Mixed Race Studies

The Family Flamboyant: Race Politics, Queer Families, Jewish Lives

SUNY Press
October 2006
244 pages
Hardback ISBN10: 0-7914-6893-3; ISBN13: 978-0-7914-6893-7
Paperback ISBN10: 0-7914-6894-1; ISBN13: 978-0-7914-6894-4
eBook ISBN10: 0-7914-8106-9; ISBN13: 978-0-7914-8106-6

Marla Brettschneider, Professor of Political Philosophy, Feminist Theory, Political Science & Women’s Studies
University of New Hampshire

Winner of a Bronze Medal in the Gay/Lesbian Category of the 2007 Independent Publisher Book Awards

Interrogates the normative heterosexual family from feminist, Jewish, and queer perspectives.

The Family Flamboyant is a graceful and lucid account of the many routes to family formation. Weaving together personal experience and political analysis in an examination of how race, gender, sexuality, class, and other hierarchies function in family politics, Marla Brettschneider draws on her own experience in a Jewish, multiracial, adoptive, queer family in order to theorize about the layered realities that characterize families in the United States today. Brettschneider uses critical race politics, feminist insight, class-based analysis, and queer theory to offer a distinct and distinctly Jewish contribution to both the family debates and the larger project of justice politics.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: K-I-S-S-I-N-G
• 1. Whitens Whites, Keeps Colors Bright: Jewish Families Queering the Race Project
• 2. Jew Dykes Adopting Children: A Guide to the Perplexed
• 3. Going Natural: The Family Has No Clothes
• 4. Questing for Heart in a Heartless World: Jewish Feminist Ruminations on Monogamy and Marriage
• Epilogue: Justice and La Vida Jew . . . in Technicolor Queer
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Intermarriage and Multicultural Families

My Jewish Learning
2012-12-13

Ruth Abusch-Magder, Rabbi-in-Residence
Be’chol Lashon, San Francisco, California

Like it or not, intermarriage is a fact in Jewish life.

And for the most part the Jewish community has learned to live with it. Sure, different movements deal with it differently. Sure, some congregations are more adept and accommodating. But from Renewal to Orthodox we no longer assume that a Jew by birth will marry another Jew by birth.
 
But as demographics shift in the United States, the nature of intermarriage is changing too. And the Jewish community will need to adapt if it hopes to continue to create spaces for these new Jewish families.
 
In particular, my concern is with multiracial and multicultural families. There is nothing new about Jews from all racial and ethnic backgrounds. There were Jews in Ethiopia centuries before there were Jews in Poland and Jews in India before there were Jews in Spain. Jewish institutional life in the United States, however, has largely been built on the presumption that Jews are white. And our welcome to interfaith couples has similarly assumed that intermarriages between one white Jew and one white non-Jew…

Read the entire article here.

The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary (review)

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
Volume 31, Number 1, Fall 2012
pages 206-208
DOI: 10.1353/sho.2012.0123

Andrea Levine
George Washington University

This volume’s title signals its central critical intervention, a challenge to the masculine biases that have shaped studies of minstrelsy and of cross-racial appropriation and desire more broadly. Most conspicuously, Lori Harrison-Kahan takes on the influential paradigm established by Michael Rogin in his 1996 Blackface, White Noise. Rogin, of course, argues that early twentieth-century Jewish blackface performances worked to confirm the still-contested “whiteness” of Jewish entertainers, a “true” whiteness that presumably resided beneath the “mask” of blackface.

Harrison-Kahan, in fact, identifies Rogin’s paradigm as one of two predominant, “oppositional,” modes of reading Jewish investment in black culture; in the second paradigm, which she traces back at least to Irving Howe, Jews “empathetically identify” with black suffering (p. 4). In practice, though, she contends much more consistently with Rogin’s well-known charges of appropriation and exploitation.

The White Negress demonstrates that once we begin to look at women’s engagement with “cross-cultural exchange” (p. 15), these transactions appear far more nuanced than such binary approaches allow. Harrison-Kahan reads a number of early twentieth-century Jewish American women’s texts and performances as invested less in claiming “whiteness” than in destabilizing it, in part through assertions—if frequently ambivalent ones—of Jewish identity. Her analysis places considerable weight on the resistance to sanctioned gender and sexual roles on the part of such Jewish American female performers and writers as Sophie Tucker and Fannie Hurst. The author also revises “unidirectional” narratives of Jewish American cultural appropriations of “blackness,” suggesting that scholars should acknowledge the more “reciprocal” transactions that obtain among African American and Jewish American cultural producers and historical actors. So, for instance, she reads Zora Neale Hurston’s 1939 novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, as a send-up, rather than a reinscription, of minstrel conventions, one that explores both the power dynamics and the mutual “cross-identifications” that attended Black-Jewish coalitions in the early years of the civil rights movement.

