HemGrupperDiskuteraMerTidsandan
Sök igenom hela webbplatsen
Denna webbplats använder kakor för att fungera optimalt, analysera användarbeteende och för att visa reklam (om du inte är inloggad). Genom att använda LibraryThing intygar du att du har läst och förstått våra Regler och integritetspolicy. All användning av denna webbplats lyder under dessa regler.

Resultat från Google Book Search

Klicka på en bild för att gå till Google Book Search.

Laddar...

The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity

av Eric L. Goldstein

MedlemmarRecensionerPopularitetGenomsnittligt betygDiskussioner
873307,924 (3.75)Ingen/inga
What has it meant to be Jewish in a nation preoccupied with the categories of black and white? The Price of Whiteness documents the uneasy place Jews have held in America's racial culture since the late nineteenth century. The book traces Jews' often tumultuous encounter with race from the 1870s through World War II, when they became vested as part of America's white mainstream and abandoned the practice of describing themselves in racial terms. American Jewish history is often told as a story of quick and successful adaptation, but Goldstein demonstrates how the process of identifying as white Americans was an ambivalent one, filled with hard choices and conflicting emotions for Jewish immigrants and their children. Jews enjoyed a much greater level of social inclusion than African Americans, but their membership in white America was frequently made contingent on their conformity to prevailing racial mores and on the eradication of their perceived racial distinctiveness. While Jews consistently sought acceptance as whites, their tendency to express their own group bonds through the language of "race" led to deep misgivings about what was required of them. Today, despite the great success Jews enjoy in the United States, they still struggle with the constraints of America's black-white dichotomy. The Price of Whiteness concludes that while Jews' status as white has opened many doors for them, it has also placed limits on their ability to assert themselves as a group apart.… (mer)
Ingen/inga
Laddar...

Gå med i LibraryThing för att få reda på om du skulle tycka om den här boken.

Det finns inga diskussioner på LibraryThing om den här boken.

Visar 3 av 3
This book isn't perfect (I would actually give it 4.5 stars if Goodreads wasn't so lazy) but it was the closest thing to what I was looking for. For many years I've thought about my Jewishness and what exactly it is? It's not my religion really because I don't practice; it's not exactly a cultural thing, because for most of my life I've done nothing very "Jewish" yet still 100 percent considered myself a Jew; so what is it? It feels weird calling it my race, since the way most people see race is based on the literal color of one's skin. I'm still not sure what it all means, but this book helped me see that many, many others have been thinking and talking about this same thing since Jews arrived in the US. ( )
  bookonion | Feb 23, 2024 |
Interesting history of post-Civil-War-to-present American Jewish ideas about race, and alternatives to racial categorizations, as applied to Jews themselves. Understandably focuses more on Jews who fought against racism generally, but does discuss the racism that many endorsed in order to distinguish themselves from Blacks. Jews were both drawn to the benefits of whiteness and pushed towards it by the larger white society: “In many ways it was native-born whites, bent on preserving a stable and optimistic vision of their national culture, who had the greatest stake in seeing Jews take on the role of white Americans.”

The book traces the fraught ideas of a Jewish “nation” which came to sound disloyal; by the 1870s “religion” appeared as a more acceptable substitute, but then came to be problematic too, so more Jews adopted the idea of a Jewish “race” to allow them to express the desire for a distinct identity without unwanted political connotations. Obviously that also didn’t work out so well. Perhaps less obviously to us now, race language expressed something about the social dimension of Jewishness just as Jewish social distinctiveness from other non-Blacks was decreasing, although such language did allow Jews to maintain a connection to persecution even as their economic and social power increased.

Meanwhile, post-Reconstruction hardening of racial lines made Jews increasingly troubling as liminal whites. Many Jews tried to manage this by claiming unqualified whiteness, often by distinguishing themselves from Blacks, with the lynching of Leo Frank a stark reminder of what could happen to racially compromised Jews.

