The denial of belonging: Jews of color and Black-Jewish relations globally in the 20th-21st centuries

Session Submission Type: Lightning Session

Abstract

This lightning session focuses on the issue of race, Jewishness, and belonging, including relationships between Jews and Blacks, the experiences of Jews of color, and how Jews have negotiated their position in relation to other racialized groups. The papers in this session are diverse in their geographic coverage (Israel, Poland, U.S., Middle East, South and West Africa, Jamaica), historical periods (pre-WWI, inter-war, 1960s-70s, contemporary) and methodological approaches (literature and history). The session challenges traditional dichotomies such as “Diaspora v. New Jew” or “Eastern v. Western Jew” and considers how Jews have tried to belong to Western civilization and separate from “Eastern-ness” while being rejected by the West or how they have tried to claim kinship with other racially marginalized groups, especially Black communities, and have been rejected by those groups. Conversely, the papers explore how Jews of color have been rejected or viewed with suspicion by white Jews. Several papers consider how gender and sexuality impact representations of “other” Jews, how Jews use racial affiliations and gender performance to prove their national belonging, and how gender and sexuality might be exploited within racially, politically and economically marginalized Jewish groups.

The session begins with the argument (Holler) that African American women’s writing can be utilized to contest the binaries within Israeli literature between “Diaspora and New Jews.” Next, Kozlowska explores representations of Jewish Middle Eastern women in the Polish press to evaluate how Polish Jews attempted to distance themselves from “Eastern-ness” to gain acceptance into “civilization” while being rejected by “the West.” Mora investigates Jewish American male activists’ imagined kinship with black masculinity to access white national belonging. Black activists rejected Jewish claims to kinship because of their perceptions of Jews as oppressors of Palestinians, just as Polish Jews were rejected from belonging in “the West.” Simonson emphasizes the myth of universal Jewish social marginality and solidarity with Black South Africans, while Mirvis articulates women of color’s rejection and inclusion in Jewish communities in Jamaica. In the final paper, Gondek questions how white and Black Jews perceived each other in an urban context (Harlem) in which both were products of transnational immigration, anti-Semitism and racism.

Sub Unit

• Interdisciplinary, Theoretical, and New Approaches

Chair

• Aviva Ben-Ur, Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Individual Presentations

• Split: Dahn Ben-Amotz, Passing and Double Identity Politics in Israeli Fiction - Roy Holler, Indiana University

• Between "La Petite Juive" and Lala Solika. The image of Jewish women from Islamic countries in the interwar Polish-Jewish press - Magdalena Kozłowska, University of Warsaw

• Militant Mimicry: Jewish Masculinity and Admiration of Black Culture in the Antiwar and Countercultural Movements of the 1960s and ‘70s - Miriam Eve Mora, Center for Jewish History

• Revisiting Jewish solidarity towards black South Africans in the apartheid context - Karina Simonson, Vilnius University, The Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies

• “New Judaism” or Dialectical Incompatibilities: Processes of “-ization” and Exclusion amongst West African “Jewries” - Janice Ruth Levi, UCLA

• The Limits of Jewish Inclusion in 20th-Century Jamaica - Stanley Mirvis, Arizona State University

• Ruth Landes and Black Jews in Harlem, 1929-1933 - Abby Suzanne Gondek, FDR Presidential Library and Museum