Conclusion

This concluding chapter returns to the question of Jewish female representation through an embodied Jewface genre. In some cases the Sexy Jewess embodies familiar versions of the comic personages made most familiar across an assimilatory twentieth century. In other cases, she performs Jewishly through sexier means, revamping iconic personifications of the pinup and porn star in raunchier acts that throw back to vintage aesthetics with the appeal of nostalgia. In all cases, the performers appear to negotiate the guilty pleasures of whiteness within self-conscious reach. Through skewed mirrors of self-display, selected performers foreground the bodily conditions of their ethnic and gender differences, to humorous and horrifying ends. With varying degrees of autonomy and access, they perform exaggerated versions of themselves and any others in their midst to wage social critiques that are both distinct to American Jewishness and beyond its bounds.