Derac(e)inated Jews

Julian Levinson

Department of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University
jal15@columbia.edu

 

Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks & What That Says About Race In America. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1998.

 

During the summer of 1986, when Hip-Hop music was just becoming a fixture in the panorama of American pop culture, I sat down to compose my first rap. For my intro, I drew from the lessons I had absorbed at Sherith Israel Sunday School on Bush Street in San Francisco: “Five thousand years ago Moses took command / He led my people to the promised land / Pharaoh was outsmarted, the Red Sea parted / And that is how my religion got started…” This rap initiated my truncated career as a Jewish rapper, a vocation–or, if you will, “subject position”–that seemed to offer itself as a viable one for me even though all the rappers who populated the music scene were, at that point, African Americans.

 

The immediate stimulus for my rhymed outpouring of Jewish pride had been a rap by the highly popular and by then mainstream group Run DMC, an inspiring rant entitled “Proud to be Black.” Moved by the lyrics, I couldn’t bring myself to sing them without feeling like an impostor, and rather than donning black face (like my illustrious predecessor, Al Jolson), I ventured a Jewish version, inserting the Biblical liberation story where Run DMC had spoken of heroic black figures like Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

In retrospect I wonder at the legitimacy of my Jewish rap. Was it a case of unwarranted borrowing or, worse, cultural hijacking, to insert my own lyrics in place of Run DMC’s? For a WASP in my position, it would have been a stretch to contrive an “ethnic” identity comparable to blackness. Was it different for me as a Jew, and a largely assimilated one at that? Historically, Blacks and Jews have both played the role of the scapegoat, the hated and maligned Other. We have both suffered brutal violence and struggled to maintain our cultural heritage and personal dignity in the face of institutionalized hostility. Does this shared historical experience make my Jewish rap somehow more legitimate than, say, my neighbor’s hypothetical WASP rap?

 

At issue here, clearly, is the question: Are Jews white? In a 1993 Village Voice article, “Jews Are Not White” (18 May 1993), Michael Lerner flatly asserts that they are not. He begins with the premise that in America, “to be ‘white’ means to be the beneficiary of the past 500 years of European exploration and exploitation of the rest of the world” (33). He then argues that only somebody with a severe case of amnesia, unable to remember the recent history of anti-Semitism, could put the Jews into this category. In her recent book, How Jews Became White Folks & What That Says About Race in America, anthropologist Karen Brodkin takes a more equivocal (and more sophisticated) approach to the question, arguing that at times Jews have been white and at other times they have been “not-quite-white.” Her premise is that whiteness is and has always been a shifting designation, one that has much more to do with social class than with skin color. In an analysis that is at once speculative and grounded in concrete data, she argues that the entitlements of whiteness are extended to specific groups at specific moments, and that the historical experiences of these groups cannot erase such undeniable social facts.

 

Brodkin begins by making an analytical distinction between “ethnoracial assignment” and “ethnoracial identity.” Ethnoracial assignments are imposed upon us by the outside world, articulated by the public culture and instituted by social policies. They are slots in a three-dimensional graph containing axes for race, class, and gender. Brodkin asserts that at least since the beginnings of slavery, this field of possible ethnoracial assignments in America has been inexorably divided by a central line separating “whiteness” from “nonwhiteness.” Ethnoracial identities, by contrast, are what we shape for ourselves once we’ve been assigned to one slot or another. They register our idiosyncratic reactions to the station we’re fated to inhabit.

