Becoming White
Prell even notes that contemporary sociologists found that for suburban Jewish Americans, being a good American, being a good Jew, and being a good person were virtually synonymous. Jewish Americans revised and revitalized traditions in pursuit of establishing distinctiveness as a cultural group and assimilating with American norms; they had to negotiate emerging accumulation of wealth and power, as well as the coexistence of Judaism the religion, Jewishness the culture, and Americanness the lived experience. These weren’t contradictory aims, however; eating Jewish and American, for one, was fully possible with mass-produced kosher goods and the development of “kosher-style” dining out.
We can read this negotiation of Jewish American identity as a project of whiteness: defining ethnonational difference while coalescing into the white majority.
Of critical importance here is that Jewishness was no longer considered a race after the Holocaust. Structural barriers that had oppressed Jews through the 19th and early 20th century were lifted post-war. "Yiddish" or "Hebrew" on government forms prior to 1940, parents’ immigration status listed on personal documents, FHA restrictions on land and home loans, barriers to education – each a racialized means of circumscribing Jewish American existence. Their absence – the same absence that encouraged suburbanization – implicitly decreed whiteness. And as Jewish Americans were propelled into higher socioeconomic status thanks to post-war affirmative action program, they walked through the word benefitting from the same systems that non-immigrant whites did – benefitting from the privileges and power of whiteness.
Without “the Jewish race” and without Jewishness pervading their daily lives, these middle-class suburban Jewish Americans found themselves without community consensus of who is a Jew? What links Jewish Americans together? And thus, ethnicity emerged. As Berman asserts, “the language of ethnicity blurred Jewish pride and success with the general phenomenon of cultural nationalism.” By defining Jewishness as an ethnicity, Jews could continue to benefit from the power of whiteness while maintaining “a generalized sense of cultural distinctiveness.” This language of ethnicity was pushed forward by Jewish sociologists and religious leaders alike in the 1950s and 1960s – and as Jews welcomed their dual white and distinctive status, they reinforced white supremacist patterns.
Historian Eric Goldstein explains that earlier generations of Jewish Americans navigated the New World without developing anti-blackness, with their recent history of European “persecution vivid in their minds.” But the hope of social acceptance led to the allure of racism: as Jews became white, others were otherized – or, Jews became white because others were otherized. Anthropologist Karen Brodkin reminds that when Jews would be considered White on government documentation, racial categories for Korean, Chinese, and Japanese developed. While Jewish Americans benefitted from the G.I. Bill and FHA loans, Black folks suffered worse redlining and discrimination. I argue that midcentury Jewish Americans were complicit in the shifting of who is orientalized and otherized, who is left out of systems of power. This harkens back to the spatialization of Jewish identity, particularly as Jewish Americans participated in white flight. As Kranson writes, “Jewish leaders at the time debated whether the move to suburbia indicated a Jewish eagerness to ‘escape’ racial tensions or whether racial segregation represented an unfortunate but inevitable result of their upward mobility.”
That upward mobility is too frequently attributed not to the removal of structural barriers that once faced Jewish immigrants. Instead, it’s credited to something inherent to Jewishness: an inherited acumen for capitalism, a centuries-born drive for achievement, an embodied religion rooted in inquiry and scholarship. The line between Jewish culture and ethnicity and race becomes blurry, and the bootstraps mentality takes shape: Jews succeed because they work hard and care about moving up in the world. They become the "model minority" – a community on a pedestal and under a microscope. Not only does this attitude invoke the very types of power and visibility that made American Jews wary of entering the middle class in the first place, but as Berman so aptly puts it, the “mythologized Jewish success story reduces the subjugation of other marginalized groups.” Jewish success wasn't innate and wasn't the result of patriotic whim and toiling labor. It grew out of structural change and and access to opportunity – and it wasn't without consequences on Jewish identity and perception. Jews themselves could not always tell where upward mobility ended and racism began.
It seems so obvious to me that Ashkenazi Jewish Americans are white. I consider myself so obviously white. We’re not a distinct race – race is socially constructed, and we’re socially constructed as white. I walk through the world with the privilege of whiteness: I'm not questioned when I enter opulent spaces, I'm not asked where "I'm really from," my accomplishments are my own and not in spite of my community. I'm able to openly identify with my Judaism, openly choose to embrace or reject its without losing my cultural tie. I can find Hanukkah candles at big box stores and Passover recipes in national, secular magazines – and I can buy makeup that matches my skin tone and read about celebrities who look like me.
Though I'm tempted to live in a post-Jewish-ethnic world, I know it's more complicated than that. My family history is as the oppressed, not as the oppressor. My genealogy and healthcare prognosis reflect a lineage of insularity. My Jewishness is not religious, but cultural and community-based. My ancestors faced xenophobia and institutionalized discrimination, and those forces shifted only two, three generations ago. Critical rhetoriticians Jamie Moshin and Richard Crosby argue that Jews can be considered “liminally white” even today; sociologist Cynthia Levine-Rasky nuances this, suggesting that though Ashkenazi Jews exist within an "indefinite and temporal" racial spectrum, they still hold a "hegemonic social positioning."
We still face marginalization rooted in white supremacy – our foods live in the "international/ethnic" aisle of the supermarket, our holidays require using PTO, our communities navigate both right- and left-wing antisemitic extremism. But by and large, we have benefitted from the systems that uphold whiteness; we constructed our ethnic self against an other with darker skin. If we were just Jewish and not white, what does that make of Black Jews – of Ethiopian descent, or descendants of enslaved Americans – or Latino Jews – whose population expanded dramatically circa stateside suburbanization – or Middle Eastern and North African Jews – who are the least diasporic of us all? To say Ashkenazi Jewish Americans are not white is to erase the multiplicities of racial and other ethnic identities also held by Jewish people in this country and around the world.