CONTAINING THE ABJECT: FEMALE AGENCY AND JEWISH IDENTITY IN ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK

In the series Orange Is the New Black, protagonist Piper Chapman’s Jewish fiance Larry is pudgy, weak, frightened, craven, and a Judas who exploits Piper’s difficulties – and the disenfranchised women whose stories she shares with him – to advance his own ambitions.  Larry’s parents are equally obnoxious and unattractive.  Yet in Piper Kerman’s memoir upon which the series is based, Larry is devoted and supportive, and his parents are compassionate and loving.  Why did reworking this text conjure the dangerous cliche of the abject Jew?

I find Larry’s betrayal not only relieves the show from an unexciting story of a reliable boyfriend, but also displaces questions about possibly exploitative aspects of Kerman’s best-seller and hit series onto the despicable and feminized Jew.  This narrative turn burnishes the author’s celebratory claims to tell rather than sell the stories of incarcerated women who will not profit from their commercial dissemination.  Furthermore, a Jewish inmate that Kerman despises, who appears in the memoir but not the show, and a series inmate constructed in the tradition of American television “crypto-Jews” (characters whose qualities suggest an unstated Jewish identity) provide powerful markers for good and bad Jewish female behavior.

Piper’s romance with a Jew helps her escape the WASP background she disdains; problematic Jewish female characters provide the distance and distinctions that help her evade identification as a Jewish woman herself.  In an all too familiar narrative construction, abject Jews in OITNB enable the humanity of prisoners who might otherwise constitute the abject themselves.