Rebecca’s mental health crisis, and leads to her diagnosis with borderline
personality disorder. In turn, Rebecca’s treatment plan puts her on an indefinite
break from dating, inverting the usual resolution for a rom-com heroine. Crazy
Ex-Girlfriend exaggerates this inversion with the song “Fuckton of Cats,”60 with
Rebecca singing that since she is “now single for good,” she must walk to the
“Lonely Lady Cat Store” and adopt all the cats … one of which she ends up
strangling. Invoking “crazy cat-lady” stereotypes, this song reaffirms that Rebec-
ca’s Jewy/screwy persona takes “zaniness” too far, placing her femininity beyond
desirable or “cute” eccentricity.
The link between “Jewyness,” “screwy” mental illness, deviant femininity, and
failed romance is clearest when Rebecca visits Scarsdale, but this link permeates
the entire series. Even when Rebecca’s mother or Rebecca’s mental illness are not
salient, Rebecca’s Jewy/screwy femininity makes her exceed the tropes of the
feisty screwball heroine. One example is Rebecca’s transgressive demystification
of women’s bodies: Like her mother, Rebecca speaks “too much” and “too expli-
citly” about her poop, periods, and vagina. She also de-eroticizes her breasts by
describing them as “sacks of yellow fat.” I am most interested, however, in how
Rebecca’s Jewy/screwy femininity makes her exceed “good” womanly conduct
and heterosexual desire.

“The villain in my own story”: Rebecca’s “Jewy” excess

In Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s first season, Rebecca faces a painful epiphany. “Oh my
God!” she sings into the mirror, “I’m the villain in my own story!”61 In other
words, she has taken “zany” rom-com heroine antics so far that she has
 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES 81

turned harmful to herself, her suitor, and everyone else. Up to this point,
Rebecca has followed many tropes of the rom-com heroine, and this zaniness
has been linked with her Jewishness. For example, Rebecca has made a leap of
faith in the name of romance: She has abandoned her New York life to woo
her ex, Josh Chan, in his Southern California suburb. While this move plucks
Rebecca from a Jewish environment and from her Jewish mother’s grasp, her
move depends on “Jewy” pushiness and wit, like her stereotypically Jewish
legal expertise. For example, Rebecca effortlessly enters a local law firm and
emerges as its best attorney. With her zany humour and excessive chatter,
Rebecca also makes close female friends, wheedles into Josh’s friend group,
and impresses his parents with her (“Jewy”) legal credentials from Harvard
and Yale.62 She has even begun to tempt Josh away from his girlfriend, Valencia.
Yet in the song “Villain in My Own Story,” Rebecca realizes that her romantic
quest has harmed Josh, his family, and Valencia. To Rebecca’s horror, her reflec-
tion morphs into a witch with wild hair, jagged fingernails, and, most sugges-
tively for a Jewish heroine, a giant, hooked nose. This monstrous reflection
mimics the shrill voice of the Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch as she sings on,
“I’m the witch in my own tale” (original emphasis). Rebecca-the-witch muses
that she has acted more like an evil antagonist than a sympathetic screwball pro-
tagonist. Within the song’s fantasy world, Rebecca-the-witch captures Josh’s
girlfriend Valencia, who embodies fairytale femininity in a pink dress and
tiara. Rebecca-the-witch explains that she is tormenting Valencia “because I’m
jealous of you and your life. You’re so skinny and Josh is so perfect, and I
want to take it all for myself!” The musical number then cuts back to
Rebecca, who cackles like the screechy witch until a neighbour yells to “shut
up!” A chastened Rebecca sadly muses, “My actions have gone way too far/I
told myself that I was Jasmine/But I realize now I’m Jafar.”
By borrowing elements from the Disney fairytale genre, Rebecca emphasizes
that her “Jewy/screwy” misconduct connotes deviant femininity. Like rom-
coms, Disney films offer idealized models of femininity. Further, Disney films
are infamous for depicting “good” women as beautiful (thin but gentle-
looking, white, and implicitly gentile), young, upper-class, soft-spoken, and
passive, while portraying “bad” women as ugly (fat or “too” spikily thin),
dark, old, self-assured, loud or shrill, and assertive, especially about their
sexual desires .63 And when Rebecca envies Valencia’s skinniness or cackles
like a witch, she not only invokes Disney tropes of “bad” femininity; she also
invokes anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jewish women’s excessive bodies and
voices.64 Rebecca’s cackle even recalls her Jewish mother’s first appearance in
an early episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, as a disembodied voice screeching at
her Catholic husband.65 This echo reemphasizes how Rebecca’s Jewy/screwy
gender deviance stems from her villainous Jewish mother.
The link between Rebecca’s Jewishness and “bad” femininity in this song
grows even clearer thanks to the Disney villains that she cites. Rebecca compares
82 J. BRANFMAN

