Barbra Streisand, spokesperson for the oppressed, now wants to campaign on behalf of the most maligned, most mistreated, most outrageously defamed sub- population in these United States. We're talking, of course, about Jewish women. "As a Jewish woman," says Streisand, "I have always been bothered by negative stereotypes about us, and in my films I have always tried to show Jewish women in a positive light." Oh? In The Mirror Has Two Faces, the movie she directed and starred in last year, Streisand showed herself in a positive light -- but Lauren Bacall and Mimi Rogers, who played her mother and sister, came across as the JAPpiest of Jewish American princesses. Meanwhile, on her concert tour, she occasionally appeared on stage with the comedian Mike Myers, dressed in drag to play his outrageously stereotypical middle-aged JAP character, Linda Richman.
Streisand is pronouncing on Jewish womanhood in her capacity as honorary chair of Brandeis University's new International Research Institute on Jewish Women, funded by the Jewish women's organization Hadassah. Says the institute's director, Shulamit Reinharz, "After 2,000 years of nearly total exclusion from the prestigious processes of learning and creating knowledge, Jewish women are ready to take their place at the table."
Somehow this feels like a comedown from the work of Hadassah founder Henrietta Szold -- promoting the creation of a Jewish state, educating immigrants, and finding homes for 30,000 children orphaned by the Nazi regime. Is Streisand really a fitting successor to Szold?