White Jews: An Intersectional Approach, by David Schraub – 5 August 2019

From AJS Review

Abstract

“Intersectionality,” a concept coined and developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, examines how our various identities change in meaning and valence when placed in dynamic relation with one another. Instead of exploring identity traits like “race,” “gender,” “religion,” and so on in isolation, an intersectional approach asks what these various characteristics “do” to one another in combination. I suggest that an intersectional approach—asking “what does Whiteness do to Jewishness?”—can help illuminate elements of the Jewish experience that would otherwise remain obscure. The core claim is that Whiteness and Jewishness in combination function in ways that are not necessarily grasped if one atomizes the identities and holds them apart. What Whiteness “does” to Jewishness is act as an accelerant for certain forms of antisemitic marginalization even as it ratifies a racialized hierarchy within the Jewish community. Absent an intersectional vantage, many political projects and controversies surrounding Jewish equality will be systematically misunderstood.

The subject of this essay is, as one might expect, White Jews. By that term, I mean to evoke two different conceptions that are clearly related but distinct in important ways. First, there is the matter of particular persons who, but for their Jewishness, would be (in the American context) unambiguously White. We might simply call those persons White, or we might say they are conditionally White, off-White, functionally White, or “White but not quite.” The intersection of Jewishness and race has a long and fraught history over several dimensions; there were and remain significant questions regarding whether Jews (at least those of proximate northern European descent) should be considered “White.” Conditional Whiteness may be the most comprehensive describer: an American Jew whose grandparents immigrated from Austria might unambiguously benefit from White privilege when passing a highway patrol car, but not enjoy it in any way whatsoever when White supremacists are looking for a target to harass. Nonetheless, I do not wish to be hung up on the precise nomenclature. Suffice to say, there are many Jews whose ancestry proximately traces to European countries, whose status as White in America would be relatively uncontroversial save for whatever complications are posed by their Jewishness. For simplicity’s sake we can refer to these Jews as “White Jews.”

But, of course, not all Jews fit this description. There are Jews whose ancestry is not European: Sephardic Jews from Turkey or Latin America, Mizrahi Jews from Iraq or Tunisia, Indian Jews, Ethiopian Jews, African American Jews, and others. Yet, in most conversations or discourses that purport to be about “Jews,” the archetypical Jew that is imagined as the subject of discussion does not look like those Jews and does not include their history. What counts as a “Jewish problem” or a “Jewish experience” or a “Jewish history” is often in fact particular and partial to the specific problems and experiences of the Jews described in the first paragraph: the White Jews. The merger of Jewishness into Whiteness places non-White Jews in a double bind—“split at the root,” to use Adrienne Rich’s evocative phrase. On the one hand, the discrete experiences, problems, or histories of non-White Jews will not be recognized as Jewish insofar as they are non-White (since Jewishness is understood as a White experience). And on the other, insofar as these experiences, problems, or histories are recognized as Jewish, then they will cease to be acknowledged as non-White (since, again, Jewishness is understood as a White experience).

Hence, the second conception meant to be evoked by “White Jews” is the vision of the Jew as White in the public imaginary. Even granting all of the qualifications present in the preceding paragraphs, the figure of the Jew is currently imagined as White—certainly in the Anglo-American world, and perhaps globally as well. The prototypical Jew is someone whose ancestors lived in Europe; if they did not remain there it is because they moved at some point to America or Israel due to some type of European oppression—Russian pogroms, the Nazi Holocaust, the Dreyfus affair, and so on. Jews who do not fit this narrative are often not acknowledged. Even where they are, their image is not the one that is initially evoked when people (very much including those in the overwhelmingly Ashkenazic and generally pale-skinned American Jewish community) talk about Jews. Put another way, “White Jews” are just “Jews”; if one is to talk about non-White Jews, a specific modifier is needed. So “White Jews” also refers to the figure of the Jew as it is currently conceptualized in the public imagination—a figure that is imposed upon the lives of all Jews, whether (individually) White or not.

The object of this essay, then, is to think about White Jews as individuals, and White Jews as a concept, and interrogate how the two constituent elements, “White” and “Jew,” interact with one another. The methodological approach is (to complete our march through the title) an intersectional one; the idea is to think about how Whiteness and Jewishness in combination function in ways that are not necessarily grasped if one atomizes the identities and holds them apart. My claim is that when Jewishness—whether as a conceptual matter or as embodied in individual persons—is understood primarily as a subspecies of Whiteness, it obscures important features of Jewish experience for White and non-White Jews alike, while often accentuating or accelerating antisemitic tropes. In doing so, it perpetuates a form of antisemitic marginalization at the same time as it ratifies, even promotes, a racialized hierarchy within the Jewish community.

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David Schraub is a blogger, lawyer and scholar. He is an associate professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon, USA.

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