ABSTRACT
Monica is also a variant spelling for moniker, which is how her mother Lewinsky's first name would have been pronounced in the Long Island neighborhoods of Marjorie Garber's youth, or indeed in some districts of present-day Boston. Overseas, in Europe and in the Middle East, Monica's Jewish identity was very much part of her story. In the United States, however, her Jewishness was seldom mentioned, except when she herself brought it up. When it was reported that Monica had given the president a copy of Oy Vey! The Things They Say! A Minibook of Jewish Wit, for example, one journalist cited Henry Kissinger's 'Power is the great aphrodisiac!' as a particularly apposite selection. Although some of the story's 'Jewish' elements went unnamed and unmarked, they powerfully and uncannily reinscribed the story of Jewish-American assimilation and its late-twentieth-century discontents. Like Monica, Barbara Walters is described as 'insecure' and 'peculiarly vulnerable'.
