From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Relationships between American Jews and African-Americans have a long, complicated history. Jews engaged in African-American civil rights work as early as the 1910s. Yet Jewish songwriter Irving Berlin felt a strong need to repudiate the indisputable influence of African-American music on his work. In this original, boldly conceptualized and well-researched inquiry into the complicated intersections of "race" and Jewish-American identity, Emory University's Goldstein explores how Jewish immigrants gradually began to understand themselves as "white" (i.e., fully European) when most of America did not. Goldstein writes that he has framed this book not "as a study of how Jews
became white but as one that explores how Jews
negotiated their place in a complex racial world," which makes this substantially different from such works as Karen Brodkin's
How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America. Using a dexterous mix of traditional history, sociology, critical race and whiteness studies. Goldstein brings together a wealth of examples—such as the turn-of-the-20th-century argument that Jews had a "primitive Negro past"—to explore the myriad ways the racialization of Jewishness formed a central tenet of ideas about race in American culture.
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Review
In this original, boldly conceptualized and well-researched inquiry into the complicated intersections of 'race' and Jewish-American identity, Goldstein explores how Jewish immigrants gradually began to understand themselves as 'white' (i.e., fully European) when most of America did not.
(
Publishers Weekly )
A palimpsest layering institutional, communal, literary, religious, and visual materials, Goldstein's study moves deftly and amusingly through periods and across cultural domains to show how the Jews came to describe themselves. . . . Goldstein's presentation of a century and a half of Jewish 'negotiation' of whiteness is fascinating chapter by chapter, and deft in communicating the bewildering diversity and reactivity of Jewish relationships to the black community.
(
Elisa New New Republic )
More than any other historian to date, Goldstein . . . shows the changing ways in which Jewish Americans themselves argued either for their own racial particularity, or for their inclusions as whites, or for both.
(
David Roediger Chronicle of Higher Education )
Essential reading for understanding ethnic/race relations and Jewish identity. Goldstein provides an excellent history of Jewish efforts to place themselves within the American racial hierarchy.
(
Ronald H. Bayor Southern Jewish History )
Eric Goldstein demonstrates in this intriguing and insightful study [that] it would be much too short-sighted to regard race solely as a problematic concept imposed on American Jews in order to marginalize them.
(
Tobias Brinkmann Journal of Modern Jewish Studies )
Eric L. Goldstein has written a penetrating and illuminating account of US Jews' entanglement with 'race' from the last third of the 19th century to the present. . . . [T]his is a thought-provoking text that deserves a wide readership.
(
Choice )
This is a field well-trodden in recent years, but Eric L. Goldstein adds both earnest research and close interpretation to the inherently limitless question of Jewish-American 'identity.'
(
American Historical Review )
Eric L. Goldstein's book should be among the very first stops for those wishing to approach the subject of Jews and race in America.... It is broad, well researched, compellingly told, extraordinarily nuanced, and it comes as a kind of savior to an area of scholarship that has suffered from large gaps regarding basic historical fact.
(
Michael Alexander American Jewish History )
Eric Goldstein, an American historian, has written a fascinating, meticulously documented book that . . . shows that American Jews' definition of the Jewish collectivity, for themselves as well as for others, has undergone significant change over the past two centuries, to a large extent reflecting their varying sense of security in American society.
(
Chaim I. Waxman Jewish Political Studies Review )
