Customer Reviews

Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(17)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

I am also 31, mixed, have a Jewish step-dad, and was raised by activist parents as well. Obviously, I ran to get this book.

I also saw a reading Rebecca Walker did on CSPAN in Maryland. She has an amazing voice and she really brought the material alive during the reading. I think she has a vast amount of wisdom & experience to share and she handled the question and answer segment amazingly well.

Unfortunately, this book is not all it could have been. It reads like a very good first or second draft but it simply isn't cohesive or particularly insightful and should not have been published yet. I really wanted Ms. Walker to move beyond cataloging events to weaving a story, a narrative that explored her experience AND connected it to a larger discussion about race.

The experiences she had especially having activist parents are ones that many of us can relate to but she never pushes the work past her self. Why does she think her parents raised her the ways in which they did? An exploration of their motives could illuminate some of the ways an entire country was shaped by the 60's.

She doesn't extrapolate from her experience to show how her experience as a "brown" woman is significant, how it is different than mono-racial teenage angst. Maybe that complete experience is ineffable - but there aren't any real moments that show the complexity of our experience as mixed race people.

She really needed someone who believed in the importance of this book and the story she could have told. I think her editor simply thought this would sell based on the subject matter and the fact that her mom is a famous writer.

I applaud Ms. Walker's attempt but I am disappointed in the final product.

All you mixed people out there - we need to write and connect with each other - keep working! And we really need some male mixed voices!

While I was moved almost to the point of tears on several occasions upon reading Walker's novel, I was disappointed with the end. It seems Rebecca has yet to come to terms with her "Shifting self". Walker writes about how she was able to weave in and out of two radically different worlds (the world of her black mother and free-living San Francisco culture, to the world of the white upper middle class New York suburb Jewish culture). She explores the way in which she adapted almost completely to one or the other culture whenever it was needed or expected. However, rather than coming to terms with her rich bi-racial and colorful cultural background and integrating both of these into forming her own unique identity, in my opinion Rebecca chose one identity over the other. Legally changing her name and thus further suppressing her identity from any resemblance of her Jewish and white background deeply saddened me. Although difficult, there are ways of incorporating aspects of both identities into one self - despite the state of racial animosity we live under in this country, both her parents were clearly able to do so. It is clear that Rebecca felt a distinct resentment toward her father and the eventual life he chose to lead; however, as a Jewish American I could not help but feel disappointed that Rebecca chose to identify with one side of her oppressed bi-racial identity over the other. She describes the life of her father, stepmother, half siblings and the culture of Larchmont, NY as privileged, wealthy, racist and generally homogeneous. While all of this may very well be close to the truth, what about being Jewish? What about all of the baggage that goes along with being a religious minority, the legacy of the Holocaust, the anti-Semitism everywhere in this world - what about that struggle? Rebecca seems to clump the "white" experiences of her life into offensive stereotypes of Jewish summer camp, and generalized stereotypes of growing up in suburban NY. She remembers those experiences as so much more of an outsider than the "black" experiences she remembers. In response to a previous review, someone wrote, "the key for me in understanding is that she cannot and will not be contained by neat categories." I could not disagree more with this after finishing this book. Walker is almost all about neat categories particularly when it comes to her "whiteness". Rather than drawing on the unique and rich history and background of her Jewish white self - she tends to wrap that side of her up into neat stereotypes. If I were to analyze her "shifting self" based on reading this book, I would say that it is this process and denial that contributes to, if not causes her confusion as a bi-racial woman and the arduous struggle she recalls in forming and constructing her identity.

All of that said, I cannot help but love this book, as completely opposite as that sounds. Walker's writing is poetic, moving and draws the reader into a world that even if unfamiliar casts a spiritual light on the struggle of bi-racialism in America. I find myself wanting to know everything about Ms. Rebecca Walker after reading this, combing the internet for scraps of information about her life and what she has done since the writing of Black, White and Jewish. I highly recommend this book

One day I was walking the aisles of [a local bookstore] when I stumbled across a large display featuring Rebecca Walker's childhood memoir: Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self. I was instantly struck by reverie as I recalled the first novel I had ever read (without having a teacher assign it) some thirteen years earlier: Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Perhaps it was with the nostalgia that I remember discovering reading for the pleasure of experiencing the world through another human beings eyes that made me linger at that display. I decided that I liked Ms. Walker's "smiling eyes" and since we both shared an ethnically indiscernible appearance (the "what are you mixed with?" syndrome), I sat down with a coffee and began reading the book. After all I thought, writing talent probably runs in the family. Although I was compelled to read along I was thinking that the big grandiose realizations about what race means in America and what it means to the individual who is hard to categorize were just around the corner. The profound social commentary never came. Neither did any revealing introspection, and although I was entertained by the account of a childhood that far excelled my own in terms of scandal and discovery, I was left disappointed.

