Mixed Race Studies

“Are You Black or Are You Jewish?”: The New Identity Challenge

Lilith Magazine
Fall 1996
pages 21-29

Sarah Blustain

Two or three times a week, on the streets of San Francisco, complete strangers walk up to Lisa Feldstein and I ask, “What are you?”

She’s not Indian, South American, Puerto Rican or—her favorite suggestion—French. The child of a black Christian woman and a white Jewish man from an Orthodox family, she usually gives them a straight answer. But for Lisa, and the estimated thousands of other biracial children of black-Jewish origin, the answers are not so simple.

A large segment of this biracial population was born into the liberalism of the 1960s, whose adherents hoped to achieve, by activism and example, an America in which race and religion would invite no bias. They have not succeeded. Indeed, in the subsequent three decades, the ideal has shifted more than once away from color-blindness toward racial and ethnic identification—stranding these black-Jewish offspring in hostile territory.

From all over the country, we found individuals willing, even eager, to describe their lifelong struggles to define themselves. Often, and movingly, they report childhoods spent in confusion, and adulthoods spent negotiating die polarized alliances of their birth.

But at this moment in America, they also find themselves with another choice. It is a choice evolving into a national grassroots movement of “multiracial pride,” an attempt to assert all parts of the self as equally valid. They have organized nationally to add a “multiracial” category to the year 2,000 census—their option in the last census was “other”—and political and cultural groups have begun operating both online and face-to-face in cities throughout the country. A retreat for multiracial Jewish families is being planned for November at the Jewish Retreat Center in Falls Village, Connecticut; and, in the company of black Jews by descent (Ethiopian), adoption, or conversion, they formed last year the Alliance of Black Jews. Organizer Robin Washington, the son of a Jewish woman and a black man, says of his own identification: “[I’m] one hundred percent of both.”

These individuals defy the dictates of history, politics and simple appearance, and their stories illuminate the fracturing biases of a society that is not ready for them. But even as they demand recognition, the question arises: Does the multiracial movement add yet another allegiance to the list demanded by their social and political communities; or, in an increasingly multiracial country, does “their very existence,” as one observer suggested, “change society”?…

Read the entire article here.

20 years after riots, Crown Heights is now a mixed racial haven

New York Daily News
2011-08-14

Simone Weichselbaum, Staff Writer

Crown Heights has become a mixed race mecca.

The Brooklyn neighborhood infamous for the 1991 riot between blacks and Jews has the second-most residents who identify as being both black and white, the latest Census figures show.

Crown Heights had 635 people in 2010 who said they were born to one black parent and one white. Harlem led the city with 776.

The neighborhood’s new population includes mixed race hipsters and young biracial families moving from pricier neighborhoods. Others identify as Jewish with a black parent who want a multi-cultural area to call home…

Read the entire article here.

Prayer, and Bug Juice, at a Summer Camp for Jews of Color

The New York Times
2011-08-12

Samuel G. Freedman, Professor of Journalism
Columbia University

PETALUMA, Calif. — On Sabbath morning, as fog still hung over the valley, the campers walked past the Torrey pines and blackberry bushes toward the garden. There, several rows of chairs had been arranged in front of an altar fashioned from a folding table covered with Senegalese cloth and a Torah scroll on loan from an Orthodox synagogue.

About 15 minutes into the service, two girls rose to lead the congregation in a series of prayers. “Baruch atah Adonai eloheinu, melech ha-olam, she’asani Yisrael,” they said. Then they switched to the English translation: “Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the Universe, who has made me a Jew.”

In all its ordinariness, as a standard part of liturgy, the assertion could hardly have been bolder, coming as it did from Amalia Cymrot-Wu and her camp buddy Maya Campbell. Maya is the daughter of an interracial black-white marriage, Amalia the product of Brazilian and Chinese bloodlines, and they were matter-of-factly proclaiming their place among the Jewish people…

Read the entire article here. View the slide show here.

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

Rutgers University Press
2011-01-19
248 pages, 3 photographs
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-4783-1
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4782-4
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8135-4989-7

Lori Harrison-Kahan, Full-time Adjunct Faculty in English
Boston College

During the first half of the twentieth century, American Jews demonstrated a commitment to racial justice as well as an attraction to African American culture. Until now, the debate about whether such black-Jewish encounters thwarted or enabled Jews’ claims to white privilege has focused on men and representations of masculinity while ignoring questions of women and femininity. The White Negress investigates literary and cultural texts by Jewish and African American women, opening new avenues of inquiry that yield more complex stories about Jewishness, African American identity, and the meanings of whiteness.

Lori Harrison-Kahan examines writings by Edna Ferber, Fannie Hurst, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as the blackface performances of vaudevillian Sophie Tucker and controversies over the musical and film adaptations of Show Boat and Imitation of Life. Moving between literature and popular culture, she illuminates how the dynamics of interethnic exchange have at once produced and undermined the binary of black and white.

