Is The Styles Section Trying To Fuck With Us?

Hells yeah, it’s all coming together today. The front page of Thursday Styles brings it on home in the lead story about chain-boutique owner Stefani Greenfield, her business partner Uzi Ben-Abraham, and their ideal customer, Tarynne Goldenberg! (Love the double-“n” “e”, btw! Verrrry classy!) What do all of these folks have in common (with Cindy Chupak, too)? Hint: it’s not just a fabulous wardrobe! Jewish American Princess Syndrome is fairly understandable in its social, political, cultural context. Of course there would be a generation of American Jews who were unbelievably excited and overwhelmed by its own capability for material transcendence! Of course they would place enormous value in things and things and more things! Of course they would get their noses broken and scraped out, their hair dyed and straightened and thinned, their nails done and redone, their wardrobes obsessively flushed every season, their oh-so-Jewy body-hair waxed clear away! Right, so a generation of spoiled little Brenda Patimkins resulted. The safety and prosperity and equal-opportunity-ness of America, replete with its near-religious reverence for the Almighty dollar, equals materialistic frenzy. But this giddy semitic shamelessness about assimilating, about owning and having and buying and having and having and having was supposed to time out about, oh, forty years ago. Yet we now find ourselves one, two, even three generations removed from said JAP heydey, the organic Jewish American Princess zietgiest, and JAPiness remains ever present, blossoming, spreading its wings to encompass persistent generations of brainless mallrats of every vague cultural Jewish persuasion. (Just ask my sister-in-law!) And you know what? There is absolutely no excuse for JAPiness in the 21st century. None. Amazing irony points, however, to Ms. Greenfield, whose comments about her new flagship store inadvertently echo Herzl: “We need a home to show the world who we really are.” I’ve been called a self-hating Jew shockingly often this past year. But reading today’s Style section it hit me! Let it be said: I’m not a self-hater; I’m an other-hater. I like myself. It’s those horrid JAPs at Intermix I can’t stand.