Marc Dollinger
Jews and ‘Whiteness’
Professor Marc Dollinger - Jews and ‘Whiteness’
- Good day everybody. Excited to present to you some thoughts on, I think a really topical and controversial topic about Jews and whiteness. So I’ll start with my middle school, junior high school here in the United States, sixth, seventh and eighth grade. And that is indeed Malaga Cove Intermediate School in suburban Los Angeles, California. And here I was in English and social studies with Ms. Lyle. And I’m naming her with her permission ‘cause I’ve actually had a chance to present this talk to her because when I was in Ms. Lyle’s sixth grade English and social studies class, we had a unit. And this unit was taught throughout the state of California in the public school system where we learned about different kinds of people. One group that we had to learn was a group called the mongoloids. And we had to memorise that a mongoloid person had slanted eyes and yellow skin. And then we learned about Negroids and Negroids had flat lips and a dark complexion. And then of course we had to learn about a group called the caucasoids. But Caucasoid had a white skin and what they described as average features. And as you can imagine right, putting O-I-D at the end of each of these words, Mongoloid, negroid, caucasoid seemed to give it kind of an authenticity. An authority, a scientific, you know, righteousness. And then it came time for our exam at the end of the unit.
And the exam, we had a true false section. For example, we were given the question, Mongoloids have dark skin. And based just upon what I gave you from that curriculum, you would’ve had to have answered that false because you would’ve studied the night before and you would’ve remembered that it was in fact Negroids that had dark skin. There was matching where sort of on, and now I’m going to date myself, but back in the old days when we had mimeographs and things like that, like on one side of the page, we would have those categories. And on the other side of the page we would have the qualities and then we’d have to sort of draw lines across the page to connect one to the other to see if it was right. Then we have the fill in the blank section of the test, you know, which is caucasoid has blank features. And then you’d have to remember to write in the word average. Jews and whiteness are subject for today. For those of you taking notes and are interested, what I like to do in my talks is offer you a historical question which is going to focus our time together and then give you my thesis at the beginning. And you can feel free of course, to disagree with the thesis. We’ll have time for question and answers at the end so we can sort of engage it. So here, what I want to do in our time together is ask the question, are Jews white? And even the question is complicated because we have a diverse, ethnically and racially diverse Jewish community here in the United States and of course around the world. So I’m now speaking about are white presenting Jews white? These are Jews who look white, but are they white?
And then ultimately I think really, and what might have your interest in attending today, what are the implications of whether or not white Jews are white? And here’s my thesis. “Jews, more than any other American ethno/religious group, maintain an ambivalent, if ever changing relationship to whiteness. Over time, over place and person. it’s very definition proves contested. Ultimately, Jewish whiteness exposes the dynamics of privilege and the powerful, and sometimes destructive ways it plays out.” And I’m going to focus today on American Jewish life. But we’ll get to QnA, especially if you’re not in the US it’d be, you know, fascinating and interesting to hear what your experiences are. So I think first we want to just look at this word whiteness or what it means to be white. And you know, here in the US typically this question comes up on government affirmative action forms. And basically there’s lots of times when you’re filling out forms that they want to know your racial background and they give you a bunch of boxes to check. And one of the boxes says, white. And Jewish people, at least white Jewish people, many of them are perplexed because they don’t identify themselves as white. Yet they don’t see Jewish as a box to check. And then there’s typically a box at the bottom that says other with a blank line. And I know a lot of people who say they check other and then they write in Jewish. So we’re going to look at the definition of whiteness.
We’re going to look at an historical overview over the last probably 150 years on how we understand Jews and whiteness. Then we’ll look at its implications and then we’ll close with some time for QnA. Alright, so the first thing to, and you might need a deep breath for this, but this is really a sociological question more than it’s a scientific question. Now we have to say, of course, racial status and whiteness is definitely based upon the colour of one’s skin. Is one’s skin colour white or not white 'cause that is what is visible and presentable and what people see and the way in which our systems of power and privilege are built. And that said, it is what we call socially constructed, which means that it actually doesn’t follow scientific standards. It more follows sociological ones and will find in history that whiteness has more to do with one’s relationship to power than it has to do just with the colour of one’s skin. And I think the best way to illustrate this, if anyone does genealogy, let’s take your great-great-great-great grandparents, however many greats we have to say to get 16 ancestors. And let’s imagine of your 16 ancestors, 15 came from Italy and one came from Ireland. What would you be? You’d probably be Italian. You’d probably have an Italian name. You’d probably have an Italian culture. You’d probably be Roman Catholic. Maybe somewhere that one Irish ancestor is going to get some kind of credit down the line over the generations. But if you are 15/16 Italian, you’re generally known as Italian. But now let’s change it up. Now we’ve got the same 15 Italian ancestors, but let’s make the 16th from an African country. And what are you then?
Okay here in the United States you would be called black because of something that we call the one drop rule, which is that one drop of African blood makes you black even if you are white presenting, you know? Even if you are light skinned. So here the mathematical data, the 15/16 Italian should mean that one’s racial definition is already determined by 15/16 but in fact it’s not. And when it comes to sort of trying to understand how at least American Jews fit into this, my favourite example is the word quotas. And the word quotas is a very triggering word in American Jewish life because back in the day, really that will most infamously was in the 1920s, there were anti-Semitic quotas placed against Jews in lots of different parts of life. But most famously or most infamously was at the university. And there’s one awful case at Harvard University of all places. Where the president of Harvard University wrote a letter, which is public now, where he basically said there’s too many Jews going to Harvard. So in the future they’re going to establish a quota. And they create the quota and only that number of Jews are going to be permitted to go to Harvard. So 40 years later in the 1960s when President Lyndon Baines Johnson creates a social reform programme called The Great Society. And one of the main features of his Great Society reform programme was affirmative action.
