Podhoretz: "Tiger Mom" is Just a Stereotype
John Podhoretz writes:
One virtue of the “Tiger Mother” controversy is that, after half a century, the Jewish mother may at last be supplanted in the national consciousness as the key ethnic neurosis-generation machine.
Amy Chua, author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” (Penguin Press), is married to a Jewish man, and the only defense I can come up with for her utterly mystifying book is that it was written to give her husband’s mother and grandmother and all other women of his ancient tribe the break they so dearly deserve.
Forget all the talk about Chua’s ideas on education and excellence and the like. “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” isn’t really about all that. It’s a book intended to immortalize a new cultural stereotype at a time when we’re supposed to be disgusted by them and look beyond them.
Chua’s commercial genius is that she understands just how much people — especially nice polite liberal elite Americans — yearn for the politically incorrect permission to believe in such stereotypes.
But the only way they can be granted such permission is if the stereotyper has unimpeachable credentials. Thus, “Glee” can traffic in gay stereotypes because its creator is gay — and Chua can create a caricature of the hard-driving Chinese mother because she is one herself.
The same was true half a century ago when the Jewish mother emerged as a dominant cultural stereotype — first in Bruce Jay Friedman’s brilliant 1964 comic novel “A Mother’s Kisses” and then immortalized by the smothering maternal tyrant Sophie Portnoy in Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint.”
What’s weird about “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” is that it’s as if “Portnoy’s Complaint” had been written by Sophie Portnoy. The “Tiger Mother” makes Sophie and all other Jewish mothers glitter and gleam by comparison. It’s like this: The Tiger Mother rejects her 3-year-old’s hand-made birthday card because it’s not good enough; the Jewish mother saves every scrap of that child’s scribblings until her home is ready to be featured on “Hoarders.”
