We Need a Word for What’s Happening to Jewish Women

We Need a Word for What's Happening to Jewish Women - Ms. Magazine Skip to content Trending: Activism Masculinity SAVE Act Dolores Huerta FEMINIST250 Epstein survivors Immigration Women voters Global National Violence & Harassment I propose “misogynam” (mih-SAH-jih-NAHM)—the intertwined violence of anti-Semitism and misogyny directed at Jewish women.

Supporters and members of the Tree of Life Congregation on Oct. 30, 2018, in Pittsburgh, Pa., after the first two victims of the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history were laid to rest. (Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images) Ever since I’ve been writing about slut-shaming, I’ve been called a slut and a whore.

In the 1990s, the age of doorstopper phone books (the kind with white pages and yellow pages), I received alarming letters delivered to my mailbox. In the early 2000s, the letters morphed into emails. And when I began posting on Instagram, the insults followed me there, too.

Over three decades, the insults were consistent: I was called various synonyms for prostitute and vagina, and an ugly pedophile for good measure. The hatred was misogyny—targeted, specific and designed to put me back in my place.

Then Hamas brutally attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel retaliated in a devastating war in Gaza. The insults changed. I am no longer a regular slut and a whore; I am a “Jewish whore,” a “chosenite supporting the porn industry,” and a “whore” whom everyone could agree was bad apart from “tribes who hate Jesus.”

I had never posted anything about Israel or the fact that I was Jewish—I hadn’t even worn my chai symbol or Jewish star necklace on social media—yet the comments found me anyway, intent on outing me as if to clear up any possible misunderstanding of who I really am. And who am I, really, to the people denigrating me publicly? I experience being called a “Jewish whore” in public as a far more sinister act than when I receive hateful emails targeting me solely for being a woman and feminist because “Jewish whore” is not simply a modular combination of anti-Semitism plus misogyny. It is a container of a more complex tangle of hatreds.

The new Louis Theroux documentary on Netflix about influencers of the “manosphere” makes this explicit. Theroux interviews Amrou Fudl, also known as Myron Gaines, who asked on his podcast Fresh and Fit: “Who pushed feminism? The fucking Jews. Who pushed homosexuality? The Jews.”

On the alt-right, anti-Semitism and misogyny are not merely coexistent; they are structurally dependent on each other.

We need precise language to make sense of this phenomenon.

I propose misogynam (mih-SAH-jih-NAHM)—misogyny that targets a Jewish person, or member of am Yisrael, the people of Israel. This portmanteau follows the model of communication scholar Moya Bailey, who brilliantly coined misogynoir—combining misogyny with noir, the French word for black—to name the specific anti-Black stereotypes and oppression that Black women uniquely face. Bailey developed her framework within the broader intellectual tradition of intersectionality established by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, which holds that overlapping systems of discrimination produce forms of harm that are irreducible to their parts.

To some, I am a member of a group that is responsible for societal deterioration. To others, I’m a repository of anger about Israel’s actions in Gaza. Whatever the impetus, when anti-Semitism—which historian Susannah Heschel describes as always present as “a reservoir of possibility waiting to be activated”—fuses with misogyny, the result is a combustible force.

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Scholars have demonstrated the long, sordid history of anti-Semitism, including the ways in which Jewish people have been accused of reversing the natural order of gender roles, with Jewish men mocked as feminized and Jewish women vilified as sexually promiscuous and aggressive. From antiquity through the Middle Ages, from the pogroms of the Pale of Settlement and the Jewish communities of North Africa to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, Jewish women have been raped systematically: not only as an act of individual brutality, but as a tool to humiliate the Jewish community at large in a particularly sadistic and public manner.

I witnessed misogynam in a different form when I was growing up in suburban New York with the “Jewish American Princess,” or “JAP,” stereotype. This slur depicted a materialistic, shallow, entitled woman who is sexually frigid yet also sexually tempting, a tease. In the 1980s, a popular T-shirt said, “Slap a JAP.”

I’ve also experienced it internally. In some religiously observant Jewish communities, male rabbis dictate how women should dress so as not to tempt