Personal Essay Explores Secret Jewish History Of Smurfette

Who knew? Smurfette was once a brunette. Image by Getty Images

By Phoebe Maltz Bovy March 23, 2017

There are a good number of essays floating around — and I should know, having written some of them — exploring Jews’ relationship to whiteness. And a decent number of those tackle the intersectional question of Jewish women’s peculiar racialization (and sexualization) in modern Western society. But none, to my knowledge, had addressed the issue in terms of the Smurfs. That is, until now.

In a brilliant Hazlitt piece, Rachel Klein connects her own experiences growing up as a Jewish woman with the surprising backstory to a children’s character she’d grown up with: Smurfette, the lady Smurf:

“[A]ccording to the official blurb that appears on almost every site hawking Smurf collectibles, she was originally a brunette with ‘a big nose and wild hair.’ Smurfette, it turned out, at least at first, looked a lot like me. That is to say: Jewish.”

As Klein explains, this was no mere physical transformation. While in popular culture, young blond women are used to represent innocence or conventional beauty, brunettes (generally white women, but with dark hair) have their own symbolic significance. Klein’s fascinating insight is pinpointing what changes when instead of a mere “brunette,” a white-looking, dark-haired female character is coded as Jewish:

[I]f the evil brunette is ubiquitous in children’s stories and comic books, Smurfette, introduced in 1966 by the Belgian artist Peyo who created the Smurfs eight years earlier, seemed to piggyback not only on age-old anxieties about female sexuality, but specific stereotypes of Jewish female sexuality at a time when the world (and particularly Europe) was still reeling from a confrontation with its own dark demons of prejudice and hate against that particular community.

What’s so great about Klein’s essay is how she captures the way identity emerges from subtle cultural messages overlapping — and, in a way, fusing — with real life experiences.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy edits the Sisterhood, and can be reached at [email protected]. She is the author of The Perils of “Privilege”, from St. Martin’s Press. Follow her on Twitter, @tweetertation

Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a former editor of the Sisterhood blog at the Forward. Her writing has appeared in several publications, including The New Republic and The Atlantic. Her book, “The Perils of ‘Privilege,’” was published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2017. She has a PhD in French and French Studies from New York University, and has read a lot of 19th century French Jewish newspapers for a 21st century American.

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