The idea that in order to get racial minorities, marginalised groups, more access and more rights and a sense of justice, more effort’s needed to be taken. First by government and then by private industry to sort of, you know, work against the historical racism that existed. Unfortunately, affirmative action in some cases was not effective 'cause there was just a great deal of pushback. So there were some courts that pushed affirmative action to the next step, which is quotas. In one famous or infamous case in Boston, for example, the fire department was basically only hiring white firefighters. And you know, the government kind of went and said, “You can’t hire exclusively white, you’ve got to diversify, you know, your firefighters.” And they said no. So they got sued and they went to court. And then the judge basically said, “Okay, you know, 10%”, whatever the number was. “Of your next year’s hire have to be people who aren’t white.” And that’s called a quota. So in the 1960s, almost all American Jewish organisations opposed the quotas that Lyndon Johnson’s administration, you know, had sort of precipitated. And when you asked them like, why are you against a quotas they say, “Well, they’re anti-Semitic.” And in the 1920s Harvard, and they would go into it. But here’s a deeper analysis of it. There were quotas in the 20s and in the 60s that’s true. But in the 1920s, the quotas were used in order to keep white people in power and the marginalised racial minority groups out of power. By the 1960s in The Great Society, LBJ, President Johnson was trying to do the opposite. He’s like, we have to find opportunities for marginalised communities, for people of colour, for racial minorities to get the access which they have been denied because of racism. So they created quotas for the purpose of basically limiting the power of white people and increasing the power of non-white people.
Which means if you’re like a self-interested, like white Protestant in the 1920s, you loved quotas, but you hated them in the 60s. Vice versa, if you’re a person of colour in the 20s, you hated the quotas, but in the 60s you’d love them. As far as I can tell, there’s only one American group that hated quotas both times, and that was Jews. And the only way, like the Jewish community would hate quotas in the 20s and then hate 'em in the 60s when they flipped on the way they operated is something happened to American Jews in those 40 years. And as historians describe it and sociologists describe it, Jews became white, especially in the 1950s, which we’ll talk about in a moment. So just by looking at the word quotas I think we can get sort of a deeper sense that there has been a change in racial status among American Jews in that time period. And now I want to honour and recommend the two leading, two of the leading scholars on this topic. This is Professor Eric Goldstein, he’s a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, and this was his first book which really set the standard on this question. It’s called “The Price of Whiteness. Jews, Race and American Identity.” And he really, much of today’s talk is really going to be gleaned from the arguments he makes in his book. And he starts sort of about in the 1880s and looks about, you know, how Jews are racially defined. And then he goes decade by decade up until the late 20th century.
The other really great book which is often used, is by Professor Karen Brodkin, now retired from UCLA and she was in the Department of Anthropology and I just love her book titled “How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America.” And her book is semi autobiographical, so she sort of fits in lots of family stories and what it was like for her growing up. And I find that my students find Bodkin’s book an easier read and they find Goldstein’s book, you know, more academic. And I think that’s probably true, you should read both of them, but if you have to choose between one, I’ll tell you that Goldstein is is really sort of the, the more straight scholarly kind of treatment. And Brodkin is a really nice way of taking the scholarship and also adding personal experience to make it a little bit more readable. I think it’s fair to say that both of these books share this thesis in common, that American Jews have moved back and forth across the racial divide. That’s the first thing. Sometimes Jews are considered white, sometimes Jews aren’t considered white over time in the US. And then the fascinating part that Goldstein really explores. Sometimes being white or not being white was a good thing and sometimes it was not a good thing. And then in a deeper sense for those of us who are academics in American Jewish history, we put all that together and it gives us really a fascinating frame for understanding the historical experience.
So we’re going to start our journey today historically in the Gilded Age. And the Gilded Age runs in the US from 1877, the end of reconstruction to 1901. Then there’s three or four reasons why they like to choose 1901 to end it, but it’s sort of the Late Industrial Revolution era. And in this time period, Jews, American Jews are not considered white. And just to report like a Jewish person who looks like me, who is definitely white, is not considered white in late 19th century America. But here’s a, well none of this is really fun, but this is academically fun. Professor Goldstein discovered that it was actually a good thing not to be considered white if you were Jewish in Gilded Age America. Because according to the genetic thoughts of that time period, Jewish people were genetically predisposed to study. Jews are the people of the book and who would not want to be considered a learned people. So if you’re walking down the street and someone who’s Christian says, “Oh, they’re a Jewish person.” Like you’re going to internalise, “Oh they respect me 'cause I study.” Jews were considered predisposed to be hardworking. And certainly in the Industrial Revolution that was emerging in the country at the time, you looked really good as an immigrant to a new country if the native born white people around you thought that you were predisposed to be hardworking.
There’s something, a phrase we only really invented in the 1950s called Judeo-Christian, but I’ll use it here in the Gilded Age. And that is, there was a Judeo-Christian commonality for Jews. Which is that Judaism was the forebear to Christianity. And there was a sense then that when Jews immigrated to the US that they were sort of like the original holders of the Christian tradition. Jesus himself was Jewish. And this is really a nice way of saying that other immigrant groups from Asia, especially to the Western United States, are not going to enjoy the kind of welcome that Jews did because they were considered unassimable and that means they couldn’t assimilate to American society. But Jews, because of the, you know, the links between Judaism and Christianity, they were seen more. I’ll just say this one personally. Jews were considered to be, Jewish men were considered to be good husbands. And at least the mythology went that, you know, we did not engage in domestic violence or really any sort of violence. And Jews were also seen as temperate, that Jews didn’t drink. And clearly, you know, when we in the United States went into a movement that ultimately passed a constitutional amendment against alcohol. Jews were seen by sort of the old guard white Christian elite as good, moral, law abiding people.
