Research Catalog

Title

How Jews became white folks and what that says about race in America / Karen Brodkin.

Author

Brodkin, Karen.

Publication

New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, ©1998.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xi, 243 pages; 24 cm

Summary

• Recounts how Jews assimilated into, and became accepted by, mainstream white society in the later twentieth century, as they lost their working-class orientation.
• "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 multi-generational experience. She shows how Jews experience a kind of double vision that comes from racial middleness: on the one hand, marginality with regard to whiteness; on the other, whiteness and belonging with regard to blackness."
• "Class and gender are key elements of race-making in American history. Brodkin suggests that this country's racial assignment of individuals and groups constitutes an institutionalized system of occupational and residential segregation, is a key element in misguided public policy, and serves as 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. As a result, the structure within which Americans form their ethnoracial, gender, and class identities is distressingly stable. Brodkin questions the means by which Americans construct their political identities and what is required to weaken the hold of this governing myth"--Amazon.com.

Subjects

• United States > Ethnic relations
• Jews > United States > Identity
• United States > Race relations
• Jews > United States > Social conditions

Genre/Form

History (form)

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 205-226) and index.

Contents

How did Jews become white folks? -- Race making -- Race, gender, and virtue in civic discourse -- Not quite white: gender and Jewish identity -- A whiteness of our own? Jewishness and whiteness in the 1950s and 1960s.

ISBN

• 0813525896
• 9780813525891
• 081352590X
• 9780813525907

LCCN

• 98022606
• 99995155428

OCLC

• ocm39069432
• 39069432
• SCSB-3642700

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries