How to Increase a Jewish Mother’s Pain Tolerance

No, that’s not the start of a joke, either for Commentary or for a Ron Paul newsletter. It’s an amusing fact from The Challenge of Pain, a book of popular medicine from 1982:

In a similar [pain-tolerance] experiment (Lambert et al., 1960), in which Jewish and Protestant women served as subjects, the Jewish, but not the Protestant, women increased their tolerance levels after they were told that their religious group tolerated pain more poorly than others.

So there you are. Say that Jewish women are worse at withstanding pain than women of other faiths, and voilà — stiff upper lip. Is it possible that an entire swath of Jewish-mother stereotypes began as a plot to produce this effect on a wide scale, only to backfire wildly?

Of course, the next paragraph in Challenge of Pain describes a 1952 study that found Jewish and Italian Americans do “tend to be vociferous in their complaints” relative to “Old Americans” (let the term be a reminder of the study’s vintage and the notions of its authors). That study drew this further distinction: “Jews tend to be concerned about the meaning and implications of the pain, while Italians usually express a desire for immediate pain relief.” That can be Plan B, then, if telling her it’s a shanda doesn’t work: talk with her about her pain’s meaning and implications. That almost always works on me, anyway.