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Shiksa (Template:Lang-yi) is an often disparaging, although not always, term for a gentile woman or girl. The word, which is of Yiddish origin, has moved into English usage and some Hebrew usage (as well as Polish and German), mostly in North American Jewish culture.

Among Orthodox Jews, the term may be used to describe a Jewish girl or woman who fails to follow Orthodox religious precepts.

The equivalent term for a non-Jewish male, used less frequently, is shegetz. Because of Jewish matrilineal descent, there is often less of a taboo associated with non-Jewish men.

Etymology

Severity

The term is typically considered a very mild insul

In popular culture

The shiksa has appeared as a character type in Yiddish literature. In Hayim Nahman Bialik's Behind the Fence, a young shiksa woman is impregnated by a Jewish man but abandoned for an appropriate Jewish virgin woman. Her grandmother can be considered a hag form of the shiksa. More dangerous shiksas in literature include Shmuel Yosef Agnon's "Lady and the Peddler", in which a shiksa plans to eat the Jewish man she is dating, and I. L. Peretz "Monish", which sees a Jewish man fall into a hell-like place for loving a blonde woman.

But the shikses, ah, the shikses are something else again How do they get so gorgeous, so healthy, so blonde? My contempt for what they believe in is more than neutralized by my adoration of the way they look, the way they move and laugh and speak.

As Jews populated American culture in the 20th century, more shiksa characters began to appear. Abie's Irish Rose focused on such a relationship, and the concept is mentioned in The Jazz Singer. Roth's books made the term mainstream, particularly Portnoy's Complaint in 1969. Roth placed the taboo nature of the shiksa in a cultural Jewish-American context, not a religious one. His work influenced that of Woody Allen, whose films depicted the concept. In American media, including Roth and Allen, the shiksa is often associated with eating lobster. The Los Angeles Review of Books noted that with more examples of shiksa characters, particularly on television, the concept became less taboo and more of a common stereotype.

Actresses Candice Bergen and Dianna Agron have both been described as "the archetypal shiksa" based on their roles; Agron is Jewish and Bergen is not, though she speaks Yiddish.

In 1997 Seinfeld episode "The Serenity Now", the term "shiksappeal" is used to describe the character Elaine and why every Jewish man she meets seems to be drawn to her.

In 2014, in the eighth episode of the fifth season of Downton Abbey, the term shiksa is used by the Jewish Lord Sinderby to describe Lady Rose MacClare (his son's Anglican fiancée) to his son Atticus Aldridge, as part of an argument between father and son over the former's disapproval of a non-Jewish marriage.

Derivatives

In Polish, siksa or sziksa (pronounced [ɕiksa]) is a pejorative but humorous word for an immature young girl or teenage girl. According to Polish language dictionary from 1915, it has been defined as "pisspants"; a conflation between the Yiddish term and its similarity to the Polish verb sikać ("to piss"). In today's language however, it is roughly equivalent to the English terms "snot-nosed brat", "little squirt", and "naughty schoolgirl" in a humorous context.

See also

• Gentile
• Goy

Notes

1. Non-Jewish

References

1. "shiksa". Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. Merriam-Webster. Retrieved May 22, 2016.
2. Kaiser, Menachem (March 6, 2013). "Anti-non-Semitism: An Investigation of the Shiksa". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved May 22, 2016.
3. Jaher, Frederic Cople (1983). "The Quest for the Ultimate Shiksa". American Quarterly. 35 (5): 518–542.
4. Cuddihy, John Murray (1976). The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. ISBN 9780807036099.
5. "The Jewish fear of intermarriage". BBC News. 7 February 2014.
6. ^ Cite error: The named reference salon was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
7. "Why We Don't Need Jewish Actors to Play Jewish Roles". Tablet Magazine. 2019-01-11. Retrieved 2021-10-25.
8. "A Baby at the Shiva". The Revealer. 2021-09-09. Retrieved 2021-10-25.
9. A Conversation with Mayim Bialik on Her New Film, As They Made Us. Retrieved 2022-04-08.
10. Gross, Max (July 1, 2014). "Seinfeld's 25 greatest contributions to the English language". New York Post.
11. "Warsaw University Digital Library - Słownik języka polskiego". Ebuw.uw.edu.pl. 1915. p. 128. Retrieved May 22, 2016.
12. Siksa - Poradnia językowa PWN. Polish Scientific Publishers PWN 2016.

External links

• The dictionary definition of shiksa at Wiktionary

• Pejorative terms for in-group non-members
• Jewish culture
• Yiddish words and phrases
• Pejorative terms for women