My first-ever sleepaway camp experience, aged eight, left something to be desired. Summer camp itself was fine, but socially, this one was not the greatest fit. Other girls at Camp Ramah in the Berkshires made fun of me for wearing clothes that didn’t match. One’s bike shorts were meant to be the same colour and pattern as one’s t-shirts, or in complementary shades. I had not gotten the memo, but more than that, I didn’t even get what they meant. Who were these eight-year-olds with such concerns?

I got back to Manhattan and received an education on the internally policed distinctions between suburban and urban Jews. I had, I learned, been at summer camp with… JAPs. Jewish American Princesses. These girls had looked down on me, but they had it wrong, for it was I who ought to be looking down on them, with their trivial preoccupations and provincial outlook.

But any internal understandings of myself as not that thing would fall apart in the face of learning how I seemed to the outside world. The narcissism of small differences is the only realm where Great Neck registers as meaningfully different from the “ritzy Upper East Side.” To an outsider—a non-Jew, or even, a Jewish man—often enough, a JAP is a JAP is a JAP.

Historically, when someone has wanted to make me feel bad about myself, to emphasize that they see me as unoriginal and unimpressive, they have sometimes gone for the JAP jugular. A type I had first encountered in the form of conformist mean-girls was also, somehow, the thing I stood accused of being, often implicitly, occasionally with the phrase. I am, after all, a doctah’s dawtah from New Yawk.

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Here is where the conventional essay, having established colour via a personal anecdote, switches over to the history of a phenomenon. And what is a JAP if not conventional?

Inside academia and beyond, scholars and others have documented and theorized the JAP. Historian Paula Hyman’s argument, that anti-JAP sentiment was a kind of displaced antisemitism, coming from Jewish men who turned around and accused Jewish women of being what society thought of Jewish men, is pretty convincing. And there’s something interesting here in the language itself, in the way the acronym could just as easily accommodate “prince,” yet rarely does. It exists in conjunction not with the nebbish, but with the unconventional male love interest, the Jewish man who’s the dream husband of every husband-seeking Jewish and gentile woman around.

The JAP origin story is often given as Philip Roth’s 1959 novella, “Goodbye Columbus,” though Brenda Patimkin always struck me as too sexy to be a JAP. Indeed, the JAP marked a break from the belle Juive, a nineteenth-century French stereotype of young Jewish women as particularly beautiful and sexual. The purveyors of that stereotype were, as a........

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