Race, Color, Identity

Rethinking Discourses about 'Jews' in the Twenty-First Century

Efraim Sicher, Efraim Sicher

• Éditeur: Berghahn Books
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857458933
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Social Sciences
• Sous-sujet: Jewish Studies

Advances in genetics are renewing controversies over inherited characteristics, and the discourse around science and technological innovations has taken on racial overtones, such as attributing inherited physiological traits to certain ethnic groups or using DNA testing to determine biological links with ethnic ancestry. This book contributes to the discussion by opening up previously locked concepts of the relation between the terms color, race, and "Jews", and by engaging with globalism, multiculturalism, hybridity, and diaspora. The contributors—leading scholars in anthropology, sociology, history, literature, and cultural studies—discuss how it is not merely a question of whether Jews are acknowledged to be interracial, but how to address academic and social discourses that continue to place Jews and others in a race/color category.

PART I

JEWS AND RACE IN AMERICA

CHAPTER 1

“I’m Not White—I’m Jewish”

The Racial Politics of American Jews

Cheryl Greenberg

The election of an African American to the U.S. presidency in 2008 prompted Americans to reflect on the changing roles of race and color in the United States. Is there something about American Jews’ relationship with color and race that might be instructive for scholars of race in America? Is there something about the changing roles of race and color in the United States that might be instructive for scholars of American Jews? In the United States, a nation without a history of Jewish persecution and a nation that from its inception guaranteed religious freedom, Jewish immigrants found themselves remarkably free to choose their own lifestyles. And yet they were caught in a thicket of racial definitions shaped by the historical context of slavery that did not lie comfortably within traditional Jewish self-understanding. The problematic and shifting status of Black people in the United States led to a rigid and binary structure of American race relations—the division of American society into two groups, White and Black. Yet Jews have never defined themselves in such terms. So, in the American context, the question becomes whether—and how—Ashkenazic American Jews consider themselves White people, and in what ways racialized self-understanding has shaped American Jewish history.

Jewish identity, or the way Jews understand themselves as a group, is complex and shifting, constituted by social and residential ties, friendships, community interests, a shared sense of history, and religious and cultural practices. But in the United States, at least, Jewish identity is also related to questions of race and color because both have been central in determining access to power. So I want to look, in that context, at Jewish understandings of race and color and how they interact with other factors such as religion and ethnicity, and then assess the impact they have on our understanding of Jewish history and of race in America. I begin this inquiry by addressing the question of Jewish whiteness in a nation where race largely determined destiny, a topic that leads almost inevitably to the subject of the American Jewish community’s relationship with African Americans. The essay then explores changing notions of the salience of race, color, ethnicity, and religion in recent U.S. history, and concludes with some preliminary thoughts about American Jewish identity and race.

Race and Color in the American Context

When Eastern and Southern European Jews came to the United States during the tidal wave of migration from 1880 to 1920, they arrived in a nation polarized by a racial binary. In the United States a person was either Black (Negro) or White. Individuals deemed White enjoyed substantial legal, social, civic, and economic benefits not available to those considered Black. Slavery embodied this division, of course, but emancipation did not erase it, as Jim Crow segregation and racial discrimination continued to constrain non-White life chances in similar ways. It was not always clear to White Americans where immigrant groups fit within that racial schema. The Irish, for example, who arrived primarily in the mid-nineteenth century, faced substantial employment and social discrimination. Whites born in the United States could not decide whether the Irish fully qualified as White. In response, many in the Irish community took great pains to identify with whiteness, in part by espousing a racism of their own.¹ Indeed, embracing whiteness proved a popular strategy for any immigrant group that could claim that status. Natives of India or the Caribbean, Chicanos from the American Southwest, mixed-race individuals and others from groups not clearly recognized as either White or Black petitioned the courts (not always successfully) to be recognized as White people.² If one were considered either Black or White in the United States, early immigrants, including Jews, embraced whiteness.

Both the Jewish immigrant populations prior to the 1880s, Sephardic and German Jews, identified with the White community, for much the same reason other groups did: being seen as White paid off in the sense of both an economic and a “psychological wage,” to borrow a phrase first used by W.E.B. Du Bois and popularized by David Roediger.³ In any case, these Jews identified with the Europeans among whom they had lived, and some made their living, either directly or indirectly, from the slave trade. The only Jew prominent in the abolitionist movement was a recent immigrant, August Bondi. Rabbi David Einhorn, who preached a sermon against slavery—in Baltimore in 1861—was run out of town by his own congregation.⁴ Indeed, Jews had racially assimilated so thoroughly that a Jew, Judah Benjamin, served as vice president of the Confederacy.

