Race, Religion, or Ethnicity?: Situating Jews in the American Scene

Abstract

For Jewish Americans and the scholars who study them, religion, race, and ethnicity make up fundamental components of American social location. In other words, they are immediately relevant to how Americans conceptualize their own identities and the identities of others, as well as to the distribution of social, political, and economic resources. In this article, I argue that scholarship on Jewish American identity is typically both attentive to and itself deeply shaped by the myths that comprise dominant American conceptions of identity, such as those that inform and construct the social categories religion, race, and ethnicity. I examine, in each of three sections, scholarship that analyzes Jewish identification in terms of religion, ethnicity, and race, respectively, highlighting how the studies engage American social categories as the framework for studying Jewish American identification. The texts that use religion as the center of their analysis tend either to focus exclusively on Jewish Americans or to situate them in relation to the expectation of assimilation to (Christian) American social norms. Ethnicity-oriented scholarship, in contrast, often examines Jewish Americans as one among many ethnic groups, focusing initially on postCivil Rights era multiculturalism and, in later work that accounts for race theory, on identity performance and representation. I argue that the turn to, or neglect of, race in contemporary studies reveals the varying levels of scholarly commitment to thinking through power, privilege, and the role of 'whiteness' in Jewish American experiences and in their relations with other groups.

A racial re-framing of Modernity and the Jews

“… 1. See Glauz-Todrach (2014) for a very useful, brief overview of the literature on the varied framing on Jews using the categories of race, ethnicity, or religion. …”