How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America

By Karen Brodkin Sacks

Book Overview

The fashion identities in the context of a wider conversation about American nationhood, to whom it belongs and what belonging means. Race and ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality are all staple ingredients in this conversation. They are salient aspects of social being from which economic practices, political policies, and popular discourses create "Americans." Because all of these facets of social being have such significant meaning on a national scale, they also have major consequences for both individuals and groups in terms of their success and well-being, as well as how they perceive themselves socially and politically.

The history of Jews in the United States is one of racial change that provides useful insights on race in America. Prevailing classifications have sometimes assigned Jews to the white race and at other times have created an off-white racial designation for them. Those changes in racial assignment have shaped the ways American Jews of different eras have constructed their ethnoracial identities. Brodkin illustrates these changes through an analysis of her own family's multi-generational experience. She shows how Jews experience a kind of double vision that comes from racial middleness: on the one hand, marginality with regard to whiteness; on the other, whiteness and belonging with regard to blackness.

Class and gender are key elements of race-making in American history. Brodkin suggests that this country's racial assignment of individuals and groupsconstitutes an institutionalized system of occupational and residential segregation, is a key element in misguided public policy, and serves as a pernicious foundational principle in the construction of nationhood. Alternatives available to non-white and alien "others" have been either to whiten or to be consigned to an inferior underclass unworthy of full citizenship. The American ethnoracial map-who is assigned to each of these poles-is continually changing, although the binary of black and white is not. As a result, the structure within which Americans form their ethnoracial, gender, and class identities is distressingly stable. Brodkin questions the means by which Americans construct their political identities and what is required to weaken the hold of this governing myth.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081352590X
• ISBN13: 9780813525907
• Release Date: October 1998
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Entertaining and Seductive ... but...

Resubmitted on 2/5/3Dr. Brodkins' book is a fair synthesis of post -War racial scholarship and theorizing. Her personal approach is entertaining and seductive but far from being a compelling story -even though there are many aspects of the book for one to like. As well, one can hardly disagree with her main theme that racism and racial identity is the single most important basis of a healthy self-concept in the contemporary American way of life. Moreover, one must take careful note of what she has to say about Jewish industriousness as being a critical parameter in the route to group success against all forms of chauvinism--including anti-Semitism, sexism and racism--although it was difficult to avoid the fact that she did jump over rather quickly the issues of race and anti-Semitism to get to her main menu item, gender. All that said however, it was painful watching her finesse the issue of Jewish racism against blacks, both before and after the events directed against European Jews; and both before and after the "gender revolution." One reason the war against racism (and sexism) cannot be won in the way the author suggests is that once a group is admitted to the club of "being white," or being allowed, in the case of sexism, to use "the flawed white male model," it already has learned all too well how to play the role of being superior to those still remaining outside those exclusive clubs. The real problem is that the illicit rewards, both tangible and intangible, in a racist and/or sexist society are so enormous that there is hardly any incentive to do otherwise.That passive-aggressive racism and passive-aggressive sexism are at least as dangerous as their more overt and active counterparts is hardly a secret anymore. Yet, the fact that this book splits hairs between sexism and racism, emphasizing one at the expense of the other, marks its clear position on the racist-sexism evolutionary chart.One must continue to be surprised and disappointed when those who have experienced racism on such a massively inhuman scale, as has been the case with European Jews, Native Americans and American Blacks, nevertheless lend their voices to the same worldview and tactics used to invent ideologies that can lead to such atrocities. The attitude that "racism is okay so long as it does not affect me or my group" guarantees we will be a long time bringing the practice in America to a final end.Although this is not the book I would have written if I were a Jewish woman, it is nevertheless a worthy and interesting effort. Four Stars!

interesting - uncontroversial - academic - brief

The author's examination of the "myth" of Jewish upward mobility as being due primarily to hard-work and discipline and only secondarily to the decline of explicit anti-semitic prejudice is fascinating (although hardly controversial anymore.) What is more important is how the author leverages her experiences and Jewish experiences in the U.S. as a springboard to examine how ethnoracial identities and ethnoracial assignments affect the life chances of individuals and communities today. My strongest "disappointment" with this book is the feeling that it seems somewhat academic and far too short to do its subject justice.

Provocative and persuasive--a new way to think about race

This book, like others in the area of whiteness studies, reconfigures the way we think about race in America. Brodkin turns the debate over affirmative action on its head. When Jews argue that blacks might learn from their example in order to achieve economic and social mobility, they forget that they themselves benefited from a "Euro-male affirmative action" implemented after World War II. Jewish mainstream success was thus a result of their acceptance as whites, and less as a result of hard work and determination. Through historical and theoretical exploration of race in America, Brodkin offers a convincing case for the social construction of race and indeterminacy of the category of "white." The book is just as provocative as the title. Books like these will force us to reevaluate how we think about race today and will provoke us to question certain logic guiding our social relations that seems obvious but in truth is not.