The large influx of new immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe beginning at the end of the nineteenth century intensified the nativism of many Americans of Western European descent, who looked with suspicion on these allegedly swarthy newcomers. They feared what they termed the mongrelization of their nation and demanded full assimilation into Anglo-Saxon culture and norms—if indeed these were White people at all. The choice of color-specific terms was not accidental in a society where color still defined racial boundaries and therefore access to power. Increasing numbers of court cases regarding racial identification, persistent economic exclusion, and social hostility made it clear that, in the words of John Bukowczyk, these new immigrants were “not-quite-White.”⁵ Similar skepticism was evident even within the American Jewish community, as German Jewish organizations from social clubs to the American Jewish Committee closed ranks against their Eastern European coreligionists and called for “more polish and less Polish.”⁶

Obviously these attitudes sprang, at least in part, from German Jews’ fear of losing their hard-won social status by being associated with these newcomers whom other Americans often believed were either degenerates or dangerous. New and public expressions of anti-Semitism followed close on the heels of this Eastern European Jewish immigration, including restrictive quotas at many colleges and universities and the social exclusion of Jewish elites from clubs and social registers. Wealthier and more-established American Jews particularly felt the repercussions of such attitudes. The rhetoric of these German Jews suggests that race and color played a part in their attitudes toward their Eastern European coreligionists. These new immigrants were “miserable darkened Hebrews,” according to the Hebrew Standard; a German Jewish newspaper referred to them as “wild Asiatics.”⁷ Color lines also hardened with the growing migration of African Americans from the rural South into northern and urban areas. The Great Migration contributed to heightened segregation in the nation’s cities, the explosive growth of the Ku Klux Klan, and a number of White-on-Black race riots.⁸

In such a racist and nativist atmosphere, most of the new immigrant populations from Eastern and Southern Europe not surprisingly embraced a White identity, as others had done before them. Self-interest lay in making clear their membership in the dominant group.⁹ Yet many Eastern European Jews hesitated to define themselves in the same way. While earlier German Jews had by and large understood themselves as Germans first, these newer immigrants rarely identified with the nations from which they had emigrated. They had more trouble seeing themselves as White. After all, Whites in Central and Eastern Europe had always identified them as outsiders and Jews had endured a long history of violence at their hands.

A number of these new American Jews tried to restructure contemporary notions of race and assimilation, thus challenging the binary choice between Black and White that their immigration posed. Anglo-Jewish playwright Israel Zangwill popularized the term “melting pot” in his 1908 play of that name, calling on native-born White Americans to stop insisting that immigrants give up their own identities to become, in the term of the day, “100 percent Americans.” Rather, he suggested, each new group made its own unique contributions to the national culture. Advocates of a melting pot argued that rather than corrupting America, immigrants added their own spice to the American cultural mix, thereby enhancing it. Still, in the end, melting pot advocates believed immigrants would willingly and inevitably shed their cultures, their backgrounds, and their historic baggage to become fully American in this new, broader, cultural sense. Zangwill’s play ends with the marriage of a Jew whose mother had been killed in a pogrom to the daughter of the Russian army officer who spearheaded the violence. In the new world, the past became unimportant. Corporations that hired immigrants also embraced this vision. Ford Motor Company’s English instruction classes featured a play in which program graduates in traditional dress entered a huge mock cauldron and emerged in American suits and ties.¹⁰

Other critics of nativism argued for a different understanding of diversity in America. Pluralism, a term coined by Jewish sociologist Horace Kallen, rejected the image of a stew yielding a single, bland pablum. Rather, pluralism called for accepting, even celebrating, private differences among communities because they all shared the same basic American values: fairness, justice, love of family, commitment to community, and morality. The immigrants’ varied cultural expressions, then, were simply different ways of saying the same thing, and posed no threat to the American way of life. Immigrant populations, pluralists explained, were “ethnic groups,” a linguistic term that distinguished them from the more pernicious label of races.

Although early pluralists, including Kallen himself, were not sure where such cultural differences originated, they quickly unified around the assertion that these differences were not innate but rather learned and therefore voluntary. This neatly resolved the question of whether immigrants could be fully absorbed into American life or whether they had to be excluded as permanently inferior races. Not surprisingly, many African American thinkers such as Alain Locke embraced pluralism because it challenged prevailing notions that racial characteristics were innate—or that they even existed.¹¹

The emphasis by advocates of pluralism on ethnicity rather than race, history rather than biology, and shared rather than subversive values, made little impact in the early part of the twentieth century. But within a generation it emerged as the central understanding of American culture. After Pearl Harbor, to promote wartime unity in the fight against Hitler and the Axis, armed forces propaganda films began featuring the all-American platoon of Irish, Italian, Jewish, and other soldiers—sometimes even Black and Hispanic—bonding happily in a muddy trench, fighting together for the American way. More sobering, the liberation by American forces of concentration camps exposed the genocidal slaughters that were the consequences of racially based ideologies. And the Cold War that followed made American egalitarian and antiracist rhetoric a political strategy to woo nonaligned, non-White nations. By mid-century, then, pluralism had become the dominant theory defining the ideal American civic community.

The irony of a nation embracing a pluralist vision while living a racially segregated reality was not lost on liberal and progressive scholars and activists and spurred civil rights efforts both in the streets and the academy. Journalists such as Carey McWilliams insisted Black and White Americans were “Brothers under the Skin”; the newly organized Congress on Racial Equality gave these beliefs substance in its public campaigns against segregation.¹² Pluralist theory extended into intellectual explorations of race relations as well. In his path-breaking book on slavery, The Peculiar Institution, historian Kenneth Stampp explained that “innately Negroes are, after all, only White men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less.”¹³ Stampp insisted that he was not negating the distinct cultural heritage, shaped by slavery and racism, that Bla...