"Jewess" does not feel good to me. It not only exoticizes Jewish women, it suggests that "Jew," while a gender-neutral term, really means a Jewish man. In a time when Jewish women are still struggling for equality in Jewish communal life, I don't think adopting "Jewess" is helpful.
An online dictionary explains the issue:
"Like many other English nouns in which the suffix -ess is added to a gender-neutral word to indicate femaleness, the terms Jewess and Negress are now widely regarded as offensive. It is interesting to note that the objection to words formed with the -ess suffix does not apply to words such as Latina and Chicana, whose contrasting forms Latino and Chicano are not gender-neutral but rather refer even in English primarily to males." (Source: http://www.thefreedictionary.c...
"Jewess" does not feel good to me. It not only exoticizes Jewish women, it suggests that "Jew," while a gender-neutral term, really means a Jewish man. In a time when Jewish women are still struggling for equality in Jewish communal life, I don't think adopting "Jewess" is helpful.
An online dictionary explains the issue:
"Like many other English nouns in which the suffix -ess is added to a gender-neutral word to indicate femaleness, the terms Jewess and Negress are now widely regarded as offensive. It is interesting to note that the objection to words formed with the -ess suffix does not apply to words such as Latina and Chicana, whose contrasting forms Latino and Chicano are not gender-neutral but rather refer even in English primarily to males."
(Source: http://www.thefreedictionary.c...