‘Broad City’ Girls Going Bra Shopping With Mom Captures A Quintessential Jewish American Experience

The broads go bra shopping in the final season of ‘Broad City’ Image by Comedy Central YouTube

By Jenny Singer February 14, 2019

“Look what I brought you — fresh, virgin, breast meat!”

It is a right of passage in a young Jewish woman’s life to be dragged by her mother or other female authority to a dingy room, to be measured by a woman who grew up in a time with different standards for personal boundaries for a ludicrously expensive, sturdy beige bra.

“Girls, a bra that fits is the single greatest gift that one woman can give another,” Ilana Wexler’s mother tells her daughter and her best friend in the most recent episode of the fifth and final season of “Broad City.” “And if I see either of you two girls wearing one of those napkins from Victorias Secrets, I will personally come and murder you.” Underscored on the show by eerie music and shadowy lighting, it’s a scene middle-class American Jewish women will instantly recognize — the horror show of shopping with your mother for a bra that fits.

As it has done so many times in the past, “Broad City” perfectly captures and lovingly sends up a quintessential American Jewish experience.

Surrounded on all four sides by hundreds of brassieres the size of infant scalps, Abbi and Ilana stand before a vicious tribunal — Ilana’s mother and two stout, Eastern European women with powdered faces and (from personal experience) ice-cold fingers. “Bring out the measuring rod!” Ilana’s mom shouts, overjoyed.

“You have a lump,” one of the women tells Abbi, nonchalantly, squeezing her breast. She cocks her head. “It is benign.”

Together, the two bras cost $533.

For bras that fit? A steal.

The intimate and intricate experience of bra shopping with a particularly supportive kind of mother is memorialized on screen forever. How do you like them apples?

Jenny Singer is the deputy life/features editor for the Forward. You can reach her at Singer@forward.com or on Twitter @jeanvaljenny

Jenny Singer is a freelance writer with pieces in Vox, the Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Teen Vogue, and more. She was previously a staff writer at Glamour and the Forward, and she’s currently getting an MFA in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

The coming year promises to be filled with more complex and historic developments. We are entering an era where independent, fact-based Jewish journalism will be more important than ever. We need to be ready for whatever 2025 will bring, and with your help, we can be.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO