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Black, Jewish, and Interracial: It's Not the Color of Your Skin but the Race of Your Kin and Other Myths of Identity. - book reviews

by David Theo Goldberg , July 12, 2007

Although Azoulay insists that "interracial" is a "Euro-American" idea and has no place in Jewish discourse, this is again disingenuous. Jewishness, especially in the second half of this century, has definitely been influenced by its Euro-American legacy as well as by discursive internalization. And there is a good deal of alienating exclusion of Jews in Israel as well as in the United States on racial grounds. Syrian or North African Sephardi Jews in New York and Tel Aviv know this all too well.

Jews may not have been White upon arriving in America, and all Jews certainly are not White today. But as a group, Jews in the United States are presumptively White. The history of that transformation is perhaps more interesting than the now-presumptive fact of Jewish Whiteness. However, nothing about this justifies the sort of narrative privileging Azoulay's text assumes.

Thus Azoulay concludes too quickly that, "It's not the color of one's skin that matters, but the race of one's kin." It's not that the race and community of one's kin don't matter, they do for quite a few people - notably the growing number of biracial children. But to assume that in a country like the United States it altogether crowds out the visceral experiences associated with skin color is to fail to understand a deep and abiding reality of an America still deeply divided between Black and White.

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