“On this show we talk about coffee, New York, daughters, dogs, you know, no big whoop, it’s just coffee talk.” If you were alive and owned a TV in the early 1990s you probably have some recollection of Linda Richman, the iconic Mike Myers Saturday Night Live character. She was a New York Jewess with an exquisite collection of “low back chain shift” vowels and an immovable pouf of black curls.
Now, I grew up on Long Island. I had a mother named Linda with a big pouf of permed hair, on-point nails, appliqué sweaters, and bling out to there. She didn’t talk like the other Linda, though; my mom was born in a very non-New York part of Pennsylvania. Nonetheless, the Linda Richman character always felt a little too close for comfort. I filed her along with the word JAP, another problematic cliché I’d rather leave behind. When I became a Yiddishist in college, not long after Myers premiered “Coffee Talk,” the Linda Richman character became, in my mind, just another unfortunate example of the way American Jews loved to laugh at Yiddish and, by extension, at themselves. JAP was a perfect intersection of misogyny and anti-Semitic stereotypes. Linda Richman, a man in drag mocking the broad accent and dazzling costume of a woman who looked a lot like someone I loved, struck me as more of the same. Genug shoyn.
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