Simply put, Black, White and Jewish is a recollection without any assessment. Rebecca Walker's story is summed up in the paragraph on the back of the book. During the Civil Rights Movement, Jewish activist lawyer, Mel Leventhal and Black activist writer Alice Walker, married and had a child named Rebecca in the unlikeliest of places for 1969: Jackson Mississippi. As the political climate changed and her parents relationship ended in divorce, Rebecca was forced to grow up shuttling back and forth across the country, searching for her self in the east coast Jewish culture, the boho San Francisco culture, and the Black urban southern culture of Atlanta. Rebecca was tossed to and fro by confusion and identity crises with every move and along the way she come to learn more and more about who Rebecca is instead of what Rebecca was born into.

Besides the title, there is a lot of irony in Black, White and Jewish. One of the early ironies that the reader discovers is that as exotic as her lineage is, Walker's story of finding her identity is painfully familiar to just about any teenager. We can all identify with the trials of being new somewhere and feeling targeted or left out or just plain different. You don't have to be of any peculiar heritage to know this experience. Being 15 years old will suffice. Even more ironic is that Walker still believes that it was the search for her identity in spite of being a racial/cultural anomaly in a country where ethnicity is such a dividing distinction (second only to gender) that makes her story so compelling. Perhaps Walker thinks we can all learn from her unique vantage point. But the truth is that Walker's perspective is hardly refreshing and has little to convey in spite of her unique perspective. Finding one's identity within a family of different values is not new and Walker doesn't really have the insight to draw any profound conclusions. This book reads more like a diary that was being kept all along as it was happening, than adult reflections on a turbulent childhood. The greatest irony is that in spite of being an adult when she wrote this book, she seems rather immature in her assessment of her childhood. She is still nonchalantly firing arrows at the things that made her feel insecure as a child (society, race, sexuality, teen-age cliques, etc.) rather than finally attacking the source of so much insecurity; her parents, and namely her mother. Being the daughter of a famous Pulitzer Prize winning writer perhaps made Walker feel special and so maybe it is asking for too much for Walker to see her mother for who she is. Perhaps Walker thinks she was supposed to share such a creative and wonderful mother with the rest of the world, but I can't help but read this book and feel that Walker was simply a lonely child that has repressed the real suffering that took place in her life as she was neglected. It was her mother's responsibility to make her feel special for who she was and most importantly to make her feel safe and secure and loved in a world that demanded that she choose an identity. In that regard, Walker's memoir reads like any other story of a child that wasn't loved enough and wasn't made to feel special enough by the people that mattered the most. Well Walker is a rather intelligent woman and given that this is her formal introduction into the literary world, she can only grow from here. But something tells me that eventually (and maybe already) she is going to regret having written and published this book. Maybe regret is a strong word here, but she will have to come to grips with how superficial and narcissistic here treatment is. Or at least she is going to want to give it another try and this time without the rose tinted glasses.

As a final note, I would like to say that it is only natural that Rebecca Walker would think that so much of what shaped her as a human being came to down to her unique racial identity rather than whether she felt loved or wanted or all of the other feelings that healthy children should have. I imagine people harped on her ethinicity constantly because that it he kind of thing people focos on: the strange and exotic. Ask anyone who is of bi-racial or bi-cultural lineage and you will be regaled with how tired they get of explaining how they could grow up normal in spite of having a Catholic mother and Muslim father or whatever the provactive mixture may be. The sad commentary that this book leaves the reader with is that Rebecca was never made to feel unique for anything she did as a child (and perhaps since) so she is still harping on the only thing that seems to make her stand out-her race. But she is more than her race, a lesson that she seems to try to communicate she has learned, but this reader is not so certain.