 

Jews make for an illuminating case study of race in America because, according to Brodkin, their ethnoracial assignment has shifted at two specific junctures during the past hundred and fifty years. She explains that prior to the mid-nineteenth century, Jews were grouped together with other European immigrants, all of whom were “more or less equally white” (54). They were extended the same privileges as others on the white side of the racial divide and quickly absorbed into mainstream society. As the waves of immigrants (both Jewish and gentile) began arriving from Southern and Eastern Europe in the 1880s, however, there developed a sizable underclass of “unskilled” and residentially ghettoized industrial workers. At this point, “Americans [came] to believe that Europe was made up of a variety of inferior and superior races” (56). Suddenly Jews, a conspicuous presence in the new urban working class, were classified as “not-quite-white.” They became a source of fear and repulsion for native-born Americans, who imagined Jews to be inherently deficient. Such a view, she notes, is expressed in a New York Times article that appeared at the turn of the century describing the Jewish Lower East Side: “It is impossible for a Christian to live there because he will be driven out, either by blows or by the dirt and stench. Cleanliness is an unknown quantity to these people. They cannot be lifted up to a higher plane because they do not want to be” (29). This sort of anti-Semitic revulsion would find expression as Jews sought entrance into mainstream American life. At a 1918 meeting of the Association of New England Deans, for example, a primary subject of concern was that colleges “might soon be overrun by Jews” (31), and various covert methods were employed to limit the number of Jews in institutions of higher education.

 

In Brodkin’s view, this was a case of old ethnoracial assignments applied to a new demographic situation. Racial categories imprinted on the national psyche during the years of slavery continued to assert themselves as native-born Americans surveyed the new masses of immigrants. As a result, certain jobs were restricted to those deemed white, while other jobs (i.e., along assembly lines or in sweatshops) were deemed appropriate for those who were “not-quite-white.” This racialized division of labor created geographical divisions between groups, reinforcing the notion of an inherent racial hierarchy. Brodkin ignores here the question of what happened to the approximately 250,000 German Jews in America, many of whom had by 1880 secured for themselves a position in the more affluent sectors of society. Were they retroactively raced, and if so by what means and to what extent?

 

Leaving this tricky issue aside, Brodkin’s narrative proceeds to explain how Jews once again became white. Amidst America’s postwar economic boom, there was an expanded need for professional, technical, and managerial labor, and Jews and other previously “nonwhite” Europeans rushed into these positions, joining the emerging middle class. Unlike African Americans, who continued to be regarded as “natural” members of the underclass, the new middle-class workers were “cleansed” of their previous racialized status. Brodkin admits that she cannot account for this development with a unidirectional causal analysis. “As with most chicken and egg problems,” she writes, “it is hard to know which came first. Did Jews and other Euro-ethnics become white because they became middle-class?… Or did being incorporated into an expanded version of whiteness open up the economic doors to middle-class status? Clearly, both tendencies were at work” (36). What is beyond doubt, Brodkin insists, is that Jews increasingly benefited from the array of social policies instituted to aid the rising middle class, among them education subsidies (i.e., the GI bill) and loans from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). Needless to say, such benefits were not extended in the same proportion to African Americans.

 

Brodkin’s three-act drama about Jews shuttling about America’s racial map is schematic but undoubtedly useful. It effectively debunks the myth that Jews succeeded in America solely on the basis of their own Horatio-Algeresque ingenuity. So much for ethnoracial assignment in America. From here, she goes on to examine Jewish ethnoracial identity (how Jews shaped themselves within the context of their assignments), and here her analysis becomes at once more provocative and more problematic. She argues that when Jews were ghettoized in ethnic enclaves and considered not-quite-white, they created a uniquely Jewish working class culture, which she calls Yiddishkeit–a Yiddish word that means “Jewishness” and generally stands for the secular but distinctly Jewish culture that emerged in the late nineteenth century. As she describes Yiddishkeit, her previously measured rhetoric swells to a glowing bombast: “Yiddishkeit did not rest upon invidious comparison for its existential meaning, and it held out a different and more optimistic vision than that of modernity (even as it participated in modernity). Instead of having to choose between individual fulfillment and communal belonging, it expected Jews to find individual fulfillment through responsibility to the Jewish community” (186). She claims that it also offered women more options than did bourgeois American society with its cult of domesticity: “[Women] were not delicate of constitution or psyche. They were sexual (even if the histories do not tell us much about their sexual agency). And they were social actors valued as individuals…” (186). Brodkin has evidently projected her own utopian/socialist fantasies upon the Jewish Lower East Side, implying that the restrictions imposed upon Jews paradoxically created the conditions for a more humane culture. Yet, if we recall, this was a community that encouraged its sons and daughters to climb as far up the American social ladder (and away from this Edenic Lower East Side) as they could manage.