Eastern European Jewish immigrants may have resisted whiteness more, in part because they had more urban experience/skills when they arrived, and rarely competed for jobs with Blacks in ways that other immigrants did. With their status in doubt, early 20th-century Jews hotly debated whether Jews were a race or a religious denomination. “[R]ace ceased to serve as a successful vehicle to set limits on assimilation and to assert Jewish contributions to American life…. Instead, due to white America’s emergent obsession with shoring up its racial boundaries, Jewish racial particularity had become either the basis for anti-Jewish prejudice or a rationale for urging the ‘fusion’ of Jews with non-Jewish society. Zionists “saw race as an essential building block of Jewish nationhood,” but were wary of “casting Jews in the role of racial outsiders and, as a result, often tried to downplay the physical dimensions of race while stressing its spiritual and psychological aspects.” That didn’t work so well. One result: a new focus on intermarriage, including in popular culture, which often framed exogamy as “indispesable to the building of the American nation.” Focusing on religion instead of race offered the prospect of opposing intermarriage without resisting assimilation.

At the same time, calcifying racial hierarchies in immigration laws made a Jewish “race” politically dangerous, so Jewish leaders attacked the government’s efforts to classify Jews as a “race,” successfully lobbying Congress and the Census Bureau to remove “Jewish” as a racial category from census forms and to prevent exclusion of Jews from eligibility from naturalization. They also fought attempts to link Jews, ancient Israelites, and Semites to Africa.

Between the world wars, antisemites focused on the relationship between Jewishness and whiteness. “If they could no longer defuse the danger they saw in the Jews by likening them to African Americans, they aimed instead to study, clarify, and expose their role as an unstable element in white society.” Henry Ford, for example, “aimed at unmasking aspects of Jewish racial difference that were thought to be dangerously masquerading as sameness.” Still, the association of Jews with modernity and of Americans with modernity meant that many other American whites were unwilling to turn away from them entirely, and even many American antisemites held out the possibility of assimilation. Harvard’s Jewish quotas were supposedly designed to end the practice of “Jewish segregation” by keeping their numbers down, not excluding them entirely. President Lowell wanted to segregate Black students on campus, but wanted to make Jewish students assimilate by surrounding them with non-Jewish whites.

What about Jewish interwar attitudes and behaviors towards Blacks? Goldstein characterizes them as mostly better than other whites’, often due to empathy, but deeply inconsistent and partial, often out of fear of losing their own place in white America. One of the best things I learned: Jewish communists staged “white chauvinism trials” in which they convicted their own Jewish members for saying racist things or refusing to participate in Party work in Black neighborhoods.

Some Jews tried to switch from “race” to “ethnicity” to draw some of the sharper stings of race language. But race still had a powerful pull in providing community and connection to other Jews. Gender also showed up as male Jews “sometimes tried to deflect unflattering racial images onto their female counterparts” (never you say!) and Goldstein argues that Jews internalized appearance-based anti-Jewish stereotypes more thoroughly than other anti-Jewish stereotypes. As the interwar period wore on, scholars focusing on pluralism pushed Jews towards more cultural and ethnic categorizations and away from biological “race,” a reformulation that gained much more power after WWII. And whiteness had finally consolidated: the INS introduced new naturalization forms in 1940 that designated European immigrants as “white” instead of using the traditional, narrower designations. During the war, likewise, Black and Asian soldiers were segregated into their own units while Jews, Italians, and Irish were assigned to “white” units along with the descendants of Britons, Swedes, etc.

Postwar optimism (and of course the example of the Holocaust) made the US “more hopeful” and less exclusionary of Jews, which then empowered Jews to voice more empathy and support for Blacks “without fear that it would bring their whiteness into question.” But “ethnicity” didn’t work as a long-term frame for Jewishness because it didn’t meet the “emotional needs” of Jews or the expectations of non-Jews who hoped that Jews would fade into a denomination. “Jews often defined themselves publicly as a religious group while privately pursuing Jewishness as a tribal phenomenon.”

Goldstein takes Adam Sandler’s Hanukkah Song as emblematic of current tensions in Jewish whiteness: Sandler “takes pride in his cast of characters precisely because they have achieved such success in entering the inner circle of white American society. The song clearly celebrates Jews’ status as racial insiders in America, holding them up as the antithesis of notorious racial villains like O.J. Simpson (and in a subsequent version, Osama bin Laden), even as it undermines the Hollywood illusion that makes Jews into undifferentiated whites.” (I was also interested in the statistic that, while about 50% of Jews marry non-Jews, in Hollywood portrayals the intermarriage rate is essentially 100%, Dirty Dancing notwithstanding.)

