Katya Gibel Azoulay seems perfectly placed to interrogate the intricacies of interracial and biracial, especially Black/ Jewish, identity formation. Azoulay's mother was an Austrian Jew who fled the Nazi invasion. Her father is West Indian of mixed racial descent who migrated to this country as a child.
In the United States, her mother was classified as White and her father as Negro. The one-drop rule rendered her and her children Black. Jewish law made them all Jewish, this latter determination borne out by the fact that her identity card from Israel, where she has spent much of her adult life, listed her nationality as "Jewish." Although Azoulay attempts to explore the complexity of identities in the case of children with one Black parent and one White parent, as a living embodiment of her subject matter she is at once too close to the material and perhaps not quite close enough.
There's the rub: too close for comfort and yet not close enough for insight. Too enamored with theory for its own sake, and yet so overwhelmed by theory that it gets in the way of and drowns out what looks to be promising and insightful material. Thus the author spends the bulk of the book struggling with, and against, abstract contemporary identity theory in cultural studies, post-structuralism, and anthropology. By the time the reader reaches the interviews contained in the last chapter, exhaustion has set in for both author and reader - and one finds just snippets of the interviews embedded in more theory. The snippets may be enough to pique interest, but the data base on which so much is premised is small.
Azoulay asserts as the heart of her argument that "to be Black, Jewish and interracial is to occupy a three-tier standpoint position: It is a cognitive and physical process of being in the world - in, and as a result of, a race-conscious society - to be an interruption, to represent a contestation, and to undermine the authority of classification."
While it is true that interracial identities incipiently challenge racial categories and formations, to assume that they do is to give in to the essentializing logic they are challenging. Azoulay seems aware of this, although she fails to pick up on the nuances in some of the interview material she cites. For instance, Frantz - whose mother is Jewish and father is Black - at one point expressly declares himself to be "Jewish first," although he earlier says that he "still maintain our heritage" while referring to Jews and "they" and "them" with a desire to "maintain their heritage and their culture." This belies the author's insistence that Black/Jewish interraciality is necessarily and sufficiently predicated on the assumption as "a common past of oppression and suffering."
