Race and the construction of Jewish identity in America, 1875--1945.

This dissertation focuses on the dynamic interplay between notions of Jewish identity and American understandings of race from 1875 through the end of World War II. It argues that American Jewish identity, like all racial and ethnic identities, has been fluid and changing, and that the ways Jews have described and understood themselves have relied on the opportunities and pressures presented by their participation in the wider world. By examining American Jews' language of self-description and placing it in the context of larger social and cultural patterns, the work uncovers the process by which definitions of Jewishness, often expressed in terms of race during the late nineteenth centuries, were reshaped in response to an American racial system organized around the categories of black and white. Responding to accounts that have described Jewish adaptation to America as relatively unproblematic, this work argues that the process of coming to identify as white Americans was an ambivalent one for Jews, filled with hard choices and conflicting emotions. On the one hand, a national culture that based inclusion on whiteness offered Jews an opportunity never before imaginable. With African Americans, rather than Jews, as the primary other, Jews for the first time in history faced the possibility of gaining full membership in a racially defined nation. But if Jews were anxious for acceptance in white America, their history as a persecuted minority made them uncomfortable with many of its racist tenets, and often pushed them to express empathy for African Americans. In addition, even though identification with whiteness required Jews to give up the notion of a distinct Jewish race, they often remained unable to part with an understanding of themselves based on blood and ancestry. Thus, the adaptation of Jews to a white identity in America was anything by swift, clear-cut and unproblematic. It was full of contradictory tendencies and emotions that have continued to define American Jewish identities even today.PhDAmerican historyEthnic studiesSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132354/2/9963787.pd