Forming modern subjectivities in the internal colony: Jewish women social scientists and their transracial, transdisciplinary and transnational networks, 1920-1965

Jews in the first half of the 20th century were objects of internal colonization in addition to participating in research that served the colonial/imperial agenda of their nations. This archival dissertation will consider how the anti-racist and pro-political/economic justice stance taken by Jewish female anthropologists and sociologists may have been a way to fight anti-Semitism by “remote control,” or to try to understand their otherness through “the most other” utilizing their special concern for black and indigenous women to prove Jews were the epitome of modern national citizenship. I will interrogate how Jewish female social scientists (like women in imperialist projects during the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries and nationalist struggles during the two World Wars) proved their nationalist-imperialist belonging and “modern” subjectivities through their research with black and indigenous women. Instead of looking at individual “heroines,” perpetuating the myth of the “Lone Ranger” anthropologist, I use a feminist post-colonial approach to social network analysis to investigate the transracial, transdisciplinary and transnational networks between women theorists. My project follows the example of Lyn Schumaker (2001) who contends that fieldwork networks impact data collection, theory generation, and the re-formation of subjectivities