So what do we have in the Gilded Age? Jews are racialized or considered non-white. But that racialization turned out to be a good thing. And you probably know where this is going. The Progressive Era that followed. This is Walter Lippmann’s famous book called “Drift & Mastery”. I think he published it in 1916, which is one of the best sort of descriptions of the early 20th century in the US, Jewish author as well. Things turn awful for Jews between 1901 and 1919. 1919 the end of World War I, the great war sort of ends, you know, for the US. This period, Jews are still not white. Jews are still racialized as what we now call people of colour. But now it’s a really bad thing for a Jewish person to be considered non-white. And this is because, and you may have heard of this word eugenics. Eugenics actually did develop in the late 19th century, in the 1870s, even in Germany, Wilhelm Mar who invented the word antisemitism, was one of these eugenicists. And in an optimistic way, eugenics was supposed to be the application of science to improve the everyday lives of people. And if you were a eugenics, you thought that all the incredible scientific discoveries that were now beginning in the early 20th century, were going to be the things that are going to change the world forever and change it for the better. Except that the eugenesis had a particular read on science. It actually wasn’t scientific at all. We would call it pseudoscience. To be clear they did not call it pseudoscience, they called it science, they believed it. We now call it pseudoscience 'cause it didn’t follow the rules. And here’s an example.
This book actually came out just before officially the Progressive Era. This is “The Races of Europe” by William Z. Ripley. And it was published in 1899. Now Ripley’s book from 1899 was considered a scientific masterpiece. He was an anthropologist. And this book was required reading in the elite Ivy League institutions here in the United States. And I’ll tell you about the book in a moment. If you read the book in the Progressive Era, and you were a college student, you were not reading it as an example of racism, which it was. And you’re not reading it as an example of antisemitism, which it was. You were reading it 'cause you think it’s true. And here’s what he argued. According to Ripley, European white people, Caucasians. What Ms. Lyle called caucasoid if you remember from the opening minutes, even white people were subdivided into different racial groups. And I put it up here on a slide because there are a lot vowels in the word Teutonic. And it’s almost like if you put that many vowels into a word, you have to believe it’s true. 'Cause it just looks like such a scientific word. So according to Ripley, and what was being taught as fact amongst the intellectual elite of our country was that if you were Teutonic, which meant you came from northern Europe. And so those of you in the UK, good news for you. You were considered Teutonic. Bad news if you’re from Ireland, Ireland was not considered Teutonic, even though it was in the North. Scandinavian countries were considered Teutonic.
France was considered Teutonic. Germany actually was considered Teutonic. And if you were that, you were smart by nature, by racial status, by scientific certainty. You were also democracy loving and you had a very high probability for being successful in your life. Oh how great to be Teutonic, smart, democracy loving and successful. Ahh. But if you weren’t Teutonic, the next best thing is Alpine. Switzerland, Austria, right? And now we’re looking for the alpine mountain range. You know, in Europe. Here you were smart and democracy loving and successful, just not as much as a Teutonic. You’d have to work harder to achieve it and probably you wouldn’t be able to achieve it as much or as well because as hard as you would try your racial composition, your racial status made it impossible for you to easily achieve. And now, as you can probably guess, we’re looking at his third category, the lowest, the worst, the Mediterranean stock as he called it. And also the Semitic stock. And this is where the Jews would fit in also. The least intelligent, the least able to succeed, the greatest threat to society.
Because if you bring in these people, and it’s not their fault, they’re just stupid, and their stupidity is not rooted even in the lack of interest of learning. It’s just rooted in the fact that their racial composition forbids them from ever actually being smart. So Eastern European Jews were considered of Semitic stock. And because they are of Semitic racial stock, they were considered inherently inferior. There’s nothing funny here, but a little bit of academic humour. There was a bit of a challenge to his thesis when this book came out in 1899, and that was the Italian Renaissance. How could the Italians be Mediterranean stock and inferior when they were the greatest artists in the greatest moment of The Renaissance of all of European history and maybe even world history. How could this respected anthropologist possibly put Italian so low? And as a good scientist, he said, “Okay, I’ll change my thesis. Italians are idiots on everything except for art. And I don’t know why art is so good for them.”, he said. But the good scientists will go and figure it out. And eventually maybe, you know, write a chapter on it. 1916, this book followed as the next sort of awful bestselling, racist, antisemitic book by Madison Grant called “The Passing of the Great Race”. And I love book titles that tell you the thesis right away. And there is his thesis. There is a great race. The great race is the white race.
This is white supremacy, you know, blatantly. And “The Passing of the Great Race” is Madison Grant’s book to say, I’m going to tell you the story about how white people, how the great race of people are dying, are passing. And here’s a quote from his book. He said, “Unless the United States excludes all inferior racial and ethnic groups, the superior Nordic strain, and that would be Teutonics.” He called them the source of rulers, organisers, and aristocrats would be swamped by what he called the weak, the broken, and the mentally crippled. So now in 1916, the eugenicists are deep into their racism and into their antisemitism, their scientific antisemitism and their depiction of Jews, no matter the colour of their skin as certainly not a part of white society. And now we go to the KKK, the Ku Klux Klan. Now the KKK was formed in the reconstruction period in US history after the American Civil War. And most people are aware of the KKK as they existed to try to recreate slavery as much as they could after the 13th Amendment was passed, forbidding it. The KKK of the 1920s. So the KKK kind of went away for some decades. It came back in the 1920s. And this is a photo from the 1920s version. So we’re in a webinar format. So if you’re watching with a friend, you can answer this question to your friend or you say it out loud to yourself.
