Are Jews White?

Catalog description

The question of how Judaism does and does not map onto contemporary racial categories has been, for centuries, a defining question of how Jews, as a small minority group, relate to their surrounding cultures. In many ways, the story of the historical construction of racial categories is itself a story indissolubly bound up with Jewish history—ranging from the development of the concept of blood purity during the Spanish Inquisition, which was then exported to the New World through Spanish colonialism, to late 19th-century racial theorists preoccupied with the question of how Jews do or do not relate to European peoples. As such, this course will consider the overarching question—Are Jews white?—from a historical and sociological perspective. In so doing, we will think about the historical development of the concept of whiteness itself and the relationship between the emergent concept of race and concepts of religion, ethnicity, nationhood, and nationality. We will look at how Jews were and are racially defined and categorized in different historical and cultural contexts in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and the United States—and how this question is bound up with broader questions about power relations, political structures, and minority and majority identities. We will look at how Zionism and other forms of Jewish nationalism have altered Jewish racialization; how Jews relate to broader discourses of postcolonialism and Orientalism; and the different racializations of Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Ethiopian Jews in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. The course will look at the ways in which Jews responded to the rise of Black nationalism in the United States and how racialized divisions between different ethnic Jewish communities shape politics in the modern state of Israel, with a particular focus on the rise of the Mizrahi Black…