herself to Snow White’s old, bent, Evil Queen/wicked witch with her massive
nose, and to Aladdin’s sexually threatening, Orientalized vizier Jafar. The
witch’s massive nose exaggerates Rebecca’s smaller, gently arched nose, both sig-
nifying Jewishness. Likewise, while today’s American culture often imagines
Jews and Arabs as opposites, European and Euro-American societies Orienta-
lized Jews until the early twentieth century.66 In fact, the earliest U.S. stage rep-
resentations of Jews like Shylock resembled Aladdin’s Jafar.67 By comparing
herself to Jafar, Rebecca masculinizes herself while invoking this racial and
sexual anti-Semitism. And like these villains, Rebecca’s plots for sexual fulfil-
ment (Jafar) or ideal femininity (the Evil Queen) always backfire.
When Rebecca’s witchy alter-ego imprisons beautiful Valencia, she also reflects
another pattern of non-normative femininity: Though Rebecca insists to her
mother that “I’m not gay!” she often expresses homoerotic desire. As I analyze
above, the song “Maybe She’s Not Such a Heinous Bitch After All” describes Rebec-
ca’s relationship with her monstrous Jewish mother as her “first failed romance,”
setting up Rebecca’s future romantic failures. I add that Rebecca’s “failed
romance” with her mother is a queer failed romance, and its effects subvert Rebecca’s
straight romances with men like Josh. Throughout Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Rebecca’s
zany efforts for straight romance often veer off-course to land her with women.
As early as the second episode, Rebecca’s plan to seduce Josh falls apart when she
aggressively kisses his girlfriend Valencia.68 This mishap exemplifies how Rebecca’s
Jewy/screwy femininity leads her to miss the mark, going too far (and in the “wrong”
direction), with behaviour too queer, “crazy,” and brazenly sexual to land her with
the leading man. Later in the series, via egg donation and in-vitro fertilization,
Rebecca even consensually impregnates her friend and housemate, Heather.69
Rebecca’s most important queer relationship is with her coworker and best
friend Paula, and this relationship especially serves to disrupt rom-com gender
scripts. Paula’s rounded white gentile body and emotional warmth make her the
ideal American mother that Naomi never was. Paula quickly becomes Rebecca’s
surrogate mother, and the two women repeatedly tell each other “I love you”
throughout the series. But as with Naomi, Rebecca and Paula’s mother-daughter
relationship contains queer, incestuous vibes. In season three, for example,
Rebecca tells Paula, “I love that ever since we met you have tried to be like my
mom, but from now on, how about we just be best friends?” Paula replies, “but
you’re the little spoon I’m the big spoon.”70 At the least, Rebecca’s erotic invest-
ment in Paula disrupts the norms of the rom-com screwball heroine, whose ener-
gies “should” stay focused on her male beau.
Yet Paula and Rebecca’s relationship, fuelled by Rebecca’s Jewish trauma,
threatens the show’s rom-com plot even more directly: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend lit-
erally substitutes Paula for Josh in the finale of season two. In this episode,
Rebecca seems close to the resolution awaiting all white gentile screwball her-
oines, meaning marriage to the leading man. Through her “Jewy” wit, assertive
sexuality, and zany plots, Rebecca has wooed Josh and they have become
 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES 83

engaged. Blending her Jewy/screwy behaviour with stereotypes of Jewish wealth,

Rebecca has even “paid some chick $10,000 to take her wedding slot” at a seaside
venue so she can wed Josh sooner.71 But on the verge of completion, Rebecca’s
plan collapses. Josh learns of Rebecca’s past mental illness,72 gets cold feet, and
leaves Rebecca at the altar. In fact, Josh flees the romantic plot altogether by
briefly enrolling in a Catholic seminary.73
This desertion flings Rebecca into a dissociative episode that nearly ends in
suicide. The seaside wedding venue sits atop a cliff, and Rebecca teeters precar-
iously toward its edge. When Rebecca collapses at the last moment, it is her best
friend/mother-figure Paula who catches her like a romantic leading man. When
Rebecca revives a moment later, the two stand facing each other (with Rebecca
still in her wedding gown), holding hands as if to wed (Figure 1). But instead of a
wedding vow, they vow revenge on Josh. This image wildly subverts the expected
ending of a romantic comedy: It not only substitutes a pair of female friends for a
straight romantic couple, but also shows them swear revenge on a man rather
than having Rebecca swear her love (and obedience) to that man. This queer
wedding exemplifies how Rebecca’s Jewy/screwy femininity fuels her fit with
the screwball heroine and subverts this fit: The very traits that help Rebecca
to pursue Josh and nearly wed him also scare him off and leave Rebecca
queerly wedded in revenge to her own substitute mother. Thanks to Rebecca’s
“Jewyness,” the plot twist that usually seals a rom-com heroine’s feminine nor-
mativity thrusts Rebecca to new heights of gender deviance.
Yet Rebecca’s wedding mishap, like all her botched efforts at straight love,
does not come across as her personal failure. Instead, Rebecca’s romantic failures
eventually launch a critique of the rom-com genre itself and its ridiculous,
unhealthy scripts for women. This critique grows explicit after Rebecca’s
third-season suicide attempt, when the series finally reveals her mental illness. In
the song “Diagnosis,” for example, Rebecca compares her infatuation with Josh
to all the other ineffective treatments that others have prescribed to fix her