Oreo

Northeastern University Press (now University Press of New England)
2000 (Originially published in 1974.)
224 pages
6 x 9″

Fran Ross

Forward by Harryette Mullen

This uproariously funny satire about relations between African Americans and Jews is as fresh and outrageous today as when it was first published in 1974.

Born to a Jewish father and black mother who divorce before she is two, Oreo grows up in Philadelphia with her maternal grandparents while her mother tours with a theatrical troupe. Soon after puberty, Oreo heads for New York with a pack on her back to search for her father; but in the big city she discovers that there are dozens of Sam Schwartzes in the phone book, and Oreo’s mission turns into a wickedly humorous picaresque quest. The ambitious and playful narrative challenges accepted notions of race, ethnicity, culture, and even the novelistic form itself.

Shades of Community and Conflict: Biracial Adults of African-American and Jewish-American Heritages

The Wright Institute, Berkeley, California
1998
152 pages
Publisher: Dissertation.com
ISBN-10: 1581120249
ISBN-13: 9781581120240

Josyln C. Segal

A dissertation submitted to the Write Institute Graduate School of Psychology in partial fulfullment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosphy in Psychology

This study of eighteen adults of African-American and Jewish-American heritage explores how biracial subjects of two minority parents negotiates mixed race heritage and identity in a society that maintains a hostile attitude toward interracial unions. Data collection included1) a semi-structured interview to determine subjects’ own sense of racial/ethnic identity, 2) a measure of parental closeness, and 3) a series of twelve anecdotal hypothetical situations as a stimulus to revealing subjects’ affective, cognitive and behavioral responses in contexts in which the subjects mixed-heritage might be expected to evoke conflict.

A qualitative analysis, incorporating socio-cultural, psychodynamic, and historical perspectives, was utilized to investigate 1) racial and cultural stereotyping, 2) a hierarchy of color and racial categorization, 3) racial tolerance, 4) Black and Jewish relations, 5) biracial (Black and Jewish) identity, as mediated by parental and familial closeness.

Factors that influenced racial/identity development in the subjects’ lives were identified. Five of the six hypotheses were supported: 1) Phenotype is related to interpersonal perception. The biracial adult phenotypically perceived as African-American is more likely to identify as such, whereas the biracial adult phenotypically perceived as White is more likely to identify as either White or “mixed.” 2) Closeness to the African-American parent is not necessary for children of mixed-race/Jewish heritage to identify with African-American heritage. 3) Closeness to the Jewish parent is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for children of mixed-race/Jewish heritage to identify with Jewish heritage. 4) For those who are close to their Jewish parent, the degree of closeness affects the degree to which they identify as Jews. 5) The extent to which respondents experience themselves as integral parts of their extended families will increase the extent to which they identify with that half of their cultural heritage. The sixth hypothesis, which stated that to the degree that respondents express negative stereotypes of one part of their heritage they will also minimize their identification with that part of their heritage was not supported due chiefly to the lack of negative stereotyping by most of the respondents.

Read the first 25 pages here.
Purchase the dissertation here.

Jewish After Mount Sinai: Jews, Blacks and the (Multi) racial Category

Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal
Volume 9, Number 1 (Summer 2001)
pages 31-45

Katya Gibel Azoulay [Katya Gibel Mevorach], Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Studies
Grinnell College

My point of departure begins with the social and political fact of being both a Black woman who is Jewish and a Jewish woman who is Black in order to undermine the presupposition of inherent cultural or racial differences that favors the vocabulary of mixed or hybrid identities over the conjunction [both.. and].  Instead of being mutually exclusive, the link between Jewish and Black identities witness Stuart Hall’s “logic of coupling rather that the logic of binary opposition.”…

…The revisionist celebration of a mixed-race identity negates and eclipses a long history of white men crossing the color line to engage in sex with Black women, usually without their consent.  It has rendered invisible violations of Black women while critiquing the strategic efficacy of privileging Black political identities. Although questions of appearance, performance and class require a separate analysis of diverse and divisive perceptions and conceptions of Blackness, the campaign for a multiracial category obscures the fact that Black/African-Americans is already a multiracial category.  Legal scholar Patricia Williams skillfully encapsulates this sentiment when she writes, “what troubles me is the degree to which few people in the world, and most particularly in the United States, are anything but multiracial, to say nothing of biracial.  The use of the term seems to privilege to offspring of mixed marriages as those ‘between’ races without doing much to enhance to social status of all of us mixed-up products of illegitimacies of the not so distance past.”…

Read the entire article here.

