Troubling Soviet Ashkenazi Jewish Whiteness: Queer Immigrant Contestations and Imaginations

This dissertation narrates and challenges the white racialized assimilation of a group of 1.5 and 2nd generation queer and gender-marginalized Soviet Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants to the U.S., from the 1980s to the present. Just as critical literature on the racialization of immigrants in the U.S. post-1950 has overlooked the major Cold War migration of Soviet Jews, most existing scholarship on this group has not attended to the roles of race, colonialism, and imperialism in their migration and assimilation (Aviv & Shneer, 2005; Gitelman, 2016). In this study, I draw on decolonial, anti-imperialist, intersectional feminist, and critical race frameworks to demonstrate that Soviet Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants are not unproblematically white, but rather, problematically white(ned). Employing feminist, queer, critical pedagogical and participatory approaches to qualitative research, I designed and co-created a live, virtual group study (Kolektiv Goluboy Vagon, the Blue Railcar Collective) that engaged participants who shared Soviet Jewish histories and social locations in a collective process of deconstructing and contesting their assimilation into U.S. white supremacy and settler colonialism. I drew on the group’s pedagogical and cultural production (including recorded group sessions, a curriculum, multimodal publication, and set of virtual performances) along with insights from modified life histories / dialogic interviews with seven core “collaborators” to document the ways these immigrants and children of immigrants individually and collectively negotiated and responded to the weaponization of their histories. This study was designed to illuminate the conditions that facilitated both this group’s whitening and their critical racial consciousness, document the consequences, and intervene into these processes./nThe findings of this study suggest that whereas the shaming of difference (e.g., immigrant, queer, Soviet, Jewish, poor) alongside white racial interpellation facilitated assimilation into American whiteness at an early age, the collective, critically-oriented processing of internalized, intersectional shame (as afforded by the Kolektiv) conversely helped participants strengthen critical orientations to racialized structures of power. In adulthood, socialization into white womanhood produced liberal white guilt and saviorist identities among some of my collaborators, while critical reflexivity around whiteness in the context of Black Lives Matter protests led them to later question their own immigrant whitening as a fraught process, rather than a given. Correspondingly, my study found that whereas some white antiracist affinity groups assumed whiteness as pre-existing and failed to account for intersectional experiences of whiteness (via, e.g., ethnic immigrant identity, queerness, gender, class), the Kolektiv, as a “historicized affinity group,” offered participants the chance to draw on shared familial and ancestral histories and complex subject positions to contest whiteness as an ongoing process. Relational processes of developing collective critical consciousness, working through shared intergenerational trauma, and creatively articulating political commitments emerged as critical aspects of this broader project of imagining and pursuing de-assimilation in ongoing colonial contexts./nThis study contributes empirical research on contemporary white(ned) immigrants, extending the study of 19th and 20th immigrant whiteness through present day and complicating the literature on Cold War immigrant racialization, which has heretofore focused on immigrants of color with few exceptions (Sadowski-Smith, 2018). By demonstrating white racialization as a colonial structure and ongoing process in the era of neoliberal multiculturalism, my study also opens space for contestations of new immigrant whiteness, however fraught this goal in the context of ongoing racialization. Finally, my discussion of the Kolektiv serves as a blueprint for the collective pursuit of such a project among assimilable immigrants, groups invested in or proximate to whiteness, and those whose histories have been weaponized by the state, contributing a liberatory pedagogical approach that centers relationships among people of shared histories and subject positions

Advisor: Hull, Glynda
Leonardo, Zeus