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This essay considers the responses of Jewish writers to the antisemitic fairy tale "The Jew in the Thornbush" as well as to readings that locate antisemitism in "Rumpelstiltskin," by analyzingfour contemporary stories by Jewish writers Naomi Novik, Veronica Schanoes, and Jane Yolen. Jewish writers are able to destabilize the dominant paradigm of the Grimms' fairy tales by demonstrating its cultural specificity. I argue that the tension that is thereby generated enacts the ambiguity characteristic of American Jewish identities, using the impetus of exclusion to fashion a response that casts the genre itself in a new light.
Keywords
AFS ETHNOGRAPHIC THESAURUS: Written literature, fairy tales, antisemitism
IT HAS BEEN MANY DECADES NOW since the feminist fairy-tale debates of the 1970s, in which Marcia Lieberman argued that fairy tales were an inherently patriarchal and retrograde genre (1972), and others such as Alison Lurie contended that they were in fact a multi-faceted genre containing many proto-feminist tales and very open to feminist intervention (1970). The pro-fairy-tale side has indisputably triumphed. Fairy-tale revisions in many forms that grapple with the gender ideologies encoded in fairy tales both popular and obscure are thick on the ground, and have been for several decades. But less well-addressed is the ethnocentrism inherent in the fame and popularity of our best-known fairy tales. It is primarily due to European imperialism, American settler colonialism, and the privileging of European narratives in the United States that these tales underpin popular culture in the United States. The fairy tale as we know it today is the product of hundreds of years of European storytelling, writing, and editing, and, more recently, of popular culture dominated by Disney and other American giants of the culture industry. But let us be more specific, because Europe has never been homogenous, despite what contemporary white nationalists would like to believe. The fairy tale as we know it today is the product of hundreds of years of mostly gentile European storytelling (mostly, as i have no wish to erase the contributions of Joseph Jacobs, for example), and the antisemitism endemic to gentile Europe for so long has informed some fairy tales and their reception and understanding as well.
Only three of the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmärchens tales1 involve Jewish characters: "The Jew...