Her Jewish Voice
In the MP3 recording, the actor’s voice was bright as a strawberry shortcake, sweet vowels and whipped-cream consonants. She was reciting the words from one of my essays, a piece about ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian War of the early 1990s. Her intonations sounded all wrong: “BY contrast, the blue PAINTING is a site OF serenity.” It was as if she had sprinkled sugar over each sentence quite randomly, no relation between the sound of language and its sense. She was reading a passage from a book about my childhood, how I grew up in landscapes stalked by war and genocide, my own family’s narrative of dispersion, what it means to be an Ashkenazi Jew. But in her audition, the actor’s voice bobbed up and down, cheery as an apple floating in a tub of water. This was a voice for romance novels. It was a voice for self-help books. This was a voice that didn’t know Jewishness is a slow-cooked stew, a dish of onion-tears.
I wrote to the director of the press, who had described the audition as “wonderfully effective.” Could I be the one to record my book? I asked him. After all, I had trained in the theater. I had even worked as a voice actor. One of the essays in my book described the hours I spent standing in front of a microphone when I was a teenager, that my voice had taught a whole generation of Polish children how to speak American English. And, I went on to argue, the book was filled with difficult words in German, French, Hebrew, Yiddish, and most of all Polish, a language of smooshed-together phonemes, impossible juxtapositions of sh and ch, delicate, whooshing vowels. “I find this reading a little sterile,” I explained in my email.
In fact, the actor’s voice was so cleansed of memory that when I first listened to the recording I searched for the woman online, trying to determine if she was a real person or was she, perhaps, something made with a computer program. I sent the audition tape to a friend who immediately said, That is not a human voice. What on earth? Your book is about genocide, and they’re feeding it to AI?
But the actor was, indeed, human. She was just the wrong person to recite my story. There is a Yiddish word—now considered too disparaging, almost a slur—for the woman I heard on the recording. Its etymology means a detested thing. More politely, we might say: gentile woman. This woman articulated my words, clearly and with great confidence, as if she were ordering her usual latte at a coffee shop, the drink sugary, rich with syrup. Certainly, when she spoke, there were no seeds of ancestral pain.
Another email or two, and it became clear that I would not be permitted to record my own essays. So, I asked for something else. Could the production team hire a Jewish actor instead? I wanted to know. Someone who would understand Jewish identity, the distinctive thumbprint that trauma leaves on the Jewish self?
After I sent the message, I thought about my request. I stood before the bathroom mirror and spoke a few sentences to my reflection, watching the shape of my mouth in the glass. Was there such a thing as an Ashkenazi Jewish voice? A Mizrahi voice? A Sephardic one? I wondered. And what would these voices contain—traces of chopped herring, the scattered turmeric of displacement, the deep flavors of apricots and raisins? Certainly, the god of the Hebrew Bible speaks with a voice that is rabbinical. He reproaches Job. Where were you, he asks, demanding textual evidence. Even in the King James Version, he sounds like a Jew. “Have the gates of death been opened unto thee? Or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death?” This god is rhetorically skillful. He can wield an argument like a honed knife. He doesn’t beat around the burning bush. I knew I wasn’t asking for the nasaled intonations of a nanny from Flushing, Queens. I didn’t mean the swooping elegance of Barbra or Bette Midler’s stomping tones. I wanted what I couldn’t quite name—knowledge, kinship, and apartness. Caricatured, the voice of the Ashkenazi Jew is strident. It scrapes at the ears. It is as harsh as horseradish. I thought of a recent television series, which had caused many American Jews to worry about the ways we are still depicted in popular culture.
In the show, a handsome rabbi falls in love with a blue-eyed woman, her hair like dense handfuls of cornsilk. She is not a Jew, and his family—particularly the women—react with scorn and anxiety. Their voices are sharp. They say cruel and clawing things. Of course, these Jewish women are beautiful too, all of them dark-haired, their bodies voluptuous like the curves of a Kiddush cup. This is often how Jewish women from across the diaspora are represented in art, what Philip Roth once called
“The Gentile dream of the melon-breasted Jewess.” In earlier centuries, the trope was known as la belle Juive. She was an exotic figure, fetishized for her Biblical features. La belle Juive was an exquisite gem set in the tarnished prongs of the Roman ghetto or a filthy shtetl in the Pale of Settlement, somehow lovely despite her ruined surroundings. In Charles Landelle’s painting from 1874, Juive de Tanger, I find echoes of my own features. Skin that is both fair and olive-tinged. Dark eyes in the shape of almonds. Hair falling into ringlets, refusing to lie flat. Many decades before the Shoah, this image of a Sephardic girl from Tangier evokes Celan. “dein aschenes Haar Sulamith.” As Jean- Paul Sartre observes in his book Anti-Semite and Jew, the phrase “‘a beautiful Jewess…carries an aura of rape and massacre. The ‘beautiful Jewess’ is she whom the Cossacks under the czars dragged by her hair through the streets of her burning village.”