What state in the United States was the KKK of the 1920s the strongest? What state was it the strongest? And as you’re thinking about that and saying it out loud or telling your friend, I will tell you that the obvious answer is something like Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, you know, any of these southern states because that was where the KKK was strongest during reconstruction. But here’s the kicker, the 1920s version strongest state was Indiana, which is in the Midwestern United States. The governor of Indiana was a member of the KKK in the 1920s. The second most popular state for the KKK in the 1920s, Colorado, which is now moving to the west even more because the KKK of the 1920s was actually not all that violent. During reconstruction, the group was quite violent. But in the 1920s, their motto was, and this is key, “100% Americanism”. The 100% is key because that’s a scientific phrase, 100%. They were about racial purity. They were about what they understood as white racial purity, white supremacy. What we’re getting from white nationalists now. So 100% Americanism says America, United States should only be inhabited by pure white racial stock. And in their mind, Jews were not considered white. It was also in the 1920s, the infamous skulls experiment. And the skulls experiment, the notion was the pseudo scientific question was, they didn’t want to say, how do you know who is smartest? They said, who has the greatest cranial capacity? By having fancy words like cranial capacity they made it sound more authoritative.
So they found four skulls, the skull of a white man, a white woman, a black man, and a black woman. And they, you know, cut off the top of the skull and they filled it with marbles. No they didn’t, marbles is not scientific enough. They filled it with beads. That sounds better. And then what they did is they counted the beads to see which of the four skulls had the greatest cranial capacity, who was the smartest. Now, notwithstanding the fact that they self-selected the skulls before they started, or that they overstuffed the ones they wanted to overstuff with as many extra beads as they could figure out that they could fit in. You’d never guess the scientific/pseudo scientific result of this study. You got it. White men were the smartest, followed by white women, followed by black men, followed by black women. So now we have the social construction of race being applied to this pseudo scientific idea of who has the best and the most brain power. And all I can say is as I learned later in my academic career about these, about the 1920s and all this stuff, I thought right back to what was for me the 1970s in Ms. Lyle’s class when we had to learn about mongoloid and caucasoid and negroid. And I said, “Wow, it’s amazing even in the state of California that they haven’t moved beyond some aspects of this really awful eugenicist approach.” So now the worst of it here in the 1920s, eugenics is strengthening across the country. Jews are facing antisemitism as bad or worse in the United States as they have anywhere else. And it gets so bad that in 1917, the United States Congress passes something called the Literacy Test Act of 1917.
And here’s how the literacy test worked. If you wanted to immigrate to America and you showed up, you know, on your first day, got off the boat, you would have to take a language test to prove your literacy. And if you failed the language test, you know, they wouldn’t let you in. And I’m from California and we have a lot of debates here between English and Spanish and English only and access to- And immigrants from Spanish speaking countries. It’s been a political debate for decades. So I of course sort of imposed that understanding on what was happening in 1917. And then my professors said, “No, actually you could take the literacy test in your native language.” So I thought, “Oh, that’s not so bad.” So the Jewish immigrants who arrived were Yiddish speakers, that’s what the native language for Eastern European Jews that came to the US in this time period. So they arrived at Ellis Island or wherever they immigrated from, and they would be given a test to prove if they knew Yiddish. And I thought that’s fine. And then of course my professor explained it wasn’t fine and that this is about racial construction. That what was really happening was they wanted to test the innate intellectual ability of different immigrant groups. If you were so dumb that you could not be literate in your own native language, then how on earth could you be literate in English?
And they were confident that this was like the SAT test. If you don’t have the aptitude, if you don’t have the brain power to learn your own language, then we don’t want you as a US citizen. We don’t want you living here because you’re going to bring in an inferior racial status to us. And I guess in the naivete of their racism and antisemitism, they assumed if they had a literacy test given that they would now filter out the inferior racial groups and they would keep only the superior racial groups. And this notion of white supremacy in America would be preserved. When we think about the KKK’s 100% Americanism idea. Wouldn’t you know it, too many immigrants passed the literacy tests in their own language. Too many Jews had turned out knew Yiddish. So by 1921, the US Congress got nervous and they’re like, “Okay, what do we do now?” So they, in a lame duck session, it was an emergency measure and they did it in a rush, created what’s called the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. For the first time in US history limited immigration of Europeans to the US. Now there had been limitations against lots of other immigrant groups prior to 1921, but like if you take the Statue of Liberty, you know, in New York Harbour as like the symbolic welcome of European immigrants to the US that ended in 1921 and here’s how Congress decided to set it up. They wanted, so 1921, they said, let’s look at the most recent census and figure out, you know, how many people from each country we have. That would’ve been the 1920 census, except in those days they did not have computers. The 1920 census was not finished.
So they went back to the 1910 census. So they looked in the 1910 census and they said, okay, for every 100 people from each country that are in that are in the US in 1910, we’re going to allow three people a year to come in. So it was a 3% national origins quota. For every 100 people in the country three more get to come in each year, that will be the quota. For the first time the golden door of American immigration was closed. And for the first time now, even European immigrants, even white presenting European immigrants are going to have to be kind of the first people in because if they don’t get in before those 3%, then they’re out of luck. This was an emergency measure, it was done during a lame duck session of Congress. The thought always was that they need to think more seriously about immigration. And they came back to it in 1924. And in 1924, Congress came to a few realisations. The first thing they realised was they were far too generous with a 3% quota. So they dropped it down to a 2% quota. And second, by 1924, they had the 1920 census available. So they went to the 1890 census. Wait a minute, I have to check my notes on this. Did he just say in 1924 they had the 1920 census available, but they went to the 1890 census? Oh yes, they did. Tell your friend or partner or just say the answer out loud if you’d like to. Why did they go back to the 1890 census? Especially given that they had multiple censuses taken after that.
