The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity
Starred Review.Relationships between American Jews and African-Americans have a long, complicated history. Jews engaged in African-American civil rights work as early as the 1910s. Yet Jewish songwriter Irving Berlin felt a strong need to repudiate the indisputable influence of African-American music on his work. In this original, boldly conceptualized and well-researched inquiry into the complicated intersections of "race" and Jewish-American identity, Emory University's Goldstein explores how Jewish immigrants gradually began to understand themselves as "white" (i.e., fully European) when most of America did not. Goldstein writes that he has framed this book not "as a study of how Jewsbecamewhite but as one that explores how Jewsnegotiatedtheir place in a complex racial world," which makes this substantially different from such works as Karen Brodkin'sHow Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America. Using a dexterous mix of traditional history, sociology, critical race and whiteness studies. Goldstein brings together a wealth of examples—such as the turn-of-the-20th-century argument that Jews had a "primitive Negro past"—to explore the myriad ways the racialization of Jewishness formed a central tenet of ideas about race in American culture.(Mar.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.