 

In any case, Brodkin’s narrative continues by showing how the Lower East Side begins to unravel as soon as the Jews become white folks. Her last chapter examines the reactions of American Jews to the breakdown of Yiddishkeit and the sudden opening up of middle class entitlements. Here the central term in her analysis is ambivalence. “In one sense,” she argues, “the experience of whiteness is an experience of ambivalence, of having to choose among unsatisfactory or partially satisfactory choices” (184). When they were extended the privileges that come with being white in America, the Jews cut a sort of Faustian bargain, half aware that they were relinquishing a rich cultural heritage, but unwilling to decline the invitation to profit from the postwar boom. One way that the Jewish man dealt with this ambivalence, she argues, was to invent the stereotype of the Jewish American Princess; it was she not he who had thrown culture to the wind and bought into the American consumerism. “JAPs,” she writes, “are Jewish men’s projections of their own nightmares about whiteness onto Jewish women” (163). Jewish women expressed their anxieties about their new identities (had they really become white?) in more self-punishing ways, leading to “the 1950s epidemic of nose jobs and in their obsession with bodily deficiencies” (165).

 

Her argument shows that even Jews who from the 1960s onward became prominent in leftist political movements abandoned Yiddishkeit. Some rejected wholesale the claims of their Jewish origins, and some simply left their Jewishness at home, acting politically as “generic white folks.” Admitting that she herself belongs in the first of these categories, Brodkin maintains that both strategies “led to impoverished forms of resistance and a loss of cultural alternatives, which were better preserved in the richer and more vital Yiddish-speaking left” (173). That is, political movements launched from the position of whiteness have little authority to speak on behalf of anything besides some version of the status quo.

 

It is at this point that the programmatic aspect of Brodkin’s book becomes clear. She maintains that whiteness inflicts a form of “psychic damage.” More specifically, those who have become white invariably end up endorsing “a worldview that has difficulty envisioning an organization of social life that does not rest upon systematic and institutionalized racial subordination” (186). In the final section, entitled “Resisting Whiteness,” Brodkin issues a call to “build an explicitly multiracial democracy in the United States” (187). In part, this project relates to the broader multiculturalist endeavor to uncover and valorize previously excluded non-white voices. Yet the specific role of Jews in this picture is left unclear. After all, her argument has insisted that Jews are no longer non-white; Yiddishkeit depends upon conditions now irretrievable. How, then, can they “resist whiteness”? She concludes with the somewhat vague offering that “the challenge for American Jews today is to confront… our present white racial assignment” (187). But, again, it is unclear whither such a confrontation could or ought to lead. Finally, Jews seem to be left in a nebulous position, disqualified from articulating anything besides wistful reveries of the Lower East Side.

 

This would make for a dissatisfying conclusion if not for the fact that the introduction to Brodkin’s book itself exemplifies a form of confrontation. In what is undoubtedly the most moving section of the book, she tells the story of her own family, emphasizing how each generation reacted to the changing racial assignments of Jews in America. She tells of her grandmother’s unbearable sense of loss after moving to suburban Long Island, of her mother’s ambivalent modes of adaptation, of her own yearnings to measure up to the “blond people.” Here Brodkin gives some sense of how it actually feels to inhabit a racial assignment, how racial codes make themselves felt on one’s skin, as it were. By infusing her cultural analysis with autobiography in this manner, she points to a way out of the impasse at which her argument arrives. For here she opens up or at least points to the interstices between racial assignments, and these are perhaps the spaces from which a forceful political agency–unmoored to the false solidities of either whiteness or Yiddishkeit–can finally emerge. So while her book presents undeniably illuminating data about race in America, it is finally her contribution to the genre of Cultural Studies, her blend of social analysis and self-scrutiny, that is most valuable.