In Canada, Jewish girls seen as uppity and privileged have a nickname: the JAP, which stands for Jewish American Princess. Meanwhile, around the world, the stereotype persists, even if the name changes: spoiled Jewish girls have been called JPs and Becks in the U.K., or even Kugels in South Africa.

Having lingered for decades, the stereotype has shaped both how Jewish women are perceived by non-Jews and how many come to see themselves. It seeped into pop culture, embodying mid-1990s sitcom characters like Fran Fine and Janice from Friends, and has been reclaimed at times, like in Rachel Bloom's JAP rap battle. But is all this just dressing around an inherently misogynistic and antisemitic caricature?

Becky Aizen has thought intensely about this subject, having written her PhD on Jewish identity in pop culture and focusing largely on the JAP stereotype. She joins Phoebe Maltz Bovy on this week's episode of The Jewish Angle to dig into the messy history and modern-day implications of the phrase.

Credits

• Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy

• Producer and editor: Michael Fraiman

• Music: " Gypsy Waltz " by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective

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Anti-Zionism is often presented as simply a political critique of Israel. But in reality, it frames Zionists as a hostile, genocidal group, while often collapsing Jews and Israelis into the same stereotype due to their support for the Jewish State. From that perspective, anti-Zionists can quickly fall into racist tropes against Israelis, flattening identities into caricatures and seeing scapegoating Israel in broadly conspiratorial ways.

The consequences ripple outward. Some anti-Zionists end up sidelining Muslim and Palestinian voices that don’t fit a rigid ideological script, diverting attention from corruption and repression elsewhere in the Middle East. It also reshapes identity politics, excluding Jews from multicultural events, and turning “Zionist” into a charged label that Jews are pressured either to renounce or wear as provocation.

On this week's episode of The Jewish Angle, Phoebe Maltz Bovy sits down with Adam Louis-Klein, a writer and academic currently completing his PhD in Anthropology at McGill University. He is the founder of the Movement Against Antizionism and a pundit who covers this topic in the media. As he explains, by creating an activist organization with academic roots, Louis-Klein is on a mission to help Zionists prepare responses to public anti-Zionist claims while reframing the discussion entirely.

Credits

• Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy

• Producer and editor: Michael Fraiman

• Music: " Gypsy Waltz " by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective

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Lena Dunham’s latest Netflix rom-com series, Too Much, hasn't gained much traction since debuting in July 2025. In November, Netflix announced it was not renewing the series for a second season; the following month, it was ignored at the Golden Globes, despite strong casting and clever writing from Dunham, the Jewish showrunner behind the seminal HBO shows Girls.

Nonetheless, The CJN's opinion editor, Phoebe Maltz Bovy, has high praise for the show, which sees a young Jewish woman (Megan Stalter) tumultuously break up with her Jewish boyfriend (Michael Zegen), only to take a job posting in London, U.K, where she gets to live out her Brit-com and Jane Austen fantasies with a new love interest (Will Sharpe).

The show is fast-paced and funny, and drew mostly positive reviews, with critics complaining that Dunham—who famously writes autobiographically navel-gazing characters—falls into her same old habits with her lead character. But if you ask Lior Zaltzman, the deputy managing editor at Kveller, Too Much is just right, hitting the right notes both in terms of Jewish representation and assertive female storytelling. Ahead of the winter holiday season, Zaltzman joins The Jewish Angle to explain why the short-lived series is worth binging over Hanukkah.

Credits

• Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy

• Producer and editor: Michael Fraiman

• Music: " Gypsy Waltz " by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective

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In certain Orthodox Jewish circles, Reform Judaism is synonymous with far-left, queer, antifa-aligned eco-protesters—and, if your only information about such things comes from the internet, that perception may go unchallenged.

Jesse—who does not publicize his last name, but writes a Substack under the pseudonym "Bagel Emoji"—wanted to see things for himself. He decided to explore the denomination in more depth for a blog post that contextualizes Orthodox suspicions and breaks down real life in a Reform synagogue.

In his essay, "I spent a week as a Reform Jew, and this is what happened", Bagel Emoji (who says he lives between traditional and modern Orthodox) describes with an outsider's comedic eye the details many Reform Jews take for granted: the penchant for singing, the pink tallits, the old age of nearly every congregant.

