Black, White & Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (Paperback)

~ (Author) "On my first birthday I am given my favorite foods: chitterlings and chocolate cake..." (more)
Key Phrases: San Francisco, New York, Color War (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The daughter of famed African American writer Alice Walker and liberal Jewish lawyer Mel Leventhal brings a frank, spare style and detail-rich memories the this compelling contribution to the growing subgenre of memoirs by biracial authors about life in a race-obsessed society. Walker examines her early years in Mississippi as the loved, pampered child of parents active in the Civil Rights movement in the bloody heart of the segregated South. Torn apart by the demands of their separate careers, her parents' union eventually lost steam and failed, leaving Walker to shuttle back and forth across country to spend time with them both. Deeply analytical and reflective, she assumes the resonant voices of an inquisitive child, a highly sensitive teen and finally a young woman who is confronted with the harsh color prejudices of her friends, teachers and families-both black and Jewish-and who tires desperately to make sense of rigid cultural boundaries for which she was never fully prepared by her parents. Whether she's commenting on a white ballet teacher who doubts she'll ever be good because her black butt's too big, Jewish relatives who treat her like an alien, or a boyfriend who feels she's not black enough, Walker uses the same elegant, discreet candor she brings to her discussion of her mother and the development of her free-spirited sexuality. Her artfulness in baring her psyche, spirit and sexuality will attract a wealth of deserved praise. (Jan. 2) Forecast: Coming the heels of her mother's story collection, The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (which offers a fictional treatment of Alice Walker's marriage to Leventhal), this literary debut by the younger Walker, who has been recognized by Time as one of her generation's leaders, is destined to generate excitement. Although Walker is likely to be compared to Lisa Jones (the daughter of Amiri Baraka and Jewish writer Hetty Jones), who tackled the myth of tragic mulatto in Bullet Proof Diva (1995), a collection of columns from the Village Voice, Walker's higher profile and narrative treatment of these themes will draw a wider audience who no doubt will greet her warmly on her 10-city tour.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Walker, the daughter of Alice Walker and attorney Mel Leventhal, shuttled among Mississippi, San Francisco, the Bronx, and Washington, DC, after her parents divorced. Here is her story of the need to redefine herself in each new setting.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Trade (January 8, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573229075
• ISBN-13: 978-1573229074
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (91 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #220,019 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, February 17, 2001

By	"miridion" (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black, White, and Jewish: How Memory Works (Hardcover)

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!

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Every Bit Her Mother's Equal....10 Stars!, April 21, 2005

By	Kola Boof (USA) - See all my reviews

Anyone who knows who writer KOLA BOOF is....is well aware that my philosophy on race and living in a "colorized" society is EXTREMELY different from Rebecca Walker's....however, the thing that kept pricking my flesh and fluttering my heart as I read this book was how much "alike" I felt her story was to my own and what a complex, brave human being she is.

"Black, White and Jewish"....is a masterpiece. These long lines of people on AMAZON who are trashing and ridiculing the book must be born out of IDIOT SPIT and MULLET SPERM. The book's intonation, lean wording and clear, tranquil brave-as-a-swinging-baseball-bat CLARITY make it one of the best autobiographies I have ever read in my life, not to mention one of the most devastatingly truthful.

I won't lie and claim that I really "like" Rebecca Walker after reading the book, I don't...but I do feel guilty about not liking her and I do empathize with a lot of her experiences and feel her loneliness and pain. My opinion of her is that she's just as powerful and spiritual as her mother "Alice Walker" and that she's a brilliant humanist, a fantastic writer and an obvious feminist, although, it still pained me that I came away from the book----as a Black Skinned woman from North Africa---seeing her as the kind of "overly-represented" selfish MULATTO girl (in relation to black girls), and throughout much of the book, she admitted as much through her depictions of the black girl "friends" she knew---and she kept juxtaposing her reckless automatic "Exotic person" status and her pain and feelings of dis-belonging over their virtual INVISIBILITY---as if they truly are made to feel that they belong in the "Black Community" more than she is made to feel that SHE DOES. It just astonishes me how women like Halle Berry, Rebecca Walker and Danzy Senna are selectively BLIND to that reality, as though they're entitled to a comfort in blackness that is offered more to them---than it ever is to "AUTHENTIC" black girls. I guess since most black of the girls were just "jealous of her", anyway (Clearing throat) she really wasn't given the opportunity (by the black girls) to get to know them enough to go deeper into either THEIR REALITY or how HER reality is so often used through over-representation to make their's invisible.

Every two weeks I hook into some new book or person and for that time--I'm obsessed with them and literally gobbling them down, digesting them and then spitting their "aura" back up.

The only reason that I've waited to so long to read this book by Rebecca Walker....is because her mother, Alice Walker, is my IDOL, one of the heroines of my young life....and I've always been jealous of Rebecca for actually getting the honor of BEING her real life daughter. Of course, I never expected to read that Alice Walker is a bad mother or spacey and neglectful----but finding it out HAS NOT made me love Alice Walker any less. Being that I'm a woman from Africa, an Adoptee and person whose vagina is "circumcised", which is a subject that Alice spent her career life bringing to the fore---I will always love Alice Walker in a supreme way, no matter what mistakes she's made, and now that I'm the mother of two young sons, I also understand how easy it is to make mistakes, because the reality is....no matter how much you love your children....it's impossible NOT to do something wrong in childrearing.

I can't believe that people are failing to see the brilliance and truth of "Black, White and Jewish" and are failing to acknowledge how courageous and needful of understanding Rebecca must be to actually open her soul this way. I think it's quite impressive and although Rebecca's style and ideation is different, as it should be, from the legendary, Alice Walker....Rebecca Walker, the writer, is every bit her mother's equal.

GIFTED. This book deserves 10 Stars.
_____________________

P.S. Rebecca Walker does NOT look "caramel" colored or any shade of "brown" to me, she's more like a "egg custard" color, but I do think she's beautiful and I love her photo on the FRONT COVER as a child so much that I've had it blown up into a poster and put it on my office wall. She was so adorable and pure of heart.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Delighted and Disappointed..., June 10, 2004

By	Alison Gilbert (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black, White, and Jewish: How Memory Works (Hardcover)

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