What is the JAP’s favorite wine/whine?
‘You want me to do WHAT?’” The “what” is shouted, nasalized, and inflected up to emphasize disgust in the suggestion that she pleasure another, either through his mouth or through hers. As Zappa sings in “Sheik Yerbouti” (an orientalizing of the slang “shake your booty”): “I want a hairy little Jewish princess/With a brand new nose, who knows where it goes/ . . . I want a darling little Jewish princess/Who don’t shit about cooking and is arrogant looking.” The JAP has always stood in the way of Jewish-American male desire, a New World Dora out of Freud’s imagination: the girl who denies the male sexual fantasy and refuses to collude with a sexual economy that is completely phallocentric. Like the agonistic Dora, the JAP is finally dismissed in her self-assertions as a “daddy’s girl”; she is never allowed her own will. That, of course, is not how Jewish men have seen it. Roth’s empowered, powerful Brenda Patimkin embodies all that is the JAP in a standard Jewish male reading: nouveau ri