And here’s the answer for those who haven’t figured it out yet. 1890 America was a whole lot more white, a whole lot less of the undesirable groups. We’ll just take the Jews since I’m American Jewish historian. The Jewish immigration really didn’t begin until the 1880s. So in 1890 there were relatively few Jews in the country. By 1920, there were millions of Jews in this country. So Congress had the question, and I’ll frame it this way, did they want an America that looked like 3% of 1920s population, or 2% of the 1890 population? And it was clear they wanted 2% of 1890. This was racist and this was anti-Semitic. And this was passed by the United States Congress in 1924. And in real terms, it’s even worse than that. And I’ll give you some numbers. Alright, let’s take Italy. 2% of the 1890 census after 1924 meant that exactly 5,802 immigrants from Italy could come each year, 5,800. Now let’s think about the massive immigrations of Italians in the 20 years previously, mostly young Italian men, mostly looking to earn money so they could actually go back to Italy and buy farmland. The return migration rate for Italians was about 50%. So as many went back as actually stayed. So 5,800 a year is essentially none. For the most part, this notion of Italian men being able to come to the US to earn some money was effectively gone. And now let’s look at the number for Great Britain and Northern Ireland, it was 65,721 people. So if you’re in London or Manchester, wherever you are now in the UK. And one day in like 1928, let’s just say.
You say, “Hey, I’d like to immigrate to New York City.” And you walk into the US Embassy and say, “I would like to immigrate.” And they look at their books and they go, “Yeah, we’re not at 65,721.” And are there 65,721 people in let’s say London that want to move that year effectively? If you were from those Teutonic countries in the north, it was free immigration after this 1924 law. And if you came from Southern or Eastern Europe, it was effectively closed. And while they didn’t know it then we do know it now, that this would be the law that would be on the books when Hitler comes to power in 1933. And when we’re trying to get Jewish refugees out of Germany and later out of Europe, and were unable to do it because these numbers exist. 85% of all the quota slots went to Northern European countries. And now we’ll go to Brodkin. Most of what I just described to you was from Goldstein’s book. And now I’ll switch over to Brodkin’s book. And now we’re going to look at post World War II, 1945 to the present here in the United States. And this is Brodkin’s thesis that after 1945, really during the 1950s, Jews became white. Which is kind of a funny way to put it, because the skin colour of these Jews didn’t change, but the way in which they were understood in American society and racialized and where they were put on the racial hierarchy did change.
The data shows us that between 1945 and 1960 anti-Semitic barriers had dropped to the point that they were no longer sociologically significant. And I’ll explain that to say there is going to be antisemitism continuing of course throughout the post-war period. And if you’re from the US or you have, you know, parents or grandparents can give you stories about antisemitic discrimination they suffered after World War II. That said, prior to World War II antisemitism was systemic. Which meant it affected the entire American Jewish group as a group because Jews were racialized as non-white. But after World War II, Jews became white, became racialized as white, and those barriers were eliminated on a group based point. And then they just became sporadic. It’s not a good thing that they were sporadic, that should all go away. But there was a significant difference. For example, there used to be in the white suburbs, outside urban areas, stipulations in housing covenants that said, “No blacks and no Jews allowed.” There were vacation places where infamously it says no blacks, Jews, or dogs allowed on how that went. But by the 1950s, they removed those anti-Semitic lines, and Jews were able to move into white Christian suburbs. Jews were able to go to these vacation spots that they weren’t able to go to a decade before. Undergraduate education, especially with a massive expansion of public universities after World War II with the G.I. Bill, which is a piece of legislation here that I’ll talk about in a moment. Jews were able to go to college in disproportionate numbers. A lot of them went on to graduate schools.
There used to be anti-Semitic quotas for medical schools. But these quotas now are dropping. So now you know, as many Jews as are qualified for med school, are able to get into med school. And this is due to, and here’s Brodkin’s thesis, the G.I. Bill. The G.I. Bill, gave Veterans of World War II low interest loans to buy homes, to finance businesses, and to get college educations. And American Jews were disproportionately engaged in fighting in World War II. And for this reason, they were disproportionately, you know, benefit from the G.I. Bill. Karen Bodkin has a way of flipping the word affirmative action. Because normally affirmative action is for non-white people to get power and access. She says that the G.I. Bill was the biggest affirmative action legislation in US history in terms of how much money was in the G.I. Bill and that the G.I. Bill was focused on affirmative action for white people. Because racial minorities did not benefit from the G.I. Bill like white veterans did. And except Jewish veterans were now for the first time considered white. If you’re interested in a book on Jews in World War II, American Jews in World War II, Deborah Dash Moore has a fantastic book with a fantastic title. It’s called “GI Jews”, which I love that title too. And what’s important here in the 1950s when Jews become white is Jews are leapfrogging ahead of African Americans, ahead of Latinos, ahead of Asian Americans. That these racial minorities that Jews used to be a part of in the earlier decades. Now Jews are less and less a part of because the restrictions against Jews have eased. This is for American Jews, the dream. Jews achieve integration into the larger Christian society. Jews are getting home ownership. Jews are getting equal rights.