Figure 1. Rebecca (left) and Paula (right) vow revenge on Josh after he abandons Rebecca at the
altar.
84 J. BRANFMAN

problems.74 Rebecca sings that “[f]or almost 30 years, I’ve known something was
wrong,” but that “when I tried to find the reason for my sadness and terror,” she
was only offered empty solutions like “[t]ake this pill, say this chant, move here for
this guy.” “Take this pill” and “say this chant” sound like suggestions that Rebecca
received from “the doctors that I’ve met who didn’t get me,” but moving for Josh
seems like Rebecca’s own (misguided) idea. By grouping Rebecca’s move with
other failed treatment plans, the song hints that Rebecca’s romantic leap of faith
was not her own spontaneous notion. Instead, lifelong exposure to American
gender ideologies, including the sexual scripts of rom-coms, shaped Rebecca
effort to solve her problems through romance.75 Soon after “Diagnosis,” the
campy song “Without Love You Can Save the World” also critiques rom-com
notions of love that encourage women to poorly invest their time and energy.
Spurred by her new therapist, Rebecca realizes that “ten thousand hours in any-
thing makes you an expert/And I’ve spent way more time than that frettin’ over
guys … I could have used that time to cure leukemia/I could have used that
time to clean the seas/ … I could have saved the pandas, whales, and bees.”76
She continues, “Without love, you can save the world/Put those hours to good
use instead.” In other words, rom-com narratives divert women from meaningful
pursuits by pressuring them to focus on straight romance.
In this storyline, Rebecca’s “Jewy/screwy” mental illness, and more precisely, a
renewed confrontation with her abusive Jewish mother, leads Rebecca to leave the
romantic plot, at least temporarily. It also advances Rebecca toward her series
finale epiphany that true happiness lies in knowing herself, not chasing romantic
love with men. This twist achieves a rare innovation on rom-com norms: The
show’s “excessive” woman ends up single, but not alone or miserable. Surrounded
by caring friends, Rebecca rejects the patriarchal rom-com tropes of femininity that
have governed her behaviour in order to literally find her own voice.

Conclusion
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend exemplifies how Jewishness continues to signify gendered and
sexual deviance in American popular culture today. The series refigures historical
tropes of “Jewy” gender and sexuality by presenting a smothered, neurotic, precar-
ious millennial Jewish daughter who is also a screwball rom-com heroine. Fuelled
by trauma from her Jewish mother, this “Jewy” femininity initially helps Rebecca
fit the conventions of this “screwy” rom-com leading lady, but her Jewy/screwy
antics overwhelm the rom-com narrative to disrupt its marriage plot, veer into
queer relationships, and critique heteronormativity.
For Jewish studies, feminist media studies, and critical race studies, my analy-
sis opens new questions about millennial Jewish American women. Why has the
“Jewish female gaze” emerged so clearly in U.S. television of the past decade, and
how does it differ from millennial Jewish men’s comedy? How do various
comedy subgenres differently convey millennial Jewish women’s ongoing
 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES 85

outsider experiences, like the musical romantic comedy/precarious-girl comedy

of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the semi-sketch comedy/precarious-girl comedy of
Broad City, and the narrative dramedy of Transparent? And why do some mil-
lennial women’s series displace anti-Semitic stigma onto older Jewish women
like Naomi, while others (like Broad City) model solidarity between Jewish
mothers and daughters? Meanwhile, how does Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s new
trope of the Jewy/screwy rom-com heroine both overlap with and differ from
racialized precarious-girl tropes like Issa Rae’s “Awkward Black Girl” on Inse-
cure or Gina Rodríguez’s pregnant Latina virgin on Jane the Virgin? By
drawing on distinct racial tropes of unruly womanhood, and unleashing these
racial histories in distinct subgenres of comedy, how do these figures enable
different social critiques of race, gender, and sexuality? And how do these
various racial tropes and comedy subgenres particularly address today’s
climate of renewed white nationalism that explicitly blends anti-Semitism
with racism, queerphobia, and misogyny? My reading of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
encourages Jewish cultural studies, feminist media studies, and critical race
studies to converse more deeply as they investigate these new directions.

