Topics
Topics
Theories of Race and Jewish Identity
The Diversity of the American Jewish Experience
Jewish Ethical Responses to the Problem of Racism
Theories of Race & Jewish Identity
Is Judaism a race? A religion? Who gets to decide?
Researcher: Dr. Jennifer GlaserIn previous research, Dr. Glaser developed the concept of “racial ventriloquism” to explore the lure of cultural appropriation for Jewish writers in the post-1967 US including the use of Rabbi Albert I. Gordon’s work on intermarriage by the state of Virginia in the Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia. This project will further look at the ways Jews and Jewishness have been conceived before the Supreme Court as a way of looking at the history of Jewish racialization in the US.
Race Before the Law attempts to introduce Jewishness more fully into the context of the discourse of critical race theory and its historical emphasis on legal definitions of identity and citizenship. At the same time, it aims to think more rigorously about the thorny question of Jewish racialization in the U.S. Readings of the law are paired with readings of postwar literary texts that similarly interpret and interpolate Jewish identity in America.
Dr. Jennifer Glaser
Dr. Jennifer Glaser is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Cincinnati.
She is affiliate faculty in Judaic Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati, as well as the Training Core Co-Director for the Ohio Policy Evaluation Network, a collaborative project on reproductive rights and legislation in Ohio.
She is also the Book Review Editor of Studies in American Jewish Literature.
Dr. Jennifer Glaser
Dr. Jennifer Glaser is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Cincinnati.
She is affiliate faculty in Judaic Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati, as well as the Training Core Co-Director for the Ohio Policy Evaluation Network, a collaborative project on reproductive rights and legislation in Ohio.
She is also the Book Review Editor of Studies in American Jewish Literature.
How does the history of American racism reverberate in the cultures and hierarchies of the American Jewish community?
Researcher: Dr. Devin NaarThis project investigates the deeply entrenched historical linkages between anti-Black racism and what commentators sometimes call “Ashkenormativity” (the idea that Ashkenazi culture is the default Jewish culture) within American Jewish communal life. Both must be viewed in tandem as products of the internalization of white supremacist and Eurocentric ideas and practices among American Jews.
Drawing on newspapers, institutional records, and memoirs in English, Ladino, Yiddish, Spanish, and Hebrew from the first half of the 20th century, this project uncovers the ways in which mainstream institutions within the American Jewish establishment distanced and denigrated Jews from the Muslim world by weaponizing anti-Black (and Islamophobic) discourses to shore up the vulnerable position of European-origin or Ashkenazi Jews on the white side of the "color line."
The project reveals the processes through which the face of the American Jewish community emerged as white and Ashkenazi, why that public image has retained such staying power, and how it might be overthrown as American Judaism is "reconstructed" once again for the 21st century.
Dr. Devin Naar
Dr. Devin Naar is an associate professor of History and Jewish studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he serves as the chair of the Sephardic Studies Program.
He teaches courses on Sephardic history and culture; Jewish history; the history and memory of the Holocaust; race and migration from the Mediterranean to the Americas; and the "color line" in Seattle.
Dr. Devin Naar
Dr. Devin Naar is an associate professor of History and Jewish studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he serves as the chair of the Sephardic Studies Program.
He teaches courses on Sephardic history and culture; Jewish history; the history and memory of the Holocaust; race and migration from the Mediterranean to the Americas; and the "color line" in Seattle.
How do the categories of “race” and “religion” fall short when talking about Jews and other people?
Researcher: Dr. Shana SippyThis project seeks to place contemporary conversations about American Jewish identity and race within a broader contextual and historical framework, complicating Jewish discourse and public understanding of racial and religious identities. The series of 6 short lectures introduces some of the ways that scholars think about the formation of the categories of race and religion, and how they map onto notions of Jewish identity in the past and present. Looking at different periods, including medieval Europe, the Inquisition in Spain and Spanish colonies, the rise of "race-science" and the study of "world religions", Jewish self-fashioning in 18th century Europe and 19th and 20th century America, the lectures explore:
- How race and religion have been and continue to be co-constituted, intertwined, and formed in relationship to one another.
- How the categories of religion and race emerged in direct relationship to the Inquisition, colonialism, enslavement, and white Christian supremacy; why religion is not a neutral category that can be easily separated from race.
- How the Jewish embrace of “religion” as a description for communal identification was intimately connected with antisemitism and racism and was a means by which Jews tried to locate and leverage proximity to whiteness and Christianness in efforts to assimilate and gain acceptance and access in public and "secular" society and civic life. Looking briefly at the 20th-century American film The Jazz Singer, the last lecture asks us to consider how, in some cases, Jewish assimilation and the embrace of Jewishness as a religious and not racial identity was complicit in and perpetuated anti-Black racism and white supremacy.
- How awareness of the historic co-constitution of race and religion can help us to think about the questions we must ask and the categories and language we wish to employ going forward if we are to address the ethical challenges posed by systemic racism, antisemitism, and white supremacy today.