This is a celebration for Jews. And I’ll be giving a talk in a few weeks on Jews in the Civil Rights Movement. So this is sort of a lead into the next talk. It’s going to create some unintended complications. Jews becoming white after World War II, while wonderful for the Jewish community and really the achievement of the American dream is going to have really complicated responses to those groups that aren’t considered white yet and aren’t able to move into those suburbs and aren’t able to go to college and aren’t able to get good jobs. And so the relationship between African Americans and Jews and between other racial minorities and Jews now becomes more challenging in the 1950s and beyond. I’ll be talking about, you know, the really extraordinary alliance between white Jews and blacks in the civil rights movement of the 50s, which was great, but I’ll also talk in the 1960s, especially the late 1960s when the tensions between the two communities really even get violent at times. And a lot of it is rooted in the notion that Jews had become white, but the African and American community had not, and still was not enjoying the kinds of privileges that Jews did. So let’s go to the contemporary scene. And that is in 21st century America, Jews are enjoying disproportionate power and privilege. And I’ll say that the last six years especially has been actually the worst antisemitism in the United States and certainly since October 7th. Even more than it’s been in the last six years, which is awful. And the antisemitism, which is spiking now is being done in sort of a larger frame or larger understanding where Jews are really much better positioned now than Jews were in the 1920s to respond to these rises of antisemitism.
We’re in I think, a much better place to have the kind of people in political power, the people with economic power to stand up and fight back, because we really couldn’t do that. This is one of my favourite books. It’s old book, it was published in 1964. It’s by Milton Gordon, who’s a sociologist. It’s called “Assimilation in American Life”. And what I like about this book is what Gordon does is he, the book is about what does it take to become American? You know, like how do you know, you’re an immigrant, you know, and your family’s come to the US. How do you know that you’ve made it in America? That you’ve become American? And according to Gordon, there are seven levels of assimilation in American life. Level one is like the first thing you do when you get off the boat. And then after that it takes a little bit of time, but you get to level two and level three and you move through all the levels. And the question I ask, and it’s another pop quiz question. Tell your friend or partner or say it out loud, what’s level seven? What is the last stage of immigrant assimilation? I like to call it acculturation now. The language has changed a bit. But what is the last thing that an immigrant group would do or know or experience so that they would be seen as fully Americanized? Now this book is not about Jews, it’s actually about white Europeans, even though it doesn’t say so. That’s also part of that generation of writers, but it just applies to Jews. So I’ll apply this question to what was level seven. So I think I’ve given you enough time to say out loud or tell your friend what you think level seven is. Sometimes we think it’s changing your name, that’s actually lower in the list. Sometimes it’s changing your religion, you know.
It’s actually intermarriage. And now I’ll be gendered about it. They may say they love you, meaning, you know, Americans. In this case it would be white Christian America, but would they let you marry their daughter? So the time that American Jews made it in America and fully became American is when, believe it or not, intermarriage rates rose. Because as Christian families are welcoming in Jewish sons and daughters in-laws, and then ultimately even Jewish grandkids, if they’re raising the kids Jewish, that is the moment according to Milton Gordon, that Jews have truly fully integrated. So when I give talks on intermarriage and Jewish identity and continuity, you know, as the Jewish leaders here in the US I say, “Look, the goal has been intermarriage, right?” The goal is to become fully American and to end antisemitism and to be fully integrated in society. Gordon is telling us that the trailing indicator of success for Jews is a high level of intermarriage. Even though of course Jewish leaders are pushing against, or many Jewish leaders are still pushing against intermarriage. So I find that to be a fascinating conundrum. So ultimately, when we talk about Jews in race and whiteness as a scientific category, as a sociological category, as a socially constructed category, it’s really about power and powerlessness. And this is one of the famous books by one of my colleagues, David Biale, who teaches at University of California in Davis.
And here’s the thing, for white Jews. White Jews have been white, privileged and powerful on the one hand. On the other hand, we have also been, oh, self referenced as a white Jew. We’ve been non-white and we’ve been powerless. How can we hold the fact that we are powerful and powerless simultaneously? By the way, this is academically why I love being a Jewish studies professor. 'Cause I don’t know that there’s another group that has this dynamic, you know, that’s like white and non-white at the same time, powerful and powerless. So I think these questions are best studied through a Jewish lens, even if you’re not Jewish, because I think this is where we get our insights. And let me give you two dates, 1945 and 1948. 1945, the end of World War II and the discovery by the world of the Shoah of the Holocaust, of the genocide of the Jews, 6 million Jews killed 90% of the Jewish population of Poland, you know, gone. You can never ever tell a Jewish person that they’re white and privileged after Auschwitz, after the death camps. So folks who are listening now and who are internalising an idea that Jewish people, even white Jewish people are not white and are not privileged because of Auschwitz, because of the genocide, because of the Holocaust of Shoah. That is truth. Just three years later, the modern state of Israel was born. And with the modern state of Israel, a military. And certainly we know with current events of what’s going on in Gaza, that a huge difference between World War II and Jewish powerlessness. And after 1948 is there’s now a Jewish army. And oh my goodness, if you are interested bring out the Kleenex, 'cause I cry every time.
