“Subliminal postmodern minstrelsy” and other intersections of race and masculinity among millennial Jewish stars

To pinpoint modern examples of the stigmas associated with Jewish masculinity, and how they intersect with both white privilege and color-based racism, Jonathan Branfman’s latest book examines a diverse group of Jewish millennial stars, from actor Seth Rogen to music superstar Drake to comedians Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer. In a Clayman Institute-sponsored talk on his new book, Millennial Jewish Stardom: Masculinity, Racial Minstrelsy, & Queer Glamor, Branfman spoke of the need for a new vocabulary to address the persistent and evolving presence of racial antisemitism in popular media.

Branfman drew from his own experiences in daily life and the classroom. “I realized that most Americans, including many Jewish Americans, don’t have good tools for speaking about Jewish experiences of race in the U.S.,” he said. “There’s no vocabulary for describing how, for instance, a Jewish person with white skin could simultaneously experience white privilege and racial forms of antisemitism. Or how a Jewish person of color, like the rapper Drake, could simultaneously experience racial antisemitism and anti-Blackness.” 

A segment of his talk centered around Drake and a 2014 Saturday Night Live comic segment portraying his Bar Mitzvah. In the sketch, Drake stands center screen at a microphone, addressing the gathered guests, while flanked on either side by a Black uncle and a white, Jewish uncle. The through-line of the sketch, Branfman noted, involves painting the uncles as polar opposites, representing “opposite and irreconcilable masculinities,” while Drake literally stands between these two extremes. He is allowed a kind of fluidity, displacing stigma and balancing between racialized stereotypes of Jewish masculinity, while the uncles are stuck, rooted in their extremes.

I realized that most Americans, including many Jewish Americans, don’t have good tools for speaking about Jewish experiences of race in the U.S.

Whereas Drake may be seen as distancing himself from stereotypes of Jewish masculinity, Branfman noted, in contrast the work of Lil Dicky, a white, Jewish rapper, draws heavily on racial stereotypes. Lil Dicky emphasizes stereotypes about Jewish bodies in projects such as the 2013 music video for his song “Jewish Flow.” Branfman noted that Lil Dicky also experiences and references his white privilege—for example, in his song “White Dude.”  

Branfman’s book examines the self-titled “Jewess” comedians Jacobson and Glazer, who revive a term for Jewish women that largely has been discontinued since the 1940s. Other stars are “Jewish man-baby actor Seth Rogen” and the “chiseled, very ‘un-Jewish looking’ (quote unquote)” film star Zac Efron. Aside from being Jewish and famous, a key element linking these stars is that “they are all minstrels,” Branfman said. “All of them in different ways are playing up and exaggerating these bodily tropes,” thus performing different varieties of racial minstrelsy. 

While we tend to envision minstrelsy as blackface, Branfman said, he found it useful to generate a number of new concepts and terms in analyzing its use in popular media. Subliminal postmodern minstrelsy, he said, titillates audiences often without their being conscious of it. Among the terms Branfman identified were: Jewessface, male blackfishing, rhetorical minstrelsy, and exhibitionist goyface.

Branfman said, “My hope is that by starting with these screens where so many people already gaze at Jewish bodies and consume Jewish bodies, I could begin to offer a new vocabulary for articulating how American society envisions Jewishness and how that intersects with other racial axes such as Blackness and whiteness.”

Millennial Jewish Stardom is the first book among a planned set of three. Branfman, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies, teaches and researches how Jewish performers embody race, gender, and sexuality in U.S. popular media. He also has published a children’s book, You Be You! The Kid's Guide to Gender, Sexuality & Family, translated into 25 languages. The book talk was co-sponsored by the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Taube Center for Jewish Studies.