What Patrick Swayze Did for Jewish Women

Below are excerpts from an article titled What Patrick Swayze Did for Jewish Women, written by Judith Rosenbaum and published in Jewish Women's Archive.

.... [Patrick] Swayze's death is not just sad (he was only 57); for Jewish girls of my generation, it's the end of era. I've written here already about the cultural meaning of Dirty Dancing, exploring the Jewish subtext of the film and Baby's imaginary trajectory after the film ends. But today I'm thinking about Swayze as Johnny and what it is that he offered young girls like me.

.... What made the character of Johnny so long-lasting in the fantasy life of Jewish women of a certain age is that the unattainable, sexy non-Jewish boy became (in the movie, at least, briefly) attainable. Baby's love for Johnny isn't unrequited. Johnny loves Baby back. He recognizes what's sexy about her, loves her despite -- or perhaps because of -- her Jewish nose and frizzy hair and tendency to blurt things out awkwardly. ("I carried a watermelon?!?")

Usually, movie love between Jewish women and sexy, non-Jewish men is unrequited. Take The Way We Were for example -- sure, Hubbell (Robert Redford) and Katie (Barbra Streisand) get married and even have a baby, but it's clear that Hubbell doesn't really love Katie the way she loves him. She can only be fully appreciated by a fellow Jewish activist-type -- whom we never see but are damn sure cannot compare to Robert Redford -- not the hot gentile.

But Johnny is different. Even though he and Baby can't ultimately be together, he really gets her. Not only does he like her and desire her, he is changed by her, and he acknowledges it publicly. Sure, he gets the big moment of agency in pulling Baby out of that corner, but she's the one who gets to fly in the lift. She saves him as much as, if not more than, he saves her. After all, he has the time of his life, and he owes it all to her!

The earnest, nerdy, frizzy-haired 14-year-old Jewish girl inside of me will be forever grateful to Patrick Swayze for making me feel like I could be graceful and sexy as I am, for giving me hope that someday someone might be turned on by my mind and my principles (and, well, maybe my body, too). ....

Below are a couple of the article's comments:

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Tara

I think that speaks a lot to the self-hatred that a lot of Jewish girls and women have. Why do we hate our "Jewish noses" and "frizzy" hair? Why are we trying to attain some standard of beauty that is sexist, anti-semitic, and racist? Yes this inter-religious love affair is sweet and inspirational, but why did you need Patrick Swayze to tell you that you were desirable as you were, as a Jewish woman? We need to stop looking for reinforcement that it is OK to "look Jewish" or to be Jewish, we are amazing as we are, and if some blond gentile doesn't see it, so be it.

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mb

Hi, I just wanted to check to see if you're sure he wasn't Jewish. He certainly was cute enough to be.

"Dirty Dancing" is the Greatest Movie of All Time

Below are excerpts from an article titled Dirty Dancing is the Greatest Movie of All Time, written by Irin Carmon and published in Jezebel.com:

The greatness of Dirty Dancing was not lost on me in my near-daily viewings as a child and preteen, re-enacting every dance with my sister. What I learned a little later: it's a great, brave movie for women.

That it was a wildly successful, commercial film, widely seen as "ugly duckling gets the guy" doesn't change that, although screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein told me this week it always dismayed her that that's how people saw it. In her mind as in mine, Jennifer Grey's Baby is a strong-minded idealistic young woman with her own interests, who doesn't have to change herself to get the guy even as she undergoes a transformation from gawky wallflower to confident onstage dancer. But Patrick Swayze's Johnny, too, changes and learns from her, under the force of her stubborn, naive belief that you can "fight harder."

"I conceived of her and made her a fighter. A girl who just won't give up... and who doesn't expect the world to be handed to her. There's a lot she doesn't understand, but she works very, very hard," says Eleanor. ....

The first time we glimpse Baby, she's reading a book called Plight Of The Peasant, because she's going to major in the economics of underdeveloped countries and not English. The daughter of the first generation of American Jews to read widespread upper-middle class prosperity, if not elite cultural acceptance, she is swathed in a pre-Kennedy assassination liberalism. But her time at Kellerman's that summer is a loss of innocence in one significant way — and I'm not talking about her virginity.

Told her whole life that she could do anything and change the world, she's faced with the hypocrisy of a long-shunned minority enacting its own unexamined exclusion, this time on class grounds. The guests at Kellerman's look comfortable, but they were raised in the Depression and traumatized by World War II. She can contrast the welcome her family received at the resort with the chilly, dismissive one Johnny and his working class dance crew gets. She can dance with the owner's son and thaw a little when she learns he's going freedom riding with the bus boys, then see how he treats Johnny. She can find out that the supposed prize, Yale Medical school and out-WASPing-the-WASPs Robbie, is also an Ayn Rand-reading cad whose life philosophy is, "Some people count, some people don't."

.... Eleanor Bergstein says the moment Johnny falls in love with Baby is when she screws up the lift in their first performance at the Sheldrake and does what she called the "hitchhiker move." ...

