Chicago Maroon, IL
Nov 1, 2004
Shades of gray in the Jewish world
By Adam Weissmann
In her op-ed piece (`Jewish-conspiracy theorist surfaces at Duke,’
10/22/04), Phoebe Maltz boldly and cleverly outlined the major flaws
and absurdities of Philip Kurian’s article `The Jews’ in a recent
edition of Duke University’s Chronicle. Yet Kurian’s article, as well
as Maltz’s critique, highlights serious problems of identity and
perception within the Jewish community, both in the world and on our
own campus. Just as I was glad to see Maltz take a stand in exposing
such vile (and frankly inane) accusations about the status of Jews in
American society, I was dismayed by the concessions she allowed in
order to make her argument seem more amenable to a general audience. I
refer specifically to her unwillingness to explore further the American
myth that Jews are `white,’ a label conferred by leading segments of
the mainstream American society only within the last seventy years.
Maltz writes: `While much of Europe has long been divided between Jew
and Christian, America has been divided…between black and white, with
(most) Jews falling into the second category.’ The most fundamental
problem with this line of reasoning is that it presupposes an
oppositional relationship between Jews and Christians. Christians are a
religious group, transcending national borders and peoples. The Jews, a
vestige of a more ancient time when each people subscribed to its own
national religious cult, are one people who have retained their
indigenous religion against the pressures to adopt one of the dominant
multinational religions of Christianity and Islam. This continuing act
of resistance against foreign religious dominance alone has done much
to spurn the hatred that Jews have endured throughout the history of
their diaspora. While other nations, such as the Armenians (they were
the first), the Greeks, and the French acceded to the adoption of the
transnational Christianity, Jews remained stubborn. To say that `much
of Europe has been divided between Christian and Jew’ is incorrect, and
it would be more appropriate to state that much of Europe has been
divided between Jews and a host of other nations.
Yet this statement still does not satisfy: Why focus attention on
Europe? For most of the last eighteen centuries, the country with the
largest Jewish diaspora population has been none other than Iraq. The
sojourn of vast numbers of Jews in Eastern Europe – the locale called to
mind for most Americans as the land of the wandering Jew – did not begin
until the early Renaissance. Throughout the history of the Jewish
exile, large communities could be found in Egypt, Iraq, North Africa,
Ethiopia, and Spain as well. At what point, then, did Jews become
`white?’
In American society, there is a construction of race and ethnicity very
different than that of the Old World. Just as much as Americans have,
throughout their early history, sought to create a new order under a
new republic with a renewed religious enlightenment, so too have
Americans invented a new standard for dividing people into arbitrary
groups. Much of this social construction, it may be deduced, is a
result of the need for fair-skinned European settlers in the New World
to reconcile their horrific enslavement of black Africans by grouping
them as `the Other.’ Before one’s race was French or Russian or
Chinese; now it had become `black’ or `white.’
But who could be `white?’ Until the period of the Second World War,
Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans were not. Neither were Jews. Only
after that bitter conflict had seen both the deep commitment of each
group to the national effort and the increased entry of the Irish,
Italian, and Jewish second and third-generation immigrants into the
American middle-class were mainstream Americans willing to grant them
`whiteness.’ Also, the growing tensions between white America and the
still-disenfranchised black America were growing, eventually coming to
a head in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and `60s. After the
war, `white’ Americans were quite eager to expand their ranks
(excluding country-club memberships and college admissions, of course).
We are witnessing a similar extension of this `whiteness’ today, as
many colleges and universities have begun grouping Asian Americans into
the `white’ category for the purposes of affirmative action and other
admissions considerations.
This `white’ identity, which in the last few decades has grown among
most American Jews, is very dangerous to the survival of the Jewish
people in this country. Foremost, it threatens Jewish national
unity – many Jews are not as fair-skinned as those in America, whose
ancestors came largely from the destroyed communities of Northern and
Eastern Europe, where Jews sojourned for several generations – by
fostering new, artificial divisions within the Jewish civilization.
Like many nations, but unlike some in the West, the Jews’ national
identity rests not on the tint of its members’ skin but in a shared
cultural, religious, and historical experience.
Second, it helps to fuel dangerous misconceptions about the
reestablishment of Jewish independence in Israel. It is far easier for
those who fear the Jews’ exercise of political sovereignty to smear the
Jewish national liberation movement as one of `colonization,
occupation, and imperialism’ if the Jews are just another group of
`white’ infiltrators. In a sense, if one were to compare the
relationship between ethnic tensions and racial labels in the Middle
East to those in America, it would be the Jews, Kurds, Assyrians, and
other historically oppressed minorities who must be termed `black.’
What, then, does this teach us? Though I may have been a bit unfair to
Maltz in my treatment of her critique, I feel it is my duty to
underscore a reality that is absent in her prose. If Jews living in
America wish to dissolve into the fabric of the American quilt then
reinforcement of these artificial and self-defeating social divisions
will only prove helpful in hastening the death of this country’s Jewish
community. I and many other Jews like me, both in the general
population and on our campus, choose not to `revel in the luxury of my
`yarmulke’-free existence,’ as does Maltz. Rather I actively embrace my
national identity. It is with pride that I elect to don a `kippah’ (a
more appropriate word for that traditional head-covering), and in so
doing I express my undying faith in the ability of all peoples in the
world to find the elusive harmony that has been so absent since the
beginning of human civilization – one in which the Jews, too, may be
accepted and respected as an equal in the family of peace-loving
nations.