Notes
1. Gross, “Rachel Bloom Upends Romantic Comedy.” Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is what Rick
Altman in The American Film Musical calls an “integrated musical” (115): Riffing
on films like Chicago (Marshall) or Barbra Streisand’s Funny Girl (Wyler), the series
often breaks into musical theater numbers that dramatize internal fantasies and
advance the plot.
2. Wanzo, “Precarious-Girl Comedy.”
3. See Beck, “The Politics of Jewish Invisibility,” Brettschneider, The Family Flamboyant
and Jewish Feminism & Intersectionality, and Branfman, “Teaching for Coalition.”
4. See Beck, “The Politics of Jewish Invisibility” and “From ‘Kike’ to ‘JAP’”; Bial, Acting
Jewish; Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct; Boyarin et al., Queer Theory & the Jewish Question;
Brettschneider, The Family Flamboyant and Jewish Feminism & Intersectionality;
Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks; Erdman, Staging the Jew; Jacobson, Whiteness
of a Different Color; Hyman, Gender & Assimilation; Kaye/Kantrowitz, The Colors of the
Jews; Mosse, Nationalism & Sexuality; Pellegrini, “Whiteface Performances” and “Inter-
articulations”; Prell, Fighting to Become Americans; Rogin, Blackface, White Noise.
5. Rosenstock, “Messianism,” 206.
6. Pellegrini, “Whiteface Performances”; Bitton, “The Jewess”; Schwadron, The Case of
the Sexy Jewess.
7. Garber, “Category Crises,” 29; Freedman, “Coming Out of the Jewish Closet,” 339;
Gilman, The Jew’s Body and Freud, Race & Gender.
8. See Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct; Erdman, Staging the Jew; Brodkin, How Jews Became
White Folks; Gilman, The Jew’s Body and Freud, Race & Gender, 13, 17.
9. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 183; Céline, l’École des Cadavres, 215.
10. Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks; Hyman, Gender and Assimilation; Prell, Fight-
ing to Become Americans.
11. Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks.
86 J. BRANFMAN

12. Brettschneider, The Family Flamboyant, 9.

13. Hyman, Gender and Assimilation; Prell, Fighting to Become Americans.
14. Gross, “No Victim, She,” 36, 40.
15. Abrams, The New Jew, 59.
16. See Gross, “No Victim, She”; Sochen, “Fanny Brice”; Cohen, “Unkosher Comedians”;
Mock, “Female Jewish Comedians”; hooks, Black Looks, 37; Rowe, The Unruly
Woman; Antler, “One Clove Away From a Pomander Ball,” Talking Back, and You
Never Call!; Mizejewski, Ziegfield Girl and Pretty/Funny; Wolf, “Barbra’s ‘Funny
Girl’ Body,” Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher; Harrison-Kahan, The White Negress;
Goltz, “Ironic Performativity”; Wanzo, “Precarious-Girl Comedy”; Hammerman, “Dirty
Jews,” Middleton, “Rather Crude Feminism”; Siegel, “Two Funerals”; Dapolito, Love,
Gilda; Schwadron, The Case of the Sexy Jewess.
17. Hammerman, Dirty Jews, 51.
18. Abrams, The New Jew, 59.
19. Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds.
20. Rowe, “Comedy, Melodrama, and Gender,” 162.
21. For histories of the Jewish American mother trope, see Antler, “One Clove Away From
a Pomander Ball” and You Never Call! and Prell, Fighting to Become Americans.
22. Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint.
23. S. McDonald, Romantic Comedy; Neale and Krutnik, Popular Film, 155–56; Schatz,
Hollywood Genres, 159; Mizejewski, “Queen Latifah,” 20–21; Mizejewski, It Happened
One Night, 14.
24. Mizejewski “Queen Latifah,” 1.
25. Rowe, The Unruly Woman.
26. Mizejewski It Happened One Night.
27. S. McDonald, “I Never Want to See Josh Again.”
28. Akhtar, “Nathaniel Gets the Message!”
29. McKenna, “I’m In Love.”
30. Moss, Why Harry, 8.
31. T. McDonald, Romantic Comedy, 13.
32. Wyler, Funny Girl.
33. See Gross, “No Victim, She”; Wolf, “Barbra’s ‘Funny Girl’ Body”; Brook, “The Fallacy
of Falsity.”
34. Bauman, Modernity & Ambivalence, 76–8.
35. See Mizejewski, “Queen Latifah”; Bowdre, “Romantic Comedies.”
36. Shankman, Bringing Down the House.
37. Mizejewski, “Queen Latifah,” 22.
38. See Mizejewski, “Queen Latifah,” 33.
39. Wanzo, “Precarious-Girl Comedy.”
40. “Adulting,” means acting like a respectable middle-class adult. Examples include
holding a job, owning a nice home, doing taxes, eating healthy foods, and raising chil-
dren (Steinmetz, “What Aduting Means”).
41. Wanzo, “Precarious-Girl Comedy,” 29–30.
42. Ibid., 30.
43. Tsuchida, “My Mom, Greg’s Mom and Josh’s Sweet Dance Moves!”
44. S. McDonald, “I Never Want to See Josh Again.”
45. S. McDonald, “I’m Making Up for Lost Time.”
46. Tsuchida, “My Mom, Greg’s Mom, and Josh’s Sweet Dance Moves!” original emphasis.
47. Creed, The Monstrous Feminine and “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine.”
48. Tsuchida, “My Mom, Greg’s Mom, and Josh’s Sweet Dance Moves!”
 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES 87

