Color me Jewish

[Behind the Aegis]

"The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity" by Eric L. Goldstein, Princeton University Press, 320 pages, $29.95.

Last fall, researchers published a study claiming that higher IQ scores among Jews were a result of natural selection. This biological explanation for stereotypically Jewish traits was widely discredited by geneticists, but it didn't stop a number of high-profile publications from trumpeting the study's findings. It seems the hunger for stories about the "Jewish brain" is floating in the Zeitgeist these days. By giving such prominence to the story, editors were picking up on the increasing tribal identification among American Jews, reflected everywhere from the "Jewcy" T-shirts to the popularity of the birthright israel program - all of it coming a decade after intermarriage became the great bugaboo of the American Jewish world.

As it turns out, this is hardly the first time that Jews have been drawn to a biological or racial envisioning of their peoplehood. As Emory University professor Eric Goldstein tells us in his new book, "The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity," American Jews in the 1880s similarly embraced a racial conception of Jewishness on the heels of a panic about rising intermarriage and assimilation. In 1887, the rabbi at Boston's largest synagogue told his congregants that "it remains a fact that we spring from a different branch of humanity, that different blood flows in our veins." While Jews are generally seen as the unwitting victims of biologically deterministic thinking, Goldstein argues that they have also frequently been among its most active proponents.

Goldstein's well-timed book traces the fraught history of Jewish particularity from the era in which "Hebrew" was a category in the census to today's society, in which scientists are again reviving chimeras of Jewish race. In the popular mind, race has loomed large as the most immutable of character markers - a trace in the blood that can't be altered. But Goldstein suggests that Jews' perception of their own racial coherence has been an unsteady concept, changing constantly and depending primarily on the acceptance of Jews in American society. He argues that Jewish identity has largely been shaped by a tug of war between two contradictory desires: on the one hand, to be fully accepted in the white majority, and on the other, to maintain the boundaries of the Jewish community. And combing through nearly every racially charged historical moment of the past century, Goldstein produces the rare academic book that uses history to enlighten, rather than complicate, a very contemporary debate.


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[DavidDvorkin]

1. Nothing new

The book sounds interesting, but not novel. See this essay, published many years ago. (I wrote it. I'm not trying to be coy.)

[genieroze]

2. Jews are smart, no doubt about it.