He joins Phoebe Maltz Bovy to explain his weeklong immersion on this week's episode of The Jewish Angle.

Credits

• Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy

• Producer and editor: Michael Fraiman

• Music: " Gypsy Waltz " by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective

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Indiana University’s Jewish Studies program was thrown into turmoil after the quiet removal of its longtime director, Holocaust historian Mark Roseman. In his place, the administration installed Günther Jikeli, a non-Jewish academic with a reputation for a more combative, pro-Israel posture.

Jikeli quickly attracted controversy, barring a student from using a "Free Palestine" avatar on Zoom and shunting a pro-Palestinian student into an “independent study” that morphed into a planned lecture titled “In the Mind of a Pro-Hamas Student”. Faculty and students saw it as a breach of basic academic ethics—a sign that personal politics were bleeding directly into pedagogy.

What’s playing out in Bloomington mirrors a broader reckoning across American campuses, where Jewish Studies programs are wrestling with questions of identity, ideology, and the edges of academic freedom. To explore this more, Phoebe Maltz Bovy is joined by Arno Rosenfeld, a reporter at the Forward who covered this story.

Credits

• Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy

• Producer and editor: Michael Fraiman

• Music: " Gypsy Waltz " by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective

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Earlier this month, the New York Magazine cultural spinoff Vulture published an article by Andrew Ridker, "A New Jewish Plotline", asking whether Jewish writers should tackle different stories after what happened in Gaza—stop portraying themselves as victims, and address the fact that Jews are broadly affluent and powerful. But Phoebe Maltz Bovy questions the logic of this article, as it conflates broad critiques of American Jewry with literature.

To help unpack what it means to write Jewishly in a publishing world that often feels hostile to Jews, we're joined by Chaya Lauer, who brings a reader’s perspective to the debate and maps a lineage from Philip Roth to contemporary voices to show how Jewish literature is plural, not prescriptive. She pushes back on the idea that Jewish writers must answer for actions done “in their name,” calling out the dangerous stereotype of collective culpability.

Credits

• Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy

• Producer and editor: Michael Fraiman

• Music: " Gypsy Waltz " by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective

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Zohran Mamdani, while running to be mayor of New York City, initially refused to disavow the slogan “Globalize the Intifada”. Once he did eventually reverse course on that, it came off more as politically expedient than a genuine act of bridge-building or moral leadership.

That's how it struck Josh Yunis, a Jewish leftist who writes a Substack called The Diaspora. The incident felt part of a broader trend of alienation leftist Jews are feeling, finding themselves caught between right-wing ethnonationalism and left-wing selective empathy. This lack of principled universalism seems to justify Jewish skepticism, especially given historical precedents of anti-Zionism leading to Jewish marginalization.

Yunis joins Phoebe Maltz Bovy on the latest episode of The Jewish Angle to expand on these arguments and give a balanced take on what many try to paint as a black-and-white issue.

Credits

• Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy

• Producer and editor: Michael Fraiman

• Music: " Gypsy Waltz " by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective

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In the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination, other right-wing commentators are pushing their way into a more mainstream spotlight. To that end, Tucker Carlson recently hosted Nick Fuentes, a Christian nationalist and Holocaust denier, consequently enraging American Republicans who felt that his sort of extremist voice should be kept outside of the party's public dialogue. But Carlson platformed Fuentes anyway, under the presense of Fuentes being a right-wing thinker who dares to go against the establishment and criticize Israel.

Writer Emily Tamkin believes that the two sides of the party have come at odds over Jews, Israel and antisemitism. One side, she argues, comfortably claims to fight against antisemitism—even while using antisemitic dog whistles—while the other side has simply taken the mask off entirely. That's an argument she makes in a [new column](https://forward.com/opinion/782002/nick-fuentes-tucker-carlson-heritage-foundation-antisemitism/) in Forward, "The fundamental miscalculation behind the GOP’s antisemitism crisis"—and also to Phoebe Maltz Bovy on this week's episode of The Jewish Angle.

Credits

• Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy
• Producer and editor: Michael Fraiman
• Music: "Gypsy Waltz" by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective

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