J.A.P. Just Another Person

As my daughter starts middle-school this year, I’m facing the daunting task of figuring out how we’ll handle her Bat Mitzvah. My parents weren’t religious so I find it hard to pass along traditions that weren’t passed along to me. My brothers were Bar Mitzvahed, but I don’t remember my oldest brother Ed’s shindig because I was only 3. I remember my brother Carl’s Bar Mitzvah (I was 8), at least I remember dancing and eating dessert, which came in a dish made of chocolate, as all meals should.

My daughter is just about the age I was when the term J.A.P. started getting thrown around. As if the onset of puberty wasn’t bad enough, I attended a junior high filled with a bunch of really nasty kids. Seventh grade felt like Lord of the Flies with spiral notebooks. I guess you can chalk it up to raging hormones. Those kids, especially the boys, scared the hell out of me. Lockers were slammed, freshmen were tripped, and insults were hurled like stones from medieval catapults (or cows if you’re a Monty Python fan). On top of the space in my teeth, my unruly thick hair (which actually became a plus during the big hair 80’s) and my skinny frame, I had the whole Jewish thing going for me. I began to hear the “J” word fairly often, along with the old favorite, “Carpenter’s dream, flat as a board and easy to screw.” Lovely.

The whole J.A.P. thing threw me into a heck of an identity crisis. A Jewish American Princess was an upper-middle class girl who was spoiled and pushy. Granted, you would have to include well-dressed and impeccably groomed, but still, it wasn’t anything I aspired to, except for the fancy outfits and expensive makeup.

Yes, I was Jewish, and I would have liked lots of pretty clothes, but it wasn’t in the budget. My father was a machine shop foreman who had a hard time holding down a job and my mother worked as a bookkeeper. We had a small house on a canal on a dead end street. As a small child, this was heaven! There was water to swim in and empty lots to play in and hold funerals for dead birds (someone had to do it!). Besides, as a rule, 6 year olds don’t size each other up when it comes to fashion. My point is I was fine with what I had.

But then you get a little older and the outside world starts tempting you with newer, better and more…everything! The kids from homes with lots of money began to notice the difference between them and the kids from homes with less money. To make matters worse, not far from our modest home in a middle class neighborhood was a wealthy Jewish area. The homes were large and they had built-in pools and two car garages. Naturally, there was some resentment in my non-Jewish neck of the woods. The resentment led to name calling. I would hear the word J.A.P. shouted at me fairly often.

Calling me a J.A.P. wasn’t just mean, it didn’t make sense. I wasn’t shopping in expensive stores and I was far from spoiled. My mother worked full time, back when it wasn’t common, and sometimes even looked down upon. I would come home and have to clean and sometimes cook dinner for my father and brothers. This is where I perfected my passive aggressive skills. I would usually burn dinner, thus feeling some sort of twisted power over my oppressors.

The worst part of being called a J.A.P., was that real J.A.P.s wouldn’t even glance down at their Chanel watches to give me the time of day. It made me feel ashamed of being Jewish. I got all the flack but none of the benefits. I definitely lacked the “Princess” part of the equation. I really liked it when people didn’t know I was Jewish. I was often taken for Irish, probably because of my fair skin and light green eyes. Those days are long gone; I’m not fooling anyone anymore. I’ve started to look so much like my Eastern European Jewish relatives, that one shopkeeper on the lower east side of Manhattan talks to me in Russian! It seems that we all get more ethnic as we get older. I may have passed for a nice Irish girl in my youth, but now I look like I just came back from the Kibbutz!

By the time I got to college the expression J.A.P. had been thrown around so much that it lost most of its sting, but I was still sensitive about it. One friend of mine insisted it was a compliment. He thought Jewish American Princesses were pretty and refined. I did like that part, but I remembered how mean so many of them were to me in high school. I knew in my heart that I had nothing in common with those girls except my religion. Even if I did have money, I would never be accepted into that particular sorority (Alpha Delta Nu?).