I picked up this book thinking it would be about being Black, White and Jewish, and found, instead, that it is about being Rebecca Walker, the privileged yet neglected child of divorced bi-costal parents. It is amazing that someone from two highly educated and idealistic parents, with her own incredible education, would have so little introspection into the parts of her identity that she claims to celebrate.

Like many materially privileged yet emotionally neglected adolescents, Rebecca Walker is angry about all the wrong things. She has written a book that is really about being the daughter of an incredibly self-involved woman, and the dangers that self-involved parenting presents to young people. She has also written about the incredible financial and class advantages that she has been offered. However, she resents her privileges and celebrates her mother's neglect. She does not even seem to be able to understand her privilege, and comes off as little more than a spoiled and angry teenager, lashing out at her father and stepmother, who provided the most caring homelife she knew. At the writing of this book, Rebecca Walker was in her early thirties, and shows that, emotionally, she has progressed little towards being an adult. This is not a result of being Black, White and Jewish so much as it is a result of money and trips around the world replacing parental nurturing.

The author's sole sense of white, Jewish identity seems to be based in being a member of the suburban upper-middle class. The title of her book seems to imply that this is what it means to be a White person or a Jewish person. Likewise, she seems to suggest that being a Black person is based on having big hips and "ghetto" attitude. It is shameful that anyone should think these identities are defined by shallow stereotypes like this, and especially disturbing that someone of such intellectual advantages is unable to see how limiting these ideas are to personal growth. As a Jewish person in a biracial family, I found it demeaning to be associated with these simplistic markers of identity. Likewise, as someone who grew up without financial advantage, I found it infuriating that the book never examines the coast-to-coast flights, expensive summer camps, and vacations in other countries as anything more than a common growing up experience.

This book might be fine if it claimed to be something else- if it admitted that it was about being the child of wealthy professional parents who lived extrememly different lives. It is not a book about racial and cultural identity so much as it is a portrait of a certain class lifestyle, either the wealthy and cnservative or the wealthy and bohemian, depending on the parent.

Rebecca Walker attended an elite high school and university, and has now chosen the life of an academic and writer. She has a lot more learning to do about the real factors that shaped her life, but, surrounding herself wih people of equal privilege, she may never be challenged to do so.

There is a lot of whining and self-pity here. Not that Walker doesn't have every reason to feel that way, but it doesn't make for insightful or interesting literature. She analyzes very little, and sloughs a lot off onto race that is really about adolescence (what teen does feel comfortable in his or her skin?) and being a child of divorced, clueless parents. Unlike Mary Karr's "The Liar's Club," where the author made the people around her understandable and human despite their astounding failings, Walker never gets below the surface. Her cast of characters remain stick figures. There are a lot of tired sterotypes. For example, she blames her neurotic inner life on her Jewish side of the family. Her mother leaves her to fend for herself for days on end when she is all of eleven, leading her into a sad precocious sexuality, but it's those Jews that messed her up? Hello?

If someone were considering making it illegal to write a memoir before the age of, say, 60, Rebecca Walker's book, Black, White and Jewish, would be held up as a prime example. In this book, Walker recounts her childhood and teenage years as a daughter of a black mother, and white and Jewish father, and describes her struggle to find a sense of identity in a world that insisted that her cultural combination was a virtual impossibility.

It is a compelling premise, but you'll be sorely disappointed if you're expecting an insightful reflection upon Walker's experiences growing up as a biracial Jewish child from the perspective of her adult self. The book is more of an adolescent diatribe about every sad, frustrating and/or confusing thing that happened to her before she graduated from high school. Yes, there was lots of confusing stuff. Her parents (divorced, estranged, and wildly inattentive to young Walker) made the unfathomable decision to have her alternate living between the two of them every two years, even though they lived on opposite sides of the country. So, just as Walker was settling into her identity with her black mother, or white Jewish father, she was whisked away to the opposite coast with a totally different peer group to start again. While one might have some stirrings of sympathy for her plight, the book's twin tones of self-pity and self-congratulation gets mighty tiresome. Fast. One gets the impression that by merely by surviving a complicated childhood, Walker thinks she performed some kind of feat that had no one else has done before. Moreover, most of the feelings of isolation and confusion she seems to embrace as uniquely hers will be recognized as entirely common to most American teenagers, whether biracial or not.

