#helen dubois is jewish

[britneyshakespeare]

throughout the series of drake and josh it pretty consistently implies that josh nichols is a christian (josh peck is jewish) and in the finale of the series helen (played by yvette nicole brown, not jewish[?]) is portrayed as a practicing jew

[volimetangere]

Fran Ross, Oreo

Written in 1974, Oreo satirizes the eponymous Jewish African-American protagonist's journey to look for her father in New York. Ross loosely bases her characters off of characters in legends of Theseus', in which Theseus journeys to find his father, Aegeus. Critics have called the novel postmodern, with its fragmented and episodic structure.

The Hybrid Polyglot

Oreo's life is shaped by both her Jewish (father) and African-American identities (mother), but she does not present us with any stable sense of either culture. The introduction to the book mentions that the novel is a "mad-cap play on Dubois' 'double-consciousness'... only in this case it's not doubled, it's triple, quadrupled..." (xiv). Oreo isn't just negotiating white American culture's objectification of her, as with double consciousness, but a multitude of stereotypes and object positions brought about by her fluency in Jewish and African-American cultural norms. Language, rather than a constraint, becomes a source of power for Oreo in her attempt to shape her destiny. Her inheritance from her mother, Helen, is a "love of words, their nuance and cadence, their juice and pith, their variety and precision, their rock and wry" (37). By being attuned to what language can do, rather than solely what it means, Oreo is able to take up different linguistic registers in her different personas in her journey to find her father.

The Mythical Journey

Ross mirrors Oreo's journey with Theseus' journey, in which he finds his father and slays the minotaur, only for his father to commit suicide because he mistakenly signaled his own death. However, the "sword and sandals" in Theseus' myth, which he uses to find his father, are converted into a mezuzah (not solid gold, like her father had promised) and bed socks for Oreo. Her father accidentally falls out of the window after being reunited with Oreo, and she becomes "more distressed over accident than essence--the flukiness, not the fact of Samuel's death" (193). Oreo's father is demystified as she derives no meaning or emotion from his death, the only tragedy being the accidental nature of the sequence of events that led to his death. She assumes that her father was involved with gangsters, due to her use of her as an intermediary to retrieve a dog in exchange or money, but she discovers that his plans were a kitschy business plan--he wanted to get into the capitalist enterprise of building a soft drink empire (195). Oreo leaves us with the thought that she would leave Samuel's sperm to the sperm bank--she may or may not tell her grandfather the consequence of his biological lineage, depending on his reaction to her. Her narration ends with "nemo me impune lacessit," no one provokes me with impunity. This Latin phrase was the motto of the Stuart dynasty--Oreo writes herself briefly into a different lineage, which deflates the meaning of her biological ties to her father and grandfather.