Research Catalog

Details

Description

1. xi, 243 pages; 24 cm

Summary

1. Recounts how Jews assimilated into, and became accepted by, mainstream white society in the later twentieth century, as they lost their working-class orientation.
2. "The history of Jews in the United States is one of racial change that provides useful insights on race in America. Prevailing classifications have sometimes assigned Jews to the white race and at other times have created an off-white racial designation for them. Those changes in racial assignment have shaped the ways American Jews of different eras have constructed their ethnoracial identities. Brodkin illustrates these changes through an analysis of her own family's multi-generational experience. She shows how Jews experience a kind of double vision that comes from racial middleness: on the one hand, marginality with regard to whiteness; on the other, whiteness and belonging with regard to blackness."
3. "Class and gender are key elements of race-making in American history. Brodkin suggests that this country's racial assignment of individuals and groups constitutes an institutionalized system of occupational and residential segregation, is a key element in misguided public policy, and serves as a pernicious foundational principle in the construction of nationhood. Alternatives available to non-white and alien "others" have been either to whiten or to be consigned to an inferior underclass unworthy of full citizenship. The American ethnoracial map--who is assigned to each of these poles--is continually changing, although the binary of black and white is not. As a result, the structure within which Americans form their ethnoracial, gender, and class identities is distressingly stable. Brodkin questions the means by which Americans construct their political identities and what is required to weaken the hold of this governing myth"--Amazon.com.

Subject

1. Jews > United States > Identity
2. Jews > United States > Ethnic identity
3. Jews > United States > Social conditions
4. White privilege (Social structure) > United States > History
5. Juifs > États-Unis > Identité
6. Juifs > États-Unis > Identité ethnique
7. Juifs > États-Unis > Conditions sociales
8. 71.37 ethnic groups
9. SOCIAL SCIENCE / Jewish Studies
10. Ethnic relations
11. Jews > Identity
12. Jews > Social conditions
13. Race relations
14. Identität
15. Juden
16. Rassenfrage
17. Ethnische Identität
18. Joden
19. Culturele identiteit
20. Assimilatie (sociologie)
21. United States > Race relations
22. United States > Ethnic relations
23. États-Unis > Relations raciales
24. États-Unis > Relations interethniques
25. United States
26. USA
27. Geschiedenis (vorm)
28. Juden

Genre/Form

1. History (form)

Contents

1. How did Jews become white folks? -- Race making -- Race, gender, and virtue in civic discourse -- Not quite white: gender and Jewish identity -- A whiteness of our own? Jewishness and whiteness in the 1950s and 1960s.

Owning institution

1. Columbia University Libraries

Bibliography (note)

1. Includes bibliographical references (pages 205-226) and index.