Just go on the internet after we’re done. There is an image, it’s actually a movie of Israeli Air Force F16 jets flying over Auschwitz after the war. If a picture can tell a thousand words to look at the death camp underneath to see an Israeli Air Force military jet over it. And knowing, if there was a jet like that in 1945 and 44 and 43, there would have been a defence against the genocide of the Jews. Rumour has it that Israel has nuclear capability, apparently has about 200 nuclear bombs. We don’t know that officially, but that didn’t happen in 1948. That happened some decades later. But just talking about the power and strength of Israel from a military point of view, you cannot be more powerful than the ability to destroy planet Earth and all the nuclear powers of the world now have that capability. And we’re working, of course, hard to make sure that we keep everything under control. But now we can flip the question. No one can say that the Jewish people are powerless if we have the ability to take nuclear action. And here’s the challenging part. Only three years separated genocide from the creation of the state of Israel and the self-defense force, military force for the Jewish people. I argue that a lot of the anxiety, ambivalence, conversation debate we have in the 21st century about whether or not Jews are white is really about us still grappling with this trauma of how we’re going to reconcile genocide from power. And I’ll just throw in here since, you know, six months now since the Gods of War began, I think that sort of in the US and in the world, you know, folks are kind of landing on one side or the other of that question, you know?
And in time, even in our own families around the dinner table, we’re getting people landing on both sides. So I’m an academic and a scholar and what I want to do here is make a convincing case for both sides. And I want to hold them both together. Oh, here it is, thank you. I forgot I had the picture. This is a photograph of the Israeli Air Force jets over Auschwitz, and there’s a movie version. This is just a still shot from the movie. So if you go to the internet and do a search for Israeli Air Force over Auschwitz, you should be able to find this. It’s one of the greatest teachers of our generation. Rabbi Irving Yitz Greenberg just celebrated his 90th birthday, happy birthday to you Yitz. He wrote an article called “The Ethics of Jewish Power”. Send me an email, I’ll send it to you on PDF. To me it’s the most important article ever written in all of Jewish studies, not just on this topic 'cause he’s an orthodox rabbi and he is getting right at the heart of this dynamic between Jews as white and non-white, powerful and powerless. Trying to be honest and real and reconcile it. And here’s my favourite quote from that article. “Power corrupts. But there is no other morally tolerable choice. The alternative is death. This is the lesson that Jewish people learned in the Holocaust.”
And now we’ll do a Rashi on this. We’ll do a close commentary. I’m going to go back and read it, but we’ll talk about each of the words. “Power corrupts.” Let’s stop there. A leading national orthodox rabbinic figure is acknowledging that when Jewish people achieved power, it’s corrupting. Like we know that line power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely? Wouldn’t it be nice? I like it to be nice if a group could get power and not get corrupted. Wouldn’t it be nice if you got power? You just did good things with the power. But Rabbi Greenberg is opening with the truth and his truth and he’ll own it. “Power corrupts” And Jewish, which means of course Jewish people are going to get corrupted with the power. How could you say this, rabbi, possibly? But there is no other morally tolerable choice. There is his answer. As corrupting as it might be for Jews to achieve whiteness, power and privilege, we have no other morally tolerable choice. Well, what do you mean we do have a choice? He says, “No, here’s the alternative. The alternative is death.” That is intense. Either you’re going to get power and whiteness and get corrupted or you’re going to die. Yitz Rabbi Greenberg, how could you possibly go to that really awful place? This is the lesson that the Jewish people learned in the Holocaust. And I think that’s the ultimate sentence on the genocide of the Jews for us, that I think really makes all of this go really deep and make it go really emotional because it’s one heck of a choice, whiteness or corruption. And with that, be happy to take your questions. And thank you for listening. And okay, I’m going to open up the questions. Let’s see.
Q&A and Comments:
Q: So Michael, thank you. “What has race got to do with skin colour? Ashkenazi Jews are white, Arab Jews are olive skin, still white, and Ethiopian Jews are black.”
A: Yes, thank you. That is part of my point because on the one hand, race does have to do with skin colour because you can easily identify someone by the colour 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 colour of your skin and where you are assigned in the racial hierarchy don’t make logical sense and don’t work for that.
“There were quotas in the UK too, for example, in the Golden Tennis Clubs at some schools.” Thank you Adrian.
Athema wants to know the name of Professor Goldstein’s book and that is “The Power of Whiteness”, I believe is what it was. But if you just type in Eric Goldstein, it should come right up.
Thank you for the compliments. Indiana. Yay Marilyn, you got it right.
“KKK was official in Oregon too.” That is also true. KKK is still active now in the 1970s. So they’re active in reconstruction, in the 1920s they came back big in the 1970s. And now I think with the rise of white nationalism again, now we’re seeing it more.
You had to, wow Carol. “You had to be in the KKK in order to be an official in Astoria, Oregon in the 1920s.” That makes sadly perfect sense.
Q: From the iPhone, E Kelvin, “Surely white refers to skin tone or melanin concentration as does black. Should we allow sociologists to redefine what colour is? Why accept American racist definition?
A: Everyone who originated in Europe was white if their skin was white. So yes, Jews can be white, black, brown, green or blue depending on where they lived. It seems Americans confuse green and violet with culture.” and now other examples, I don’t really know. It’s not crazy. What I think all those questions point out is what my point today is, which is that race is socially defined and Jews as a group are the ones that move back and forth over time and place depending on where you are. So it seems to make no logical sense and it is very confusing. And I believe Jews are, I don’t know, unique might be too strong a phrase, but you know, close to unique.
Q: “Who were the objectors to eugenics?”
A: That’s a great question. Immigrant groups objected to it, although they didn’t have power to do it. And there were some politicians, but the big deal about eugenics is it really didn’t have strong objectives to it. And in fact, most of the leading intellectuals believed in eugenics. If you asked them how could you possibly believe in eugenics? They would not go to the antisemitism or the racism part. They would go to the, “Wow we’re scientists who are discovering so many new things and the 20th century is going to be the century where we perfect the world.” There was extraordinary optimism. So the eugenics, a lot of eugenics people were like into the optimism of science to help us in life and in the world. And then it took a turn from the back.
