The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity.

Alexander, Michael

The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity. By Eric L. Goldstein. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. xii + 307 pp.

Eric L. Goldstein's book should be among the very first stops for those wishing to approach the subject of Jews and race in America. Goldstein's careful unearthing of what Jews actually said and how they really behaved is an important contribution to the fields of American Jewish history and ethnic studies. It is broad, well researched, compellingly told, extraordinarily nuanced, and it comes as a kind of savior to an area of scholarship that has suffered from large gaps regarding basic historical fact. I have concerns about the historiographical lens he employs (that of "whiteness") and these misgivings will take up the bulk of my review, but I hope readers will recognize the fundamental value of this book.

The foundational research of his study describes the ways Jews employed the term "race" from 1875 to 1950. Goldstein understands the changing use of the term by positing an unchanging tendency of American Jewry to bear "competing impulses of inclusion and distinctiveness" in its relationship to larger America (239). To Goldstein, Jews have utilized racial rhetoric to negotiate the space between their drive to fit in and their drive to stand apart. In the nineteenth century, when Jews feared that a strictly religious demarcation of Jewry could not bear American pressures to assimilate, while at the same time the embrace of a Jewish national bond and rhetoric of peoplehood still seemed too complete and dangerous a distinction, Jews took a middle path by adopting a racial differentiation for themselves. In the twentieth century, with its hardening of racial lines, and, when the dangers of racial differences seemed to surpass national ones, Jews abandoned employing a racial rhetoric when describing themselves and gradually turned to Jewish peoplehood (though typically they employed the euphemism "ethnicity" to soften any lingering nationalist threat). In either case, the nomenclature appears to have been secondary. Jews concerned themselves primarily with marking themselves off as being different from the perceived mainstream, but not so different as to cause alarm. This is a pattern well known to readers of Jacob Katz, and it should not surprise scholars that the pattern continued among Jews in America who of course utilized symbolic discourse particular to the American scene. (1)

On top of this rhetorical analysis, Goldstein also describes the larger beliefs and behaviors related to race with which Jews negotiated their competing impulses of inclusion and distinctiveness. In this discussion Goldstein applies the theories of "whiteness" studies and understands America to have undergone a bifurcation between black and white, with American Blacks standing in for "a stable, monolithic 'other'" (239) against which whites defined themselves. (2) Goldstein attenuates this position by claiming "the black-white dichotomy has functioned in American history less as an accurate description of social reality than as an ideology"; and he hopes the example of Jewish ambivalence and "negotiation" of racial location will make clear "that the history of race in America cannot be reduced to a story of black and white" (3). Indeed, he conjectures that many American groups "negotiated" their places somewhere between black and white (5).

Still, Goldstein agrees with the axiom of the whiteness argument: Jews and other immigrant groups quickly came to view America as being divided along a single color line--black and white--and just as quickly came to "pursue whiteness" as part of their assimilation strategy (6). Due to their impulse toward distinctiveness, Goldstein feels Jews may have felt somewhat conflicted about their inclusion into white society. Nevertheless, Goldstein agrees with the bulk of whiteness scholarship that Jews understood what it meant to be white and attempted to become so.

I am familiar with many of the materials that Goldstein uses in his book, as well as those used in other studies that use Jews as an example of a group pursuing whiteness, and I must admit, despite their arguments, that I still do not see a clear Jewish drive toward whiteness. I do see Jewish drives toward money, material, social stature, middle-class luxury, power, and even acceptance by a vague gentile American mainstream (which the Yiddish press typically herded together as "the Irish"). These things are described and pursued explicitly and often. But are these economic and social drives indications of attempts to be white? If so, where is the Jewish discourse establishing a correlation between certain actions and white identity? Where are the discussions of the meaning of whiteness, or the assertions of what it entailed to be white? Where is its construction? Goldstein presents a few examples of Jewish discourse about whiteness related to specific racial legislation, and these record the rather straightforward desire by Jews to be placed in the most socially and economically advantageous legal category. But other than in this limited arena, an explicit Jewish construction of whiteness has yet to be unearthed.

Compare this rather specific legal interest Jews had in whiteness to the Jewish-American fascination with blackness. In this behavior, there actually is an elaborate record of negotiation, definition, debate, action, construction, and confusion among Jews. Here there is also a historical record of discourse about whether Jews could consider themselves affiliated with American Blacks, whether they could "pursue" blackness. The American music and entertainment industries comprise only one infamous location of that discussion, but there are many other places, including of course politics and academia. Compared to the limited Jewish discussion of whiteness, there is manifold evidence to support viewing blackness as a significant category of social construction, categorization, and identification among American Jews.

So I wonder whether whiteness is an interpretation employed by scholars but not by their subjects. To question the hermeneutic prism of whiteness studies is not to deny the claim of Goldstein and others that blackness in America has constituted a pole, "a stable, monolithic 'other'" (239). But at least in the minds of Jews, it may have been a pole without a monolithic polar opposite. Judging by their often patronizing advice to black Americans about how to "make it" in America, Jews do not seem to have realized that their own complexions had been among the most important factors in their American inclusion, and that Blacks could not hope to follow a similar path to prosperity. Jews appear to have missed the fact that in America their skin was crucial to their success (trumping even religious difference) and, as such, they had no right, special insight, or invitation to represent Blacks or speak for them: on stage, in politics, or in the classroom. This is not pursuing whiteness, but repressing it.

What then is the price of whiteness?

It is certainly what Goldstein claims, that, given the social reality of their racial inclusion, American Jews have acquired a powerful sense that their group identity must be guarded against complete immersion into the amorphous American mainstream. But Goldstein's analysis might be made a degree sharper if it considered the specific threats that racial inclusion poses to Jewish identity. For instance, insofar as Jewry held the position of "stable, monolithic 'other'" throughout its Diaspora, and insofar as it does not in America, it may be that the maypole around which the complex of traditional Jewish symbols and behaviors parades has been usurped by another group: The Jewish people in America have been displaced as protagonist in its own sacred history; to use the traditional language, Jews are not America's exiled people. This is a possible source of Jewish fascination and conflict with African-Americans, and it goes a long way in explaining the peculiar Jewish desire to keep at arms length from "white" America. If accurate, it is the gravest price of whiteness, since it has taken from Jews their sacred meaning and place in the world.

Michael Alexander

Temple University

(1.) Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (Oxford, 1961).

(2.) Goldstein cites books by David R. Roediger, Noel Ignatiev, Michael Rogin, Matthew Frye Jacobson, and Karen Brodkin as examples and influences.