As Wladylaw Szpilman, the protagonist in director Roman Polanski’s film adaption of The Pianist (2002) remarks, “Sometimes I don’t know which side of the wall I’m on.” In The Jewish Struggle in the 21st Century: Conflict, Positionality, and Multiculturalism, Daniel Ian Rubin captures the tensions, the questions, the insecure and unsecured place of U.S. Jews – in particular, European-heritage Ashkenazim – in multiple sectors of life.
Rubin skillfully interweaves historical representations with current lived experiences of U.S. Jews, the bittersweet relationship between Jews and African Americans, and the gendered stereotypical depictions of Jewish males, while simultaneously confronting and expanding the continuum of this social notion we call “race.” Throughout this examination, Rubin makes a compelling case for why the dearth of inclusion within the multicultural project regarding Jews and the oppressive condition of antisemitism must be confronted and changed, for this current exclusion seriously affects Jewish communities and scholars both within and outside academia. Depictions of Ashkenazim as “White” on the racial scale provide cover for multiculturalists in their justification to avoid discussions of antisemitism.
As Rubin addresses in this text, I have, myself, questioned my position along the racial spectrum. On numerous occasions, I have attended the annual National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s “Creating Change” conference, bringing together grass-roots activists from throughout North America as well as other countries around the world. At one of the conferences in the early 1990s, I was a participant in a well-attended workshop titled “Activists of Color/White Activists Dialogue” facilitated by two highly respected activists: a woman of color and a White Christian man.
When the workshop began, the woman outlined the agenda for the next one-and-one-half hours: the workshop would concentrate on the concepts of “race” and dialogue across racial divides, and it would include two separate panels of participant volunteers: one composed of four people of color, the other of four White people. Panel members were to each, in turn, answer four questions put to them by the facilitators, first the people of color panelists followed by the White people panelists.
The questions were: (1) “What do you love about being your racial identity?” (2) “What has been difficult for you growing up this racial identity?” (3) “What do you never want to hear said again about or seen done to people
As the facilitator explained the intended focus and agenda, great confusion came over me: Should I volunteer? Well, maybe, but I really can’t because I’m not sure if either of the categories on which the panels are organized include me. I know for certain that I am not eligible to volunteer for the “persons of color” panel. But, also, I feel as if, somehow, I don’t belong on the “White persons” panel either. Maybe I should just listen to the panelists, which I did.
But what caused my bewilderment? What got in my way of self-defining as “White”? From where was this feeling of not-belonging on either panel, or my feeling of in-betweenness coming? Thinking back, I came to realize that it stems, I believe, from both personal and collective experience.
For me, it seemed to have taken somewhat longer than, for example, many European-heritage Christians, to come to an acceptance that by dint of my skin color, hair texture, facial features, and most importantly, my European genealogy, U.S. society grants me a host of privileges denied those constructed as “persons of color.” But then again, my father often talked about his childhood and the ways he suffered the effects of anti-Jewish prejudice. One of only a handful of Jews in his schools in Los Angeles in the 1920s and 1930s, many afternoons he returned home injured from a fight. During recess period in elementary school, to avoid attack by the other boys who targeted him as “the Jew,” “the dirty Jew,” and “the killer of Christ,” he found an opening under one of the buildings where he hid each day. To get a decent job, his father, my grandfather Abraham, anglicized the family name, changing it from “Blumenfeld” to “Eddy Fields” so he could find a job within this highly discriminatory society.
When I was born in 1947, my maternal uncle’s friend gave me a small gold chain with the fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Hei, representing “G*d” in Hebrew, or “HaShem.” Upon my Bar Mitzvah at the age of 13, my mother presented me with the Hei, saying: “Warren, you are old enough now to wear this. Remember, though, to always wear it under your shirt out of view. There are still many people who hate Jews, and I don’t want you to get hurt if these people see the Hei around your neck.”
Due to historical and social conditions, Jews have a sort of “double vision” (Brodkin, 1998) or “insider/outsider” status (Biale, Galchinsky, & Heschel, 1998) within contemporary U.S. society. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz concludes that:
The truth is, Jews complicate things. Jewish is both a distinct category and an overlapping one…The problem is a polarization of white and color that excludes us. (1996, emphasis in original)
Dominant groups have passed down stereotypes from generation to generation of Jews being the “killers of G*d,” being in the service of the Devil, desecrators of the Christian Host, ritual murderers of Christian children, poisoners of drinking wells and transmitters of disease, being homeless wanderers, “clannish,” cheating usurers, sexually perverse, being of an alien “race,” being murderous Communists and Socialists who attempt to overthrow Capitalist systems, and simultaneously being enormously rich Capitalists, dominators of countries and world economies, and being exploiters of the oppressed.
It is no wonder that Jews as a community carry with them (us) an “oppression mentality,” an “enemy memory” (Steele, quoted in Berman, 1994), or a “siege mentality” (Hertzberg, 1979), which is the intense awareness that anti-Jewish oppression can surface again at any time, regardless of how “good” conditions for Jews appear at any moment. With these lingering questions, with the occasional acts of anti-Jewish violence, with the continued categorization of Jews as “racially inferior” and as so-called “mud people” (along with people of color) by extremist White racist groups, and possibly because I continue to carry this “enemy memory,” I come close to Brodkin’s placement of Ashkenazi Jewish American ethnoracial assignment as “White,” but not completely. I chose, therefore, to plot our current placement as “off-White” on the American ethnoracial scale as it is currently constructed.
In this text, Daniel Ian Rubin raises important issues related to Jewish heritage, identity, and “raciality,” the place of Jews in discussions and education related to diversity, multiculturalism, and social justice, and how HebCrit fits within the overarching field of critical studies.
The Jewish Struggle in the 21st Century: Conflict, Positionality, and Multiculturalism will add significantly to the extant literature base on this deeply neglected field of inquiry.
Warren J. Blumenfeld
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
References
Berman, P. (Ed.). (1994). Blacks and Jews: Alliances and arguments. Dell Publishers.
Biale, D., Galchinsky, M., & Heschel, S. (1998). Insider/outsider: American Jews and multiculturalism. University of California Press.
Brodkin, K. (1998). How Jews became white folks & what that says about race in America. Rutgers University Press.
Hertzberg, A. (1979). Being Jewish in America. Schocken Books.
Kaye/Kantrowitz, M. (1992). The issue is power: Essays on women, Jews, violence, and resistance. Aunt Lute Book.