In another acute challenge to prevailing scholarship, Harrison-Kahan argues that the racial politics of Edna Ferber’s Showboat look quite different when one reads the novel that served as the basis for the Broadway musical, much-maligned for its traffic in sentimental and demeaning representations of African American characters. Harrison-Kahan emphasizes the novel’s “pluralistic” rendering of Jewishness and its emphasis on racial “mixing.” Similarly, she re-reads Hurst’s 1933 novel, Imitation of Life, which provided the basis for both the 1934 and 1959 film versions, texts far more familiar to most scholars than Hurst’s original novel. Harrison-Kahan argues that Hurst’s novel interrogates and exposes the commodification of “blackness” on which its protagonist’s business rests—and that these challenges to racial stereotypes work in conjunction with the challenges that Bea Pullman, as a “working woman,” poses to normative scripts of white femininity and maternity. As in the chapter on Ferber, the author makes a persuasive case for the under-examination of Hurst as a Jewish American author, in part because her biography deviated from that of the largely New York-based Eastern European Jewish immigrants whose work dominates the Jewish American “canon,” and in part—as with so many women writers—because her work was consistently marginalized by critics for its commercial success. One might, however, suggest that even given the historical frame of Harrison-Kahan’s project, her own privileging of “working” white femininity as a disruptive version of femininity is rather a circumscribed choice, leaving heterosexuality, among other indices of normative femininity, largely intact.

Harrison-Kahan’s readings are subtle and deft, and to her credit, she does not over-state the radicalism of either her own approach or the texts she reconsiders. A characteristic passage reads, “Hurst’s novel thus negotiates a fine line between being an additional inculcation of the mammy myth and a commentary on it” (p. 124). Harrison-Kahan works cogently and intelligently in the ambivalent space she charts, writing in the conclusion that whiteness can be “produced and destabilized through cross-racial performances and encounters” (p. 179).

This volume makes an important contribution to a scholarly…

Rose Hill: An Intermarriage before Its Time

Heyday Books
March 2012
192 pages
5.5 x 8.5
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59714-188-8

Carlos Cortés, Professor Emeritus of History
University of California, Riverside

A riveting memoir of cultural crossfire

“Dad was a Mexican Catholic. Mom was a Kansas City–born Jew with Eastern European immigrant parents. They fell in love in Berkeley, California, and got married in Kansas City, Missouri.

That alone would not have been a big deal. But it happened in 1933, when such marriages were rare. And my parents spent most of their lives in Kansas City, a place both racially segregated and religiously divided.

Mom and Dad chose to be way ahead of their time; I didn’t. But because of them, I had to be. My mixed background meant that, however unwillingly, I had to learn to live as an outsider.”

The son of a Mexican Catholic father with aristocratic roots and a mother of Eastern European Jewish descent, Carlos Cortés grew up wedged between cultures, living a childhood in “constant crossfire-straddling borders, balancing loves and loyalties, and trying to fit into a world that wasn’t quite ready.” In some ways, even his family wasn’t quite ready (for him). His request for a bar mitzvah sent his proud father into a cursing rage. He was terrified to bring home the Catholic girl he was dating, for fear of wounding his mother and grandparents. When he tried to join a high school fraternity, Christians wouldn’t take him because he was Jewish, and Jews looked sideways at him because his father was Mexican.

In his new memoir, Rose Hill: An Intermarriage before Its Time, Cortés lovingly chronicles his family’s tumultuous, decades-long spars over religion, class, and culture, from his early years in legally segregated Kansas City during the 1940s to his return to Berkeley (where his parents met) in the 1950s, and to his parents’ separation, reconciliation, deaths, and eventual burials at the Rose Hill Cemetery. Cortés elevates the theme of intermarriage to a new level of complexity in this closely observed and emotionally fraught memoir adapted from his nationally successful one-man play, A Conversation with Alana: One Boy’s Multicultural Rite of Passage.

In Judaism, one’s mother must be Jewish in order to be ‘officially recognized’ as Jewish. Because it was my father who was Jewish, I didn’t count. And although I was born in Japan, I was not granted citizenship because only my mother was Japanese. From both sides, stranded. When I was 18, I decided to convert to Judaism. My mother was supportive, but she insisted that if I were to have a mikvah I must also start taking Japanese lessons. I’m not sure why she though these two things went together, or that they somehow balanced each other out. Balance was something both my parents strove for. Balance was important, they explained.

Naomi Angel, “On the Train,” in Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out, edited by Adebe De Rango-Adem and Andrea Thompson (Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2010): 143.

