Who knew that feminist anthropologist Margaret Mead had a hand in demonizing the Jewish mother? Mead persuaded the American Jewish Committee to fund research at Columbia University on the European shtetl. Interviews with 128 European-born Jews who had immigrated to the United States demonstrated a range of different family experiences. But the anthropologists who wrote up the study and published it in the 1950s, in frequently cited books and articles, placed a "nagging, whining and malingering" mother at the center of the shtetl family. They reported that these mothers gave their children unshakable love but anchored it in "boundless suffering." They retold this folktale:

"A young man begs his mother for her heart, which his betrothed has demanded as a gift; having torn it out of his mother's proffered breast, he races away with it; and as he stumbles, the heart falls to the ground, and he hears it question protectively, 'Did you hurt yourself, my son?' "

And so a stereotype was born.