People of God, Children of Ham: Making black(s) Jews

Journal of Modern Jewish Studies
Volume 8, Issue 2 (July 2009)
pages 237 – 254
DOI: 10.1080/14725880902949551

Bruce Haynes, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Davis

Taxonomies inherited from the nineteenth century have shaped the discourse surrounding the racial identity and supposed roots of Ethiopian immigrants to Israel. Through their interactions with just a few colonial actors, some of whom were Christian missionaries, others who were Jewish Zionists, a small group of young Falashas developed an elite status in Ethiopia as the true lost Jews in Africa. While most historians specializing in the history of Ethiopia do not believe the Beta Israel are a “lost tribe” of the ancient Israelites, Ethiopian immigrants have altered their self-conceptions over the past hundred years and come to see themselves as both black and Jewish.  This essay offers an alternative reading of the Beta Israel narrative, and asserts that the transformation of their social identities are embedded in a political process of racialization tied to racial ideology, and both secular and religious institutions and the State. In the process of incorporation into western society, their social identities have been transmogrified from religious others in Ethiopia to co-religionists yet racial others in Israel.

Read or purchase the article here.

Narrating the Racial Self: Symbolic Boundaries and the Reference Group Identification Among Biracial Black Jews

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association
Marriott Hotel, Loews Philadelphia Hotel
Philadelphia, PA
2005-08-12

45 pages

Bruce Haynes, Associate Professor
Sociology Depertment
University of California at Davis

Few studies of bi-racial or multiracial identity have considered the symbolic boundaries people use to establish their reference group identification to different social groups.  This analysis focuses on the ontological dimensions of social identification (Hart 1996) by considering the symbolic boundaries social actors use to emplot their life stories and claim membership in two distinct American ethno-racial groups, Blacks and Jews. The analysis seeks to answer two related questions: 1) How do self-identified Black and Jewish biracial individuals utilize symbolic boundaries in their personal narratives to claim membership in two publically recognized mutually exclusive groups? 2) To what degree traditional ethno/racial social boundaries have weakened as markers for social identification.  Although the content of any individual Black-Jewish identity is variable, many subjects report a “double-minority” status as both Black and Jewish, while others articulate identities as “Black Jews.”  The reproduction of Black and Jewish identity along traditional racial and ethnic group boundaries challenges both the presumed path towards the majority culture that is predicted by classic assimilation models, and romantic notions that the impact of race and the one drop rule has declined at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Introduction

The following analysis uses the intersection of Jewish and Black reference group identification as a way to explore the degree to which traditional ethno/racial social boundaries have weakened as markers for social identification among self-identified bi-racial Black and Jewish Americans. The data for this study is drawn from eleven in-depth life history interviews of self-identified Black and Jewish bi-racial people; five men and six women were selected who range from 22 to 46 years of age.

Self-identified bi-racial Black and Jewish Americans claim membership in two American ethno/racial groups that have historically been understood to be mutually exclusive. While holding a particular reference group identity is ultimately a matter of self-identifying with a specific group (Putnam 1993, 114), being both Black and Jewish requires making claims on both Black and Jewish collectives. Identity by definition carries consequences; otherwise it wouldn’t hold such salience to the orientations of social actors (Jenkins 1996)…

Read the entire paper here.

Black, Jewish, and Interracial: It’s Not the Color of Your Skin, but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity

Duke University Press
1997
232 pages
Cloth – ISBN13 978-0-8223-1975-7
Paperback – ISBN13 978-0-8223-1971-9

Katya Gibel Azoulay [Mevorach], Professor
Anthropology and American Studies
Grinnell College, Grinnell Iowa

How do adult children of interracial parents—where one parent is Jewish and one is Black—think about personal identity?  This question is at the heart of Katya Gibel Azoulay’s Black, Jewish, and Interracial.  Motivated by her own experience as the child of a Jewish mother and Jamaican father, Gibel Azoulay blends historical, theoretical, and personal perspectives to explore the possibilities and meanings that arise when Black and Jewish identities merge. As she asks what it means to be Black, Jewish, and interracial, Gibel Azoulay challenges deeply ingrained assumptions about identity and moves toward a consideration of complementary racial identities.

Beginning with an examination of the concept of identity as it figures in philosophical and political thought, Gibel Azoulay moves on to consider and compare the politics and traditions of the Black and Jewish experience in America. Her inquiry draws together such diverse subjects as Plessy v. Ferguson, the Leo Frank case, “passing,” intermarriage, civil rights, and anti-Semitism. The paradoxical presence of being both Black and Jewish, she argues, leads questions of identity, identity politics, and diversity in a new direction as it challenges distinct notions of whiteness and blackness.  Rising above familiar notions of identity crisis and cultural confrontation, she offers new insights into the discourse of race and multiculturalism as she suggests that identity can be a more encompassing concept than is usually thought. Gibel Azoulay adds her own personal history and interviews with eight other Black and Jewish individuals to reveal various ways in which interracial identities are being lived, experienced, and understood in contemporary America.