Organizing 101: A Mixed-Race Feminist in Movements for Social Justice

Chapter in:
Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism
Seal Press
April 2002
432 pages
ISBN-10: 1580050670
ISBN-13: 9781580050678

Edited by:

Daisy Hernandez
Bushara Rehman

Foreword by: Cherríe Moraga

Chapter Author:

Lisa Weiner-Mahfuz

pages 29-39

I have vivid memories of celebrating the holidays with my maternal grandparents. My Jido and Sito (“grandfather” and “grandmother,” respectively in Arabic), who were raised as Muslim Arabs, celebrated Christmas rather than Ramadan. Every year, my Sito set up her Christmas tree in front of a huge bay window in their living room. It was important to her that the neighbors could see the tree from the street. Yet on Christmas day Arabic was spoken in the house, Arabic music was played, Arabic food was served and a hot and heavy poker game was always the main activity. Early on, I learned that what is publicly communicated can be very different from what is privately experienced.

Because of the racism, harassment and ostracism that my Arab grandparents faced, they developed ways to assimilate (or appear to assimilate) into their predominantly white New Hampshire community. When my mother married my Jewish father and raised me with his religion, they hoped that by presenting me to the world as a white Jewish girl, I would escape the hate they had experienced. But it did not happen that way. Instead, it took me years to untangle and understand the public/private dichotomy that had been such a part of my childhood.

My parents’ mixed-class, mixed-race and mixed-religion relationship held its own set of complex contradictions and tensions. My father comes from a working-class, Ashkenazi Jewish family. My mother comes from an upper-middle-class Lebanese family, in which—similar to other Arab families of her generation—women were not encouraged and only sometimes permitted to get an education. My mother has a high-school degree and no “marketable” job skills. When my father married her, he considered it an opportunity to marry into a higher class status. Her background as a Muslim Arab was something he essentially ignored except when it came to deciding what religious traditions my sister and I were going to be raised with. From my father’s perspective, regardless of my mother’s religious and cultural background, my sister and I were Jews—and only Jews.

My mother, who to this day carries an intense mix of pride and shame about being Arab, was eager to “marry out” of her Arabness. She thought that by marrying a white Jew, particularly in a predominantly white New Hampshire town, that she would somehow be able to escape or minimize the ongoing racism her family faced. She converted to Judaism for this reason and also because she felt that “eliminating” Arabness and Islam from the equation would make my life and my sister’s life less complex. We could all say—her included—that we were Jews. Sexism and racism (and their internalized versions) played a significant part in shaping my parents’ relationship. My father was never made to feel uncomfortable or unwelcome because he had married a Muslim Arab woman. He used his white male privilege and his Zionistic point of view to solidify his legitimacy. He created the perception that he did my mother a favor by “marrying her out” of her Arabness and the strictness of her upbringing.

My mother, however, bore the brunt of other people’s prejudices. Her struggle for acceptance and refuge was especially evident in her relationship with my father’s family, who never fully accepted her. It did not matter that she converted to Judaism, was active in Hadassah or knew all of the rituals involved in preparing a Passover meal. She was frequently made to feel that she was never quite Jewish enough. My Jewish grandmother was particularly critical of my mother and communicated in subtle and not so subtle ways that she tolerated my mother’s presence because she loved her son. In turn, I felt as if there was something wrong with me and that the love that I received from my father’s family was conditional. Many years later this was proven to be true: when my parents divorced, every member of my father’s family cut off communication from my mother, my sister and me. Racism and Zionism played a significant (but not exclusive) role in their choice. My father’s family (with the exception of my Jewish grandfather, who died in the early seventies) had always been uncomfortable that my father had married an Arab woman. The divorce gave them a way out of examining their own racism and Zionism.

Today my mother realizes that her notions about marrying into whiteness and into a community that would somehow gain her greater acceptance was, to say the least, misguided. She romanticized her relationship with my father as a “symbol of peace” between Jews and Arabs, and she underestimated the impact of two very real issues: racism within the white Jewish community and the strength of anti-Semitism toward the Jewish community. At the time she did not understand that her own struggle against racism and anti-Arab sentiment was both linked to and different than anti-Semitism…

Read the entire chapter here or here.

Mixed-race Jewish children locate their communal comfort zone

The Jewish Chronicle Online
2009-11-12

Sue Fishkoff

Dafna Wu, a 48-year-old San Francisco nurse, was born to a Jewish mother and Chinese father. She was raised Jewish but looks Asian, as does her daughter, nine-year-old Amalia, whose father was also Chinese.

The Hebrew School Amalia attends is filled with mixed-race children, but the parents in the congregation are all white, as is the majority of American Jewry. That concerns her mother.
 
“All my life I’ve had to defend being Jewish,” says Ms Wu. “When I go to a new synagogue, people ask who I’m with. I don’t want her to have to explain her Judaism, or be exoticised for it. I just want her to be a kid, not ‘that special, multi-racial kid’.”
 