I was especially interested in the point that Jewish embrace of racial liberalism “allowed them to identify as part of the white mainstream culture without making them feel as if they had abandoned their legacy as a persecuted minority group,” because Jews can ground racial liberalism in the legacy of our own slavery in Israel. But also, “[w]ith their own sense of ethnic difference affirmed or perhaps even augmented, Jews could continue on the path of integration with little fear that they were complicit in the misdeeds of an exclusionary society.” Tensions became more evident, however, as Blacks gained more control over the relations between the groups and didn’t always see Jews as allies; the Jewish narrative of Black-Jewish links undermined claims for Black distinctiveness.

Ultimately, Goldstein argues, growing ethnic consciousness and declining ethnic cohesiveness are “two sides of the same coin.” What is Jewish identity? The very difficulty of the question increases its salience. Some Jews now protest the absence of the category from the census. And a plurality—40%--of Jews said in 2001 that “being a part of the Jewish people” was the most important aspect of their identity, while only 14% said that religious observance was. In the end, Goldstein suggests, only the “dissolution of the dominant culture” can solve the tension that Jews experience between acceptance and group identity. ( )
  rivkat | Sep 21, 2021 |
This is less about whether (European-descended) "Jews are white" (or not) and more about the contentious place American Jews have occupied in an American society that wants to define a sharp boundary between black and white. It's a bit dense, but interesting, looking at how Jews defined themselves, how they were defined by others, and how this defined their relationship with other ethnic/racial groups.

If there's a serious flaw it's that everything post-1965 is jammed into an epilogue.

3.5. ( )
  arosoff | Jul 11, 2021 |
Visar 3 av 3
inga recensioner | lägg till en recension
Du måste logga in för att ändra Allmänna fakta.
Mer hjälp finns på hjälpsidan för Allmänna fakta.
Vedertagen titel
Originaltitel
Alternativa titlar
Första utgivningsdatum
Personer/gestalter
Viktiga platser
Viktiga händelser
Relaterade filmer
Motto
Dedikation
Inledande ord
Citat
Avslutande ord
Särskiljningsnotis
Förlagets redaktörer
På omslaget citeras
Ursprungsspråk
Kanonisk DDC/MDS
Kanonisk LCC

Hänvisningar till detta verk hos externa resurser.

Wikipedia på engelska (4)

What has it meant to be Jewish in a nation preoccupied with the categories of black and white? The Price of Whiteness documents the uneasy place Jews have held in America's racial culture since the late nineteenth century. The book traces Jews' often tumultuous encounter with race from the 1870s through World War II, when they became vested as part of America's white mainstream and abandoned the practice of describing themselves in racial terms. American Jewish history is often told as a story of quick and successful adaptation, but Goldstein demonstrates how the process of identifying as white Americans was an ambivalent one, filled with hard choices and conflicting emotions for Jewish immigrants and their children. Jews enjoyed a much greater level of social inclusion than African Americans, but their membership in white America was frequently made contingent on their conformity to prevailing racial mores and on the eradication of their perceived racial distinctiveness. While Jews consistently sought acceptance as whites, their tendency to express their own group bonds through the language of "race" led to deep misgivings about what was required of them. Today, despite the great success Jews enjoy in the United States, they still struggle with the constraints of America's black-white dichotomy. The Price of Whiteness concludes that while Jews' status as white has opened many doors for them, it has also placed limits on their ability to assert themselves as a group apart.

Inga biblioteksbeskrivningar kunde hittas.

Bokbeskrivning
Haiku-sammanfattning

Pågående diskussioner

Ingen/inga

Populära omslag

Snabblänkar

Betyg

Medelbetyg: (3.75)
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
3 3
3.5
4 4
4.5
5 1

Är det här du?

Bli LibraryThing-författare.

 

Om | Kontakt | LibraryThing.com | Sekretess/Villkor | Hjälp/Vanliga frågor | Blogg | Butik | APIs | TinyCat | Efterlämnade bibliotek | Förhandsrecensenter | Allmänna fakta | 203,238,566 böcker! | Topplisten: Alltid synlig