There’s a link here that H gives us on the KKK’s population by state, thank you, in 1924. Okay, thank you. Appreciate that. I’m just slipping through.
“And South Africa, the 1910s, the Jewish community went to great effort to get the Jews classified as European, as white.” Thank you.
I’ve had a few questions. You know, doing this on South Africa and I think South Africa is really an excellent place. You know, with your history around who is white, who’s non-white, who’s coloured, how all of the various- You know, I understand it’s a very complicated system of racial classification. Which also goes ultimately to social construction. And then there’s a link here to a short documentary that H has also given to us.
“When Myrna applied for US citizenship from Canada.” Oh, in 1992 you had to take a literacy test. Okay, this is great. I’m thinking it might be the constitution test. So I just want to make a distinction. You do have to take a test to be a US citizen and it’s a test to make sure you understand American government and the US constitution and separation of powers and things that, you know, US raised kids learn in school. The literacy test was actually whether or not you had had the genetic brain power to be a successful American.
Q: “What was the symbol on the left and X with a P?”
A: I don’t know what that was Michael, but you can find my email quickly and feel free to ask me there.
Okay, yes. I’m going to talk about Heschel next time. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, essentially Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s rabbi. My most recent book just came out in a revised edition and we have the picture of Rabbi Heschel next to Dr. King on the cover, so we’ll talk about that too.
Oh thank you, and H has given us the link on YouTube to the F15s over Auschwitz. So I think you can all see the QnAs if you’d like to do that.
Q: “In the 1920s, how did eugenicists reconcile perceptions of Jewish intelligence with the racial inferiority?”
A: So in the 1920s they argued that, sorry. They argued that Jews were not intelligent and now Susan were- So my other field was anti-Semitism, you know, around other than just race. And here’s how it works. Anti-Semites from the political right argued that Jews are genetically inferior and a sub racial group. That’s what I’ve talked about mostly today. Antisemitism from the left. And that’s what we’re getting especially now, says that Jews are hyper powerful and privileged and are using their power and abusing their power to bring harm to marginalised groups. And this is also playing out in Israel’s war against Hamas. So how did they reconcile that perception? Well, if you’re on the political right, you said Jews are too dumb. If you’re on the political left, you said Jews are too smart. So I don’t really know how to answer that because this is part of antisemitism. It comes in on both sides.
Q: Let’s see, “Whiteness and white fragility and bringing awareness to it for those uncomfortable with a comparative privilege. Is there a learning here for what some may call Jewish fragility?”
A: Yeah, so fragility. And there’s a famous New York Times bestselling book called “White Fragility”. So Dan is giving us a play on Jewish fragility, which is, at least in the- I have to talk about the US. There’s a lot of discomfort in the US among white people to talk about racial privilege and a lot of lack of awareness or knowledge of it. I have actually five lectures on Jews and race. This is number one. And they brought me in to do number two. Maybe I’ll do the rest, that’ll be up to the folks in charge.
And Dan, I’ll just say I do the best when I give these talks to anticipate and understand Jewish fragility, which is to say, I imagine for many of you here, what I said today was challenging and hard to hear. So I want to, on the one hand, do the best I can to open you up to new ideas. And on the other hand, make sure that I actually say something of substance. So I’m always trying to navigate that.
Q: “Do white extremists still consider Jews brown?”
A: White extremists or white nationalists consider Jews subhuman. I don’t know that they would describe a particular colour 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 antisemitism comes in.
“Type the last quote in the chat.” I don’t think the chat is activated, but Terry, if you want just send me an email. On the internet, really easy to find me. Just type in my name, it will come up. I’ll send you the quote, I’ll send you the whole article.
And let’s see what else, more thank yous. Appreciate that.
Jean, “In South Africa under apartheid, Chinese were considered non-white, Japanese were considered white.” How is that?
Jean tells us, “Trade with Japan, but not with China at the time.” That’s right. That’s like economically, you know, considered. So there’s different reasons different people get in different spots.
And then Abigail has a scholar, Francisco Gill White, who talks about the geopolitics of all of these topics. Oh, and puts a link in if you’re interested. There’s a two hour interview there and you can get all that information too.
“It was literacy. We had to write in English.” Thank you. I appreciate that.
Wow. Okay. “In the 30s, pre 1948, apartheid eminent scientists were measuring the skulls of live San people, Johannesburg.” So another now transnational comparison that this was more than just the US. And when Abigail applied to American immigration status, she was admitted under the Hungarian quote in 1969.
Thank you, so there’s been a bunch on contemporary immigration. I kind of ended immigration law in, you know, 21 and 24. There’s going to be more laws in the 40s and 50s, which is really what’s going on right now.
Alright, so Paula says that “Louis Brandeis supported eugenics in Buck versus Bell.” Fascinating. I need to study that. I have not studied that. That’s a good one.
Phil says his parents white and Jewish went to a resort in the Poconos. Which is on the east coast of the United States. “And there was a sign that said restricted.” And that was code. Of course that meant, you know, no Jews allowed. “They didn’t know what it meant. So they went back the next year.” All right.
Canada apparently requires a literacy test to qualify for permanent residency, not to mention citizenship. And the Japanese and South Africa were honorary whites.
Q: Was Linus poling a proponent of the theories that blacks had smaller schools?
A: I don’t know specifically, so I can’t answer that.
Q: “Are Israeli Jews white?”
A: 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 colour, 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 colour or for us, Jew of colour. 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.
All right, perhaps, I guess we might be done with this one, and I just invite you all to come join the next one and I look forward to seeing you then.