The rise of the Jewish nerds

In the nineteenth-century, you couldn’t forward YouTube videos, but you could purchase and mail a wide variety of postcards with exceedingly mean ethnic caricatures on them. The ones that took the Jew as their subject usually depicted him as clumsy and androgynous — falling off a bicycle, dropping a rifle when drafted into the army, wrestling incompetently with another Jew, being upended by frolicking children — wailing, smiling goofily, groping for his glasses. This visual tradition matched a literary one in which authors described Jews as ‘cowed’ and ‘the least of any people addicted to military life,’ prone to calculation and incapable of ‘scuffles.’ This is not unlike the contemporary idea of the nerd.
The word ‘nerd’ doesn’t show up in print until 1950, but the old caricatures dating back to eighteenth-century England and Germany, suggest that the Jew played a similar comic role to our contemporary nerd. In fact, the paradigmatic Hollywood nerd character of the 1980s, Louis Skolnick, the Lenin of the great uprising imagined in Revenge of the Nerds, in which the nerds seize control of a college from the jocks and their allies, is to all intents and purposes a nineteenth-century postcard Jew: clumsy, limp-wristed, helpless in physical combat, with a big nose, glasses, and a toothy smile. Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.