I might have been able to forgive Walker for the invariable whine in her voice had she delivered any message more penetrating than `it's tough to be a biracial/Jewish child of divorce.' I waited to see Walker become a grown-up, to rise above the childish insistence that the whole world understand her, and to divine and share some meaningful wisdom from her experiences. Didn't happen. If Walker has changed substantially from the self-centered, insecure teenager that she was, it's not obvious from her memoir. The reader is left to wonder how, if at all, she bridges her two worlds. Is she still "ashamed," as she puts it, of her white side? How does she think her childhood squares up against the experiences of other biracial children she's met, particularly those whose parents did not divorce, or at least remained amicable? What kind of advice or message would she give a biracial child that is struggling with his/her identity? What advice would she give to parents of a biracial child? Questions such as these are much more interesting and enlightening than a description of her first blow-job, or the names of the songs she listened to in junior high school.

Walker's writing is fluid, and so, in that sense, the book is quite readable. And the contrast she offers of her antithetical worlds is vivid, packed with enough cultural details of the '80s to choke a hog. But, she seemed to be wrestling with something too big for her. She chooses a rather inapt central metaphor - her lack of memory - for a memoir. The first sentence of the book is: "I don't remember things" but then she spends the rest of the book spelling out every minor physical detail of her childhood and teenage years, starting from age 1. As a result, the memory theme feels embarrassingly contrived. (As do many of the pseudo-poetic musings she sprinkles throughout the book, like when some drunk barges into her Yale dorm room and asks how it can be possible that she's black and Jewish, she stares in the mirror and broods: `Am I possible?' Girl, get over yourself.)

In addition, she spends almost no time at all fleshing out the characters of those people who, for better or worse, influenced her life. She tosses everyone into simplistic categories - her Jewish grandmother was Racist, her mother was Uninvolved, her father Didn't Understand, the black men she met all had Beautiful Brown Skin, her white cousins had Hidden Racist Tendencies, etc. - and thus they all remain lifeless as cardboard cut-outs. Her willingness to cast the villains of her story in an unwavering negative light made me not fully trust her judgment and observations. For all the "honesty" that is supposedly bandied about in the book, I'd have trusted her view much more if she had managed to portray those who disappointed her as flawed humans with complex motivations and intentions instead of writing them off as Bad People. To me, that would be a hallmark of maturity.

I could go on and on, but other disgruntled readers have hit what I've left out. Particularly the person who wrote about how she horribly oversimplifies - and renders superficial - what it means to be black, and what it means to be Jewish.

The book really seemed to be a personal catharsis rather than a vehicle for sharing mature insight on the multicultural experience in America. Now that she has gotten to purge some of her bitterness at the expense of the reader, perhaps she can finally grow up. Maybe by the time she turns 60 she'll have learned enough to write a truly illuminating memoir that is for the reader, not for herself.

Black White Jewish changed my life. It finally allowed my experiences as a bi-racial person a landing place and a sense of validity. Rebecca Walker is one of a very small handful of writers that has had the opportunity to be a voice for bi-racial people. It is a daunting task to be a voice for such a multifaceted colorful bunch, but she has stepped into this role fully with depth and grace. BWJ gives a much-needed voice to the ever-expanding population of bi-racial people in this world. As time goes on the mixing becomes more complex than just black or white, but for anyone with an open mind and curiosity about what it is like to live this experience, this is the book! Not only does Rebecca Walker masterfully depict and explore the duality that so many of bi-racial folk must learn and live, she manages to also send the reader on a vivid flashback rollercoaster ride into being a child of the eighties. This is a bonus and a worthwhile one. As a woman Rebecca zeroes in on so many of the universal issues that continue to plague generation after generation of young women. From sex and sexuality and losing her virginity, to abortion to the conundrum of relationships Rebecca writes with sincerity and candor. Again, as a mixed person I found myself over and over in the pages of this book, the writing is so insightful. I saw Rebecca read from this book at In Other Words a small bookstore in Portland, Oregon a couple years ago and I was immediately drawn in. I dog-eared countless pages in this book and it is one I refuse to lend out- encouraging all those who are curious to purchase a copy for their own reference. When my fiancée struggled to understand my perspective on life and personality once, I told him to read this book. Not only was he unable to put the book down he agreed with me when I told him that somehow, my perspective landed in the pages of the book. Since reading BWJ he has a renewed understanding and sense of appreciation for who I am. This is so valuable to anyone who is involved with a bi-racial person or plans on raising one. From a heartfelt place I must say that reading this book was like a long reminiscing conversation with an older sister. Revisiting old memories, trying to understand the influences of our parents, our peers, the times, and the cultures and cities we were raised in. While the details are different for each of us, the themes will undoubtedly resonate with any bi-racial person- making this a classic literary piece on this topic. I could go on and on and never have enough words to sing praises for this book.

