In New England, a girl complains to her friend zipping up a Juicy Couture jacket. She says,“Oh my god you’re such a f*cking JAP.” The two friends chuckle until the Juicy girl yells, “I am not!”
The first time I heard the acronym "JAP" ( meaning Jewish American Princess) used in conversation I was jolted to a standstill. My mind immediately rushed 3,000 miles back home to California, to the images of barbed wire and dust, to photographs of signs that read "No Japs Allowed," to the first time I heard my mother called an anti-Asian racial slur. Having only once encountered the term JAP in a discussion with my father (what to expect in New England), the only j-a-p I could contextualize was the derogatory term for Japanese/Japanese Americans popularized in WWII.
Since moving to the east coast, I've heard JAP thrown out casually a handful of times; it's almost always jokingly used by Jewish Americans, and most often by young Jewish women as a mode of self-deprecation. I still get a little knot in my stomach every time I hear the term. Though I'm both Jewish and Asian American, I never quite understand the joke.
Motivated by these feelings of discomfort as well as my own mixed identity, I researched how people feel about the term JAP through conversations with friends and the consultation of scholarly sources.
What my friends had to say:
The first step in my investigation was talking to peers. In total, I interviewed 10 people; however, the responses of my two friends, Lynn and Caroline, represent the most common types of perspectives.
Lynn:
Lynn is 19 years old, an athletic girl with a no-nonsense tone and a slight Long-Island accent that flattens her O’s and erases her R’s. She answers my questions briefly and firmly while sipping on her second drink of the night. (We laugh as she tells me about how the first one was consumed while playing a drinking game to the GOP debate).
We march through the precursory questions with ease. I ask her about her ethnic and religious identity. With no pause she says, “Caucasian and Catholic” as if she is checking boxes on a standardized form. A firm “yes” tells me there were many Jewish people in her hometown.
She tells me she became aware of the term JAP around 9th grade. She only pauses when asked who or what is a JAP. After nonchalant "um" she finally answers my question with the following: “a rich white teenage girl who gets whatever she wants, not necessarily Jewish.”
I was fascinated by this answer. It confirms my own understanding of the term and how I most frequently hear it: using Jewishness as shorthand for a larger non-Jewish phenomenon.
I told Lynn I thought her answer was interesting, and she shrugged. "Yeah." She remembers observing friends being called JAPs by other teenagers, characterizing it as “nothing serious” and "largely joking". She seems to find these past incidences unremarkable, uninteresting. I asked, “Do you consider it derogatory?” She answered affirmatively without pause.
At first, Lynn could not place JAP in any other context. When I nudged her in the direction of Asian Americans, she responded, “Oh yeah I have, I answered wrong on the last one then, haha. Old people use it, like when my grandparents are describing a Japanese person in the context of WWII. Like ‘Oh the japs this or that.’”
The term Jap was largely kept in the WWII era by interviewees with only a few people having a modern sense of the word. Lynn very clearly represented one common response to JAP/jap as a term: she did not stutter over it, show any sign of being uncomfortable, or even find it noteworthy and had basic awareness of jap as a historic racial term. Lynn, like many others, clearly did not have an emotional tie to the terms.
Caroline:
Caroline is a very tall, intensely friendly 20-year-old girl from Northern California. She talks very quickly and laughs frequently. Even the precursory questions of ethnicity and religious background seem to both amuse her and make her uncomfortable.
“I’m white (laughter) very white. and a Roman Catholic,” she says. She qualifies this statement, and many of her other answers, by describing her sister’s best friend and her family; they are Jewish so Caroline is “familiar and knowledgeable” about Judaism as well as other religions/ethnicities through her “very diverse” schooling.
In contrast to many east-coast interviewees, Caroline had never heard the term JAP/Jewish American Princess until her first year at Wesleyan University. She described her reaction as “What the f*ck did you just say??” Her context for JAP was only in the aurally indistinguishable racial slur. Like most West Coast people (myself included), Caroline’s first encounters with the term were startling as well as confusing. To her, why it exists in popular vernacular was a mystery.
Unlike Lynn, Caroline connects JAP to Asians without my prompting. When defining how negative or positive it is she equated to "FOB," an acronym for "fresh off the boat" that is commonly used to describe Asians who are "too Asian."
When we discuss the distinction between JAP and jap, Caroline begins verbally tiptoeing: uttering the word "jap" clearly makes her uncomfortable. It reminds me of reading black novelists in predominantly white classes and watching the kids stumble and stutter over the "N-word", unsure if they have permission to say it in the context.
I asked her how she would differentiate the two terms, either by sound or spelling. She tried to work out an answer before saying “I just wouldn’t say it. Ever. It doesn’t feel right.” She cracked several jokes at some of the more poignant moments, clearly conscious of gravity in the words we discussed.