That’s why Ms Wu brings Amalia to Be’chol Lashon (In Every Tongue), a San Francisco-based organisation for ethnically and racially diverse Jews. At the group’s most recent retreat last month, at a camp north of San Francisco, Amalia played with other Jewish children who are black, Hispanic and Asian. They sang Hebrew songs, built a succah, and learned about tzedakah, but they also talked openly with their counsellors about what it means to be Jews of colour, to have an identity people do not see due to the colour of their skin.

About 5.4 per cent of America’s Jews are either non-white or Hispanic, according to the 2000-2001 National Jewish Population Survey. A 2004 study by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, Be’chol Lashon’s parent organisation, puts that number at about 10 per cent. Nevertheless, say activists in the field, the prevailing assumption is that Jews are white, and that Jews of other racial or ethnic backgrounds are adoptees or converts. Sometimes they are, but increasingly they are not, as the children of mixed-race couples grow to adulthood and begin raising their own Jewish children…

Read the entire article here.

Jewish multiracial families grow in numbers and commitment

The Denver Post
Denver, Colorado
2012-09-25

Electa Draper

Three Denver mothers heading multiracial families are seeking to build on what it means to live in Jewish community.

The community is changing.

It’s perhaps a surprising slice of demography that shows that 16 percent of metro Denver Jewish households headed by people ages 39 and younger are multiracial.

Among all age groups, 9 percent are multiracial, according to the 2007 Metro Denver/Boulder Jewish Community Study. National organizations note that the trend is increasing through conversion, marriage and adoption…

…For years, American Jews have been characterized as a “white” ethno-religious group, “both in terms of their racial classification and in terms of their cultural alignment in American society,” reported the UJA-Federation of New York in its comprehensive 2011 study released in June.

“However, several factors — intermarriage and adoption among them — have been working to alter that nearly all-white imagery and reality to some extent,” the report states…

Read the entire article here.

How Jews Became White Folks and What That says about Race in America

Rutgers University Press
1998-10-01
272 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-2589-1
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-2590-7

Karen Brodkin, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
University of California, Los Angeles

A wide-ranging and provocative assessment of how race, class, and gender shape social identity in the United States.

We fashion identities in the context of a wider conversation about American nationhood, to whom it belongs and what belonging means. Race and ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality are all staple ingredients in this conversation. They are salient aspects of social being from which economic practices, political policies, and popular discourses create “Americans.” Because all of these facets of social being have such significant meaning on a national scale, they also have major consequences for both individuals and groups in terms of their success and well-being, as well as how they perceive themselves socially and politically.

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.

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.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. How Did Jews Become White Folks?
• 2. Race Making
• 3. Race, Gender, and Virtue in Civic Discourse
• 4. Not Quite White: Gender and Jewish Identity
• 5. A Whiteness of Our Own? Jewishness and Whiteness in the 1950s and 1960s
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Multiracial Jews Moving Beyond Isolation

The Jewish Week
2012-06-12

Julie Wiener, Associate Editor

Now 12 percent of the community, racially diverse Jewish households making their way into mainstream — but still less ‘engaged’ than others.

When Rabbi/Cantor Angela Buchdahl was growing up — the daughter of a white Jewish father and a Korean-American mother — she and her sister “always felt like the ‘only ones’” that were non-white in Jewish settings.

Today, her three children attend the Abraham Joshua Heschel School, and each is in a class with at least one other mixed-race Asian. “And there are other races as well,” she noted.

Meanwhile at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, where Buchdahl is a member of the clergy, there are at least 20 families with Jews of color, not counting Sephardic or Mizrachi Jews…

…Rabbi/Cantor Buchdahl’s observations are reflected in the comprehensive UJA-Federation of New York population study released this week. The first Jewish population study to ask about race, it finds that approximately 12 percent — or 87,000 — of New York Jewish households are “multiracial or nonwhite.”

This category includes households in which survey respondents were both Jewish and black, Hispanic, Asian or biracial, or in which white Jewish respondents reported that their household is bi- or multiracial. “As a group they are divided almost equally among four groups: Hispanic respondents, Black respondents, white respondents with biracial households, and biracial respondents, with small numbers of others (for example, Asian-American respondents),” the study reports.

In short, the category encompasses a wide range of profiles — among them interracial couples and their children, adult children of interracial couples, white couples with non-white adopted children and non-whites who were either born Jewish or converted to Judaism. And it is not clear how many families fit each profile…

…But there is no typical multiracial Jewish family: the category represents a mix of races and ethnicities, as well as a wide range of family and national backgrounds everywhere on the spectrum of Jewish observance.

“To call everyone ‘Jews of color’ is really a disservice because there’s so much variation,” said Diane Tobin, director of Be’chol Lashon, a San Francisco-based group that conducts research and offers various programs throughout the United States, including an overnight summer camp for multiracial Jewish children. “Between intermarriage, conversion and adoption, there’s so many different paths and ways people are identifying as being Jews.”…

Read the entire article here.