Brodkin (Caring by the Hour), a professor of anthropology at UCLA, synthesizes much recent scholarship to assess the shifting notions of race?and changing objects of racism?in the U.S. She points out that racial inferiority has been ascribed to waves of immigrants only when they were used as unskilled labor. She notes how "Jewish whiteness became American whiteness" after WWII, when Jews began to speak as whites and Jewish intellectuals "contrasted themselves with a mythic blackness." A self-described secular Jew situated in leftist academic circles, Brodkin somewhat awkwardly weaves familial reflections into her otherwise academic book. While intriguing, Brodkin's treatment is hardly exhaustive. She argues that her New York parents and grandparents "lived in a time when Jews were not white"; however, that focus on Jewish racial self-assignment obscures the somewhat murkier role of Jews in the South, as well as those who ran shops or provided social services in the inner cities of the North. She repeats her overall thesis?that racism and the construction of racial identity is the foundational principle of American identity and American capitalism?over and over, but her argument is no more convincing for all the repetition.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"An insightful interpretation of the complexities of Jewish ethnoracial identity, in the context of a multicultural America stratified by gender, race and class that is both theoretically rich and deeply personal. By interrogating how Jews were integrated within the framework of whiteness. Brodkin illustrates just how difficult it may be to deracialize American society and culture."
Review
"An insightful interpretation of the complexities of Jewish ethnoracial identity, in the context of a multicultural America stratified by gender, race and class that is both theoretically rich and deeply personal. By interrogating how Jews were integrated within the framework of whiteness. Brodkin illustrates just how difficult it may be to deracialize American society and culture."
,
Endorsement
From the Back Cover
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 multigenerational experience. She shows how Jews experience a kind of double vision that comes from racial middleness: on the one hand, marginality wit regard to whiteness; on the other, whiteness and belonging with regard to blackness.
Class and gender are key elements of race-making in America. Brodkin suggests that racial assignment of individuals and groups constitutes an institutionalized system of occupational and residential segregation, a key element in misguided public policy and 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. Brodkin questions the means by which Americans construct their political identities and what is required to weaken the hold of this governing myth.
About the Author
Karen Brodkin is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Caring by the Hour and Sisters and Wives, and co-editors with D. Remy of My Troubles are Going to Have Trouble with Me.