49. Spielberg, Jaws.

50. Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine,” 58.
51. Ibid., 60.
52. Akhtar, “I Will Help You.”
53. Frye, “Characterization,” 272; Mintz, “Standup Comedy”; Robertson, “The Kinda
Comedy,” 61.
54. Battles and Hilton-Morrow, “Gay Characters.”
55. See Krieger, “Does He Actually?”
56. Tsuchida, “My Mom, Greg’s Mom, and Josh’s Sweet Dance Moves!”
57. “Goyish” is a deprecating Yiddish word for “non-Jewish.”
58. Kahn, “Josh’s Ex-Girlfriend is Crazy,” 2017.
59. Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) are the two
“High Holidays.” Spaced ten days apart, they are the most important holidays of the
Jewish calendar.
60. S. McDonald, “Trent?!”
61. Ehrlich, “Josh Is Going to Hawaii!”
62. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend further links Rebecca’s legal education with Jewyness when her
mother comes to visit, as Naomi complains about “wast[ing] all that dough on
Harvard and Yale” (Tsuchida, “My Mom, Greg’s Mom, and Josh’s Sweet Dance
Moves!”). Rebecca’s legal career is the result of her pushy, wealthy Jewish mother.
63. See Ayers, Poisonous Applie; Bell et al., Mouse to Mermaid; Davis, Good Girls; Hoerr-
ner, Gender Roles; Putnam, Mean Ladies.
64. Gottfried, “What Do Men Want?”; Beck, “From ‘Kike’ to ‘JAP’.”
65. Davis, “I Hope Josh Comes to My Party!”
66. Erdman, Staging the Jew.
67. See Erdman, Staging the Jew, 24.
68. Scardino, “Josh’s Girlfriend Is Really Cool.”
69. Weng, “Oh Nathaniel, It’s On!”
70. S. McDonald, “Getting Over Jeff.”
71. Akhtar, “To Josh, With Love.”
72. Season 3 reveals that Josh learned this damning history about Rebecca from Trent, a
stalker obsessed with Rebecca. At the end of season 3, Trent embodies a gender-flipped
commentary on Rebecca’s own path toward stalking Josh.
73. McKenna, “Can Josh Take a Leap of Faith?.”
74. Winkler, “Josh Is Irrelevant.”
75. Season four amplifies this notion of rom-coms as indoctrination when a friend men-
tions that Rebecca “loves” the genre. This tip leads one of Rebecca’s suitors to binge
rom-coms, which humorously reshape his own gendered and romantic fantasies
(Ehrlich, “I’m Almost Over You”).
76. Akhtar, “Nathaniel Gets the Message!”

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Jonathan Branfman is Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender & Media Studies at William &
Mary, where he researches masculinity, race, and Jewish stardom in U.S. media. A few of his
88 J. BRANFMAN

favourite Jewish stars to write on are Drake, Ilana Glazer, and Zac Efron. This research
informs his teaching in courses like “TV’s New Jews” and “Racial Passing Onscreen.” To
make feminist education more accessible beyond the university, Jonathan has also published
the 2019 LGBTQ children’s book You Be You: The Kid’s Guide to Gender, Sexuality & Family.

ORCID
Jonathan Branfman http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8352-6352

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