Marc Dollinger
Jews and ‘Whiteness’
Summary
This lecture delves into the question, are American Jews white? The answer varies across different generations of Jews and lies at the heart of their Jewish identity. Marc Dollinger explores whether American Jews have maintained their distinctiveness or assimilated to the extent of becoming white. Through an examination of the contentious history and sociology of Jews in the United States, Dollinger provides insights into their evolving racial definition and shares some surprising insights into the ongoing debate over Jewish ‘whiteness’.
Marc Dollinger
Prof. Marc Dollinger is the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Chair in Jewish Studies and Social Responsibility in the Department of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University. He has authored many articles and four books, including Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America, California Jews and American Jewish History: A Primary Source Reader, and Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s. He is currently writing his fifth book, Power and Privilege: Jews, The Identity Project and the Modern University.
Yes, thank you. That is part of my point because on the one hand, race does have to do with skin color because you can easily identify someone by the color of their skin. And what I wanted to add to that equation is what we call the social construction of race, which is sometimes this color of your skin and where you are assigned in the racial hierarchy don’t make logical sense and don’t work for that.
White extremists or white nationalists consider Jews subhuman. I don’t know that they would describe a particular color to it. They would say that, you know, white Jews can have white skin, but they’re still genetically inferior because of their Jewishness. And that’s where the essential anti-Semitism comes in.
Joan thank you. That’s a great question. And this really illustrates the point of social construction. Based on US standards of race, a majority of Israeli Jews would qualify as people of color, meaning they’re not white. Now if you go to Israel, and I have, because I talk about this in Israel too. Jews who are not white have no idea what I’m talking about. Like they’ve never heard this vocabulary or this language or the concept of person of color or for us, Jew of color. And in Israel it has its own, you know, its own racial definitions and standards that are independent and related to what’s going on in the US so.