But as long as la belle Juive stays silent—her eyes fixed on some distant point of history—she remains desirable. In America, it’s the voices of Ashkenazi Jewish women that are perceived as grating. The voice is what makes them grotesque.
Like the Greek myth of the harpy, a Jewish woman who speaks is rendered part human and part bird, a beaked creature with a vulturous appetite. Caw-caw, she shrieks.
I returned to the bathroom and stared again at my face. What made my own voice Jewish? I asked myself. Here’s what I know.
My voice is stripped of any regional distinctions, thanks to a peripatetic childhood in Yugoslavia, Zaire, Washington, DC, Poland, and Belgium. My parents, who were career Foreign Service Officers, did everything they could to disappear from my speech any evidence of Jewishness. They were both raised in multilingual households. Yet they too speak a deracinated American English.
My mother’s accentless voice is particularly remarkable, given that she grew up in Honduras and moved to Miami only when she was a junior in high school. German and Spanish were her first languages, the pickled sounds of Yiddish often drifting from the kitchen. In our many postings abroad, my parents were often afraid for my safety, I suspect. As first-generation Americans, the children of stateless refugees, they must have worried that my voice might mark me as foreign, perpetually exiled.
My voice was trained to project from the stage to the last row of seats in the theater. I have excellent diction. My voice can make all the twisting consonants of Polish and the 19 vowels of French, the mouth that puckers and purses around those narrow, Gallic sounds. So, what makes my voice Jewish? Deborah Tannen, a scholar of linguistics, has written about what she calls the “New York Jewish Conversational Style.” And while my voice may be that of an American from Nowhere, U.S.A, I recognize myself in Tannen’s characterizations of New York Jewish speech. There is, for instance, a certain rapidity to how I communicate, a tendency to engage in what Tannen calls “cooperative overlap and participatory listenership,” which is to say I interrupt to show my enthusiasm and interest. I use “expressive paralinguistics,” my voice dramatic in its rise and fall. Tannen observes that “style is often invisible. People tend to take their conversational habits as self-evident and draw conclusions not about others’ linguistic devices but about their intentions or personalities.” I have felt this to be true in many literary and academic spaces where my Jewish voice often has been treated as unwelcome, pushy, or intrusive. My voice has been called monstrous. My voice has been told to shut up. If I wished to entirely remove the Jewishness from my voice, I would have to stay silent in every room.
A few days after I received the first audition tape, my publisher sent me a recording of a second actor. As soon as she began to speak, I knew her Jewish voice, although she too spoke a regionless American English. Her pitch was low, her intonation insistent and intense. There was no effort to ingratiate herself with a listener. She read my words as if she recognized the story. This time, it was an essay about my adolescence in Warsaw:
As far as I know, Mrs. H and I are the only Jews in school. I often sit with her during recess and free periods, reading while she grades papers. Or else we talk about books. Mrs. H is everyone’s favorite teacher. Given how bullied I am, how much my classmates enjoy whispering “you’re hideous” and “you stink,” Mrs. H’s popularity is miraculous to me; that she can make her strangeness so appealing to others is like the wonder of a tiny cup of oil lasting eight days when there is only enough to burn for one night.
Listening to the Jewish actor’s audition, I felt surprise and relief that my publisher had understood what I was asking for, even when I had barely grasped my own request. I had been looking for a voice like mine, a voice that accepts, after all these years, its position at the edge of things, a voice no longer interested in hiding what makes it other. Call it a voice of calf ’s foot jelly.
If my specific Jewishness has a voice, then it speaks from a shared history and ancestry, a common set of laws. That first actor, the pert one—her sweetened tones would have muffled what made me me on the page, all those difficult flavors of diaspora, the bitterness of cumin, the burned red of paprika, the acid of sumac on the tongue.
Jehanne Dubrow is the author of three books of nonfiction, a craft book, and ten poetry collections, including most recently Civilians (LSU Press, 2025).