This is a "false climax," Eleanor says. Another movie would have built up to a performance she got perfectly right (and indeed there is one, later), and she gets the guy. Instead, they come back to Penny's botched abortion, a still incredibly rare and key plot point that Eleanor says she put in back in the mid-1980s because she was afraid Roe v. Wade would be overturned. ....

And she likes sex. Did I mention she likes sex? Watch, if you will, how she slowly, deliberately surveys his body, ...

You'll have to read the entire article to read its juicy parts.

Is ‘Dirty Dancing’ the Most Jewish Film Ever?

Stephanie Butnick, the deputy editor of Tablet magazine, published in that magazine in 2011 an article titled Is "Dirty Dancing" the Most Jewish Film Ever? Before I read that article, I myself had begun to write an article about the film's Jewish element. While I still am writing it, I am posting here some excerpts from Butnick's article.

.... Eleanor Bergstein, the writer and co-producer of the incredibly popular film Dirty Dancing [said] that it was a seriously Jewish movie. So Jewish, in fact, that none of the characters ever need to explicitly mention their Jewishness — they’re spending the summer at Kellerman’s resort in the Catskills, after all, and, Bergstein pointed out proudly, milk and meat are never served in the same scene. It’s a Jewish film, she explained, “if you know what you’re looking at.” ...

The film is hugely Jewish, capturing a 1960s Jewish family and their open-minded but still guarded sensibilities. ... Told her whole life that she could do anything and change the world, she’s faced with the hypocrisy of a long-shunned minority enacting its own unexamined exclusion, this time on class grounds. The guests at Kellerman’s look comfortable, but they were raised in the Depression and traumatized by World War II.

Butnick did not develop her thesis, but her recognition of the film's Jewish essence is correct.

Below are some of the comments to Butnick's article:

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marjorie says:

.... I adore this film, with its very Jewish depiction of bungalow colonies, liberal idealism, changing times, Baby and her dad’s relationship, “I carried a watermelon,” THE LIFT, and the total hilarious adorability of the very Jewish-looking Jennifer Grey. ...

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Joy says:

OMG..I love this film… I was a ‘hotel brat’ ([my] family owned country Catskill-like hotels also) and every scene resonated with me then and even now!!

Jewish? Of course…..We who married oh, so young grew up in the ‘Marjorie Morningstar’ era and Dirty Dancing reconfirmed the excitement of sudden liberation we experienced … including ‘forbidden’ loves! ....

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Jacob Blues says:

Most Jewish film ever? I think you have serious competition from the following:

The Frisco Kid
A Serious Man
A Prince of Egypt
Ushpizin

And of course that Jewish classic – Blazing Saddles (oops) I meant Fiddler on the Roof.

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Marilyn Cohen says:

I agree with Jacob Blues, but I would also include “Yentl” in a list of most Jewish movies.

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Marilyn Cohen says:

I forgot to mention “The Chosen” and, of course, the original “Jazz Singer”.

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Margaret says:

I’m not even Jewish and loved the film (as a Jewish film)… who else would have a ‘save the day doctor” for a dad but a Jewish princess! Anyway, I think the idea of a remake is a sacrilege (if you know what I mean).

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Michael Wasser says:

I nominate Crossing Delancy

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Vic says:

This movie came out when this Jewish girl was a freshman at — you guessed it — Mount Holyoke. It will always be very close to my heart!

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Pat says:

I nominate “The Way We Were”

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Judith says:

I also consider this one of the quintessential Jewish movies, and a movie that is particularly important to many Jewish women. I’ve blogged about it here:

http://jwablog.jwa.org/swayze

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Mark L. Levinson says:

It was a terribly anti-Semitic film. The sexy goyish boy liberates the girl from her uptight Jewish environment and teaches her to express her sexuality, while on the other hand when a girl gets pregnant it’s the fault of the ostensibly nice Jewish student… and even when there’s pilfering of valuables, it turns out to be the ostensibly harmless Jewish oldsters. Can’t trust these innocent-looking Jews. In fact the Jews can do no right in DIRTY DANCING, except to learn from the goyim how to live life.

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Heather Scholl says:

Mark L. Levinson, the woman who wrote it….wrote it from her OWN experiences as a Jewish girl. She says in the interview that she was celebrating her Jewish heritage in the screenplay. Are you trying to say that she is closeted anti-Semitic? That seems rather silly.

I have watched the movie multiple times with Bergstein’s commentary and she seemed incredibly focused on the dichotomy of Kennedy liberalism combined with a decades-present class structure. She was foreshadowing the coming rather explosive end to the neat and tidy class structure that rich people had built for themselves. With the Kennnedy assassination, the Vietnam war, civil rights, Watts riots, the hippie generation…..the walls of class came crashing down. What exists now are remnants of it but the world was forever changed.

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One of the comments mentioned a podcast that I would love to listen to, but the link does not work.

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Binnie Klein says:

Had the unusual experience of meeting Jackie Horner, who was the inspiration for the character “Penny” in the Catskills last year. She’s still teaching the mambo!

Here’s a 4-minute audio piece I produced about that meeting, first aired on AARP radio:

http://postscript.podbean.com/2011/03/
.