Rebecca Walker's book, Black, White, and Jewish, is a fascinating, well-written memoir of life on the borderlands between the African American and Jewish worlds in the modern United States. Walker's engaging prose allows the reader to catch a glimpse of what she experienced as a mixed race Black/Jewish person growing up, including her difficulties, the challenges, and the insights gained from her mixed race life. As intermarriage increases, more stories like Walker's undoubtedly will be told, with increasing complexities arising in them as the racial mixtures become increasingly complex. Mixed race autobiography, which includes such notable works as James McBride's The Color of Water, is a small but growing genre. Walker's experiences, including her uncertainty about how she fit into this nation's race picture and how this affected virtually every aspect of her life (including her early sex life, which is given in-depth discussion), were thought-provoking and are well worth the read. Despite its positives, however, the book left me thinking that much important background was left out of the full story. Having written in this genre myself, I understand the difficulties of autobiography, especially its potentially damaging impact on family and friends that may inhibit telling the "whole" story. However, Walker seemed to go out of her way to be tough on her parents and their role (or lack thereof) in her upbringing. One wonders whether she was unduly harsh, perhaps failing to appreciate how difficult it must have been for her African American mother and Jewish father to live in a racist world in which Black/white marriages were frowned upon, if not vociferously (at times violently) condemned. Indeed, the tensions caused by the racially turbulent world in which her parents lived may well have contributed to their marital break-up. The near-exclusive focus on the difficulties faced by Rebecca Walker, with virtually no discussion of those faced by her famous mother (Alice Walker) and civil rights lawyer father, was troubling. Some readers may be left with the impresssion that the book was self-indulgent. It was telling to me that Walker's parents are not expressly mentioned in the book's acknowledgements.

A very sad book but not for the reasons the author intends. According to Walker, she has rhythm because of her black lineage (which of course makes her incredible in bed). She can withstand the cold because of her white blood. And she is a neurotic, overanalytical mess because of her Jewish heritage. Has the dialogue about race and religion progressed so little that someone of Walker's keen intelligence would try to pass off these inanities as profound truth?

I don't purport to be a critic of any kind, however upon reading this book, I felt a sort of indescribable urgency to express my opinion on it.. I loved it. I read it in 3 sittings and that's rare considering my hectic schedule. But I must say, that as I read chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph, I could relate to so much of this book.. but I am not of mixed heritage. I am, however, a product of having been raised in two totally different cultures, and I'm talking east vs. west. To this day, I still deal with the rigors of being one way in one place and another way in another place.. when in Rome is appropriate, I guess. This book, aside from the intelligence and thoughtfulness with which it was written, was extremely therapeutic for me to read. In the end, I found myself feeling as though I had gone through those experiences myself, and some of them, I indeed have. I found myself wanting to read more. But you couldn't ask for a better ending, and in my opinion, Ms. Walker's last words are definitely words to live by, whether you are of mixed heritage or not. It is the love for the human race that is above and beyond the most important of all. As idealistic as that may sound, I found courage in my own ways of thinking, because now I know that I'm not the only one.. As I read the last few pages, particularly the one where Ms. Walker responds to a question from her lover (in that chapter her lover asks her if she 'feels' black or white and if she 'feels' for her people and their struggle) I felt chills go down my spine... because in all honesty, I couldn't have said it better myself. It's a must read... truly. I even had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Walker in Chicago and listening to her read passages from her book. If she's touring in your city, please go see her, it will definitely be worth your while. As a side note, it happens to be my personal belief that most of the people that have given the book bad reviews probably didn't understand where she was coming from at all, hence their misguided and accusatory comments. It takes an open mind to read a book like this...