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The Sopranos, Real Housewives of New Jersey, Jersey Shore etc. It seems that NJ is more associated with Italian Americans in popular culture than Long Island even though both are heavily Italian.
Maybe cuz NJ is an actual state and Long Island is just a city?
Long Island is not just one city. It's that big island at the bottom of NY State and has many different towns, cities, and beaches.
For those that may not be familiar, Brooklyn and Queens are on the island, but "Long Island" only refers to the rest of the island outside of BK and Queens.
New Jersey just has a larger profile, and more of a national identity. People think of Long Island as the place New Yorkers move when they're sick of city living. And when people think of who lives in New Jersey, they generally think Black and Italian.
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Because northern New Jersey is closer to NYC, more densely populated and more industrialized than Long Island, all factors that lend itself to a much larger profile than Long Island, which is more suburban and distant in character. Plus, it's its own state. Look at the shows you just listed. NJ has a sleazy, trashy stereotype because of those factors.
All the above answers are, at least to some degree, wrong. Sorry!
The REAL answer is probably that New Jersey is commonly thought of by snobby New Yorkers as trashy, and those snobby New Yorkers are the same people who create entertainment such as The Sopranos, The Real Housewives of New Jersey and Jersey Shore. Because the working-class-to-middle-class parts of Jersey that the New Yorkers look down on are heavily Italian, Italian-Americans become conflated with the culture and associated with it in snarky media portrayals. If you're going to make a "ha ha, look how silly New Jersey is" TV show or movie, you kind of have to make the characters Italian, because that's who lives there.
Now, Long Island can have a similarly trashy reputation, but only in parts (such as the part I'm from, which is nearly 100 percent Jews and Italians -- think Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco). However, the "trashy" parts of the Island are probably a bit wealthier on average than the "trashy" parts of Jersey, and more importantly, Long Island is also closely associated with glamorous areas such as the North Shore and the Hamptons. Jersey also has ritzy parts, so why doesn't it get credit for them in the popular imagination while Long Island does? I'm not sure, but that's another discussion.
I do think that it's kinda funny that NJ got all the bad rep from the Jersey Shore tv show, when really they were all from Staten Island and Long Island, which are in NY and not NJ.
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