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Shades of gray in the Jewish world

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  • Shades of gray in the Jewish world

    Chicago Maroon, IL
    Nov 1, 2004

    Shades of gray in the Jewish world
    By Adam Weissmann

    In her op-ed piece (`Jewish-conspiracy theorist surfaces at Duke,'
    10/22/04), Phoebe Maltz boldly and cleverly outlined the major flaws
    and absurdities of Philip Kurian's article `The Jews' in a recent
    edition of Duke University's Chronicle. Yet Kurian's article, as well
    as Maltz's critique, highlights serious problems of identity and
    perception within the Jewish community, both in the world and on our
    own campus. Just as I was glad to see Maltz take a stand in exposing
    such vile (and frankly inane) accusations about the status of Jews in
    American society, I was dismayed by the concessions she allowed in
    order to make her argument seem more amenable to a general audience. I
    refer specifically to her unwillingness to explore further the American
    myth that Jews are `white,' a label conferred by leading segments of
    the mainstream American society only within the last seventy years.

    Maltz writes: `While much of Europe has long been divided between Jew
    and Christian, America has been divided...between black and white, with
    (most) Jews falling into the second category.' The most fundamental
    problem with this line of reasoning is that it presupposes an
    oppositional relationship between Jews and Christians. Christians are a
    religious group, transcending national borders and peoples. The Jews, a
    vestige of a more ancient time when each people subscribed to its own
    national religious cult, are one people who have retained their
    indigenous religion against the pressures to adopt one of the dominant
    multinational religions of Christianity and Islam. This continuing act
    of resistance against foreign religious dominance alone has done much
    to spurn the hatred that Jews have endured throughout the history of
    their diaspora. While other nations, such as the Armenians (they were
    the first), the Greeks, and the French acceded to the adoption of the
    transnational Christianity, Jews remained stubborn. To say that `much
    of Europe has been divided between Christian and Jew' is incorrect, and
    it would be more appropriate to state that much of Europe has been
    divided between Jews and a host of other nations.

    Yet this statement still does not satisfy: Why focus attention on
    Europe? For most of the last eighteen centuries, the country with the
    largest Jewish diaspora population has been none other than Iraq. The
    sojourn of vast numbers of Jews in Eastern Europe - the locale called to
    mind for most Americans as the land of the wandering Jew - did not begin
    until the early Renaissance. Throughout the history of the Jewish
    exile, large communities could be found in Egypt, Iraq, North Africa,
    Ethiopia, and Spain as well. At what point, then, did Jews become
    `white?'

    In American society, there is a construction of race and ethnicity very
    different than that of the Old World. Just as much as Americans have,
    throughout their early history, sought to create a new order under a
    new republic with a renewed religious enlightenment, so too have
    Americans invented a new standard for dividing people into arbitrary
    groups. Much of this social construction, it may be deduced, is a
    result of the need for fair-skinned European settlers in the New World
    to reconcile their horrific enslavement of black Africans by grouping
    them as `the Other.' Before one's race was French or Russian or
    Chinese; now it had become `black' or `white.'

    But who could be `white?' Until the period of the Second World War,
    Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans were not. Neither were Jews. Only
    after that bitter conflict had seen both the deep commitment of each
    group to the national effort and the increased entry of the Irish,
    Italian, and Jewish second and third-generation immigrants into the
    American middle-class were mainstream Americans willing to grant them
    `whiteness.' Also, the growing tensions between white America and the
    still-disenfranchised black America were growing, eventually coming to
    a head in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and `60s. After the
    war, `white' Americans were quite eager to expand their ranks
    (excluding country-club memberships and college admissions, of course).
    We are witnessing a similar extension of this `whiteness' today, as
    many colleges and universities have begun grouping Asian Americans into
    the `white' category for the purposes of affirmative action and other
    admissions considerations.

    This `white' identity, which in the last few decades has grown among
    most American Jews, is very dangerous to the survival of the Jewish
    people in this country. Foremost, it threatens Jewish national
    unity - many Jews are not as fair-skinned as those in America, whose
    ancestors came largely from the destroyed communities of Northern and
    Eastern Europe, where Jews sojourned for several generations - by
    fostering new, artificial divisions within the Jewish civilization.
    Like many nations, but unlike some in the West, the Jews' national
    identity rests not on the tint of its members' skin but in a shared
    cultural, religious, and historical experience.

    Second, it helps to fuel dangerous misconceptions about the
    reestablishment of Jewish independence in Israel. It is far easier for
    those who fear the Jews' exercise of political sovereignty to smear the
    Jewish national liberation movement as one of `colonization,
    occupation, and imperialism' if the Jews are just another group of
    `white' infiltrators. In a sense, if one were to compare the
    relationship between ethnic tensions and racial labels in the Middle
    East to those in America, it would be the Jews, Kurds, Assyrians, and
    other historically oppressed minorities who must be termed `black.'

    What, then, does this teach us? Though I may have been a bit unfair to
    Maltz in my treatment of her critique, I feel it is my duty to
    underscore a reality that is absent in her prose. If Jews living in
    America wish to dissolve into the fabric of the American quilt then
    reinforcement of these artificial and self-defeating social divisions
    will only prove helpful in hastening the death of this country's Jewish
    community. I and many other Jews like me, both in the general
    population and on our campus, choose not to `revel in the luxury of my
    `yarmulke'-free existence,' as does Maltz. Rather I actively embrace my
    national identity. It is with pride that I elect to don a `kippah' (a
    more appropriate word for that traditional head-covering), and in so
    doing I express my undying faith in the ability of all peoples in the
    world to find the elusive harmony that has been so absent since the
    beginning of human civilization - one in which the Jews, too, may be
    accepted and respected as an equal in the family of peace-loving
    nations.
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