Customer Reviews

Black, Jewish, and Interracial: It’s Not the Color of Your Skin, but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity

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My mother is Dr. Katya Gibel Azoulay and I've read some of her book. I think she is one of the smartest people I know, and if you want to research on interracial families, you need to read this book. Good job Mommy!

Having majored in sociology and taken a race course, I wish we had this as a book. It provided so many good sources for information and really made very interesting analyses that I wouldn't have thought of making. Whether you are Black or Jewish, or Black and Jewish, a lot of individuals could really learn from this book. I wish I had stumbled upon it prior to my journey through Judaism; it would have helped prepare me for the attitudes I would come to encounter, and my own feelings in now being Black and Jewish. This should be recommended reading in sociology courses on race, African-American studies courses, and most definitely in Judaic studies curriculum. Would love to see a follow-up of some kind in the near future.

Gibel Azoulay enters the discourse on race at a pivotal point in history, when debates over the reconfiguration of census/socio-political categories and developments in the so called "mixed race" literature threaten to turn back the clocks to a sanitized version of Jim Crow. The author's voice is a refreshing and insightful alternative to those who wish to ignore history for the sake of those "mixed race" individuals hoping to 'escape' blackness. Gibel Azoulay's insistence upon maintaining dual cultural identities (Jewish and Black) must make a number of theorists and laymen incredibly uncomfortable. With impeccable scholarship and an original theoretical base she achieves a radical positioning, refusing to the embrace the idealized notions of racelessness put forth by Appiah and others, at the same time resisting the pure essentialization of the Afrocentrists. This is an important, noteworthy contribution. Great Job!