Changing Families
Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Ideas
December 2007
Caryn Aviv, Senior Instructor in Secular Jewish Society & Civilization
University of Colorado, Boulder
A Different Sexual Revolution
The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism, by Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Indiana University Press, 2007. 320 pages
The Family Flamboyant: Race Politics, Queer Families, Jewish Lives, by Marla Brettschneider, SUNY Press, 2006. 232 pages
Two new books provide food for thought about contemporary Jewish identities in the United States. The Family Flamboyant: Race Politics, Queer Families, Jewish Lives by Marla Brettschneider, and The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism, by Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz, have much in common. Both books are informed by the authors’ deep commitment to social justice, their insights as Ashkenazi Jewish lesbians, and their experiences as coalition organizers. And both authors offer a nuanced, passionate, and sophisticated analysis of slippery Jewish identities in relationship to racial politics and inequality in the United States.
Each author inserts compelling autobiographical experiences into their political analyses. Brettschneider reveals the unsavory and overt racism and homophobia of the adoption system in the United States based on her own experiences of trying to adopt as an outspoken Jewish lesbian. Kaye/Kantrowitz draws upon her experiences of living in diverse places in the U.S., her struggles for racial and economic justice, and her memories of growing up in a secular, Yiddish-inflected family in Brooklyn. And both books provide meticulously documented empirical and theoretical evidence for the arguments they advance, offering a veritable bibliographic trove of resources for scholars and lay readers interested in these literatures…
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