What scholars have to say:
I was hard-pressed to find academic literature simultaneously addressing the histories of jap and JAP or even commenting on the auditory overlap of the terms. Just as I was unable to reconcile the two terms, it seems scholars have a similar mental gap. Perhaps the lack of connection is due to the perception that one is a violent racial slur and one is a largely comical and self-directed dig. The humor issue is a neoliberal red herring; there is an ongoing, though perhaps diminished, violence at play in Jewish American life. Although not literally connected in etymology, both JAP and jap serve to punish marginalized peoples when they are perceived as encroaching on previously white-male space.
In order to effectively discuss the terminology, it is first necessary to dispel the belief that JAP jokes are nothing more than harmless humor landing on sensitive ears. To understand the high stakes one need only read accounts of sexually violent anti-JAP chants at Syracuse University or the 1982 case of Elana Steinberg, a woman murdered by her husband who successfully escaped conviction by arguing that her neediness and materialism (essentially JAPpy-ness) caused temporary insanity (Booker).
Some sociologists argue, “Not every joke is an instance of disguised or outright hostility. Therefore, they argue, intent is an important, if difficult to identify, factor. They also argue that violence based on JAP-hate is the exception, not the rule. However, this type of analysis fails to address the multi-level permeation of anti-JAP sentiment, which at sometimes manifests as self-policing humor and at others results in extreme violence. JAP jokes reinforce social structures and function as important symbols.
The denigration of JAPs builds on traditional anti-Semitic discrimination by developing a specifically misogynistic mentality; the former increases Jewish self-policing by allowing Jewish men to displace their own social burdens onto certain Jewish women.
Spencer says the Jewish American Princess is “symbolic of unrefined nouveau riche who are narcissistic, sexually withholding, and deserving of denigration and abuse." First, Jews were targeted as scheming moneylenders, but upon financially and culturally integrating into white Europe a new wave of social backlash created a hatred of the “nouveau riche” Jew . Because this hatred is not inherently gendered, the following question remains: why is “the Jewish woman…taking the rap for the consumerism which is rampant in our highly materialistic culture in general” and traditionally attached to Jewishness at large?
The answer is in the portrayal of JAPs as “narcissistic (and) sexually withholding;” the inclusion of these traits is both a direct response by white men to the perceived sexual unavailability of Jewish women and a receptacle for internalized male Jewish hatred.
In a study of college campus “JAP-baiting,” Spencer concludes that predominantly Jewish sororities were primary targets of abuse due to a perceived “emphasis upon religious endogamy in dating practices." Hypersexual and sometimes violent JAP jokes surface in reaction, such as “Make her prove she’s not a JAP, make her swallow."
If women are little more than a space for white men to occupy, then JAP women present a spatial challenge to the white hegemony. Therefore JAPs and “JAP castles” become targets of anti-Semitism due to their perceived sexual unavailability to white men.
However, Jewish men also frequently participate in JAP shaming, as outlined in From ‘Kike’ to ‘JAP’. There are two major components to this intra-Jewish shaming. First, JAPs stray from that traditional image of the Jewish mother as that unfailing martyr described in Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. In this way, JAPs are also withholding a perceived requirement of femininity (sacrifice) from Jewish men just as they withhold sexual availability from white men. Second, combining misogyny with anti-Semitism allows Jewish men to construct a new hierarchy in which they are distinctly above JAPs.
We must emphasize the consolidation of the racial and gendered tensions of WWII into one term and recall purposefully forgotten prejudices to understand why JAP is still thrown around. In the same way that we forget Emitt Till would have been only 74 last year, we imagine anti-Semitism as a particularly removed form of discrimination, when in fact the consolidation of whiteness occurred only after WWII and rather incompletely, leaving a distinct hierarchy within whiteness intact. Japanese internment and nuclear annihilation were also hastily obscured (immediately after the war the US collected Japan as an ally and made concerted attempts to repair American image with the Hiroshima Maidens project). No scholar considers the historic restriction of Jews’ movement from curfews in ghettos to concentration camp as having a direct parallel on American soil: Japanese internment.
The auditory overlap of JAP (Jewish American Princess) and Jap is not solely coincidental: the entanglement of the terms points to the complex racial, ethnic, religious, and gendered components of the JAP stereotype. Jap was initially a somewhat non-hostile abbreviation and became violently racialized during WWII. JAP, meanwhile, seems to be moving in the opposite direction, having initially been connected to an era of open anti-Semitism and now existing as humor in a “post-racial” world. The commodification of JAP stereotypes is growing; there are capitalist gains to be made in JAP usage, from t-shirts to greeting cards and now to reality shows such as “Princesses: Long Island”. These conditions, combined with the rising Zionist-elite Jewish class in the US, suggests that the term is here to stay regardless of fact that it is far closer to the racial slur Jap than most would admit.