Dr. Shana Sippy
Shana Sippy is an Associate Professor of Religion at Centre College.
She is engaged in public scholarship as the Co-director of Religions Minnesota, a Research Associate in the Department of Religion at Carleton College, and a founding member of the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective.
Her scholarship examines the articulation and politics of identity and focuses on the making of Jewish and Hindu selves and communities in modernity.
Dr. Shana Sippy
Shana Sippy is an Associate Professor of Religion at Centre College.
She is engaged in public scholarship as the Co-director of Religions Minnesota, a Research Associate in the Department of Religion at Carleton College, and a founding member of the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective.
Her scholarship examines the articulation and politics of identity and focuses on the making of Jewish and Hindu selves and communities in modernity.
The Diversity of the American Jewish Experience
How might Jews in the U.S. celebrate Sigd while honoring the history and culture of the Beta Israel community?
Researchers: Rabbi Ruth Abusch-Magder, PhD and Dr. Bezawit AbebeSigd is an ancient Jewish holiday preserved through the generations exclusively by Ethiopian Jews. Awareness of Sigd is growing in the United States and can become an opportunity to expand understanding of the Jewish people's historical racial and ethnic diversity. Sigd celebration could open conversations that center the Black Jewish experience, challenge colonialist ways of thinking about the center and periphery of Jewish life, and help explore the complex culture and history of Ethiopian Jews.
At the same time, the adoption of Sigd may fuel tokenism, relegating engagement with the multifaceted issues of racial diversity in the Jewish community to a single holiday with a limited lens much the way the MLK Day holiday simplifies the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement.
In addition to interviewing Israeli activists who helped make Sigd a recognized national holiday, the research team conducted interviews with American Jewish professionals who have implemented Sigd celebrations. All of this work is done through a lens of how the story of Ethiopian Jewry manifests in current politics and racial discourse.
Rabbi Ruth Abusch-Magder, PhD
Rabbi Ruth Abusch-Magder is the Director of Education at Be'chol Lashon, an organization that celebrates and promotes the racial diversity of the Jewish people.
She was ordained at HUC, has a PhD in Jewish History, and is a frequent writer and teacher on Jewish topics.
Rabbi Ruth Abusch-Magder, PhD
Rabbi Ruth Abusch-Magder is the Director of Education at Be'chol Lashon, an organization that celebrates and promotes the racial diversity of the Jewish people.
She was ordained at HUC, has a PhD in Jewish History, and is a frequent writer and teacher on Jewish topics.
Dr. Bezawit Abebe
Dr. Bezawit Abebe is a research fellow at Be’chol Lashon. She is a human rights activist, and before coming to America, lived in Israel.
She held various positions in legal and philanthropic organizations striving for integration, empowerment, and equality of the Ethiopian Israeli community.
She previously worked at Tebeka, advocating for the Ethiopian community’s human rights, and lectured on human rights extensively in Israel.
Dr. Bezawit Abebe
Dr. Bezawit Abebe is a research fellow at Be’chol Lashon. She is a human rights activist, and before coming to America, lived in Israel.
She held various positions in legal and philanthropic organizations striving for integration, empowerment, and equality of the Ethiopian Israeli community.
She previously worked at Tebeka, advocating for the Ethiopian community’s human rights, and lectured on human rights extensively in Israel.
How does research on the Syrian Sephardic Jewish community challenge conventional American ideas about race?
Researcher: Dr. Mijal BittonBuilding on previous research about a community of Syrian Sephardic Jews in New York, Dr. Bitton investigates how to theorize the positionally of this group vis-a-vis America’s racial classification.
In particular, Dr. Bitton examines the notion of a racial binary, influential in scholarship about race in America, and argues that this group resists simple racial classification into one side of the theorized racial binary.
Dr. Bitton investigates questions about the racialization of Middle Eastern Americans and the effects of continuous immigration and ethnic replenishment on this group. She also examines how this group’s trajectory relates to scholarly ways of thinking about Jews, class, and race in America. Dr. Bitton interrogates the notion of racialized/ethnic place-making and offers new questions about Jews, immigration, race, and class in the United States.
Dr. Mijal Bitton
Dr. Mijal Bitton is a sociologist of American Sephardic Jews, a Scholar-in-Residence at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, and the Rosh Kehilla of the Downtown Minyan.
Dr. Mijal Bitton
Dr. Mijal Bitton is a sociologist of American Sephardic Jews, a Scholar-in-Residence at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, and the Rosh Kehilla of the Downtown Minyan.
How might the Cuban Jewish story shape our attitudes to new immigrants today?
Researcher: Dr. Mark GoldbergIn 1960, Saúl Ginzburg left Havana and arrived in Miami. Fearing social and economic instability, he joined about 35% of Cuba’s total Jewish population who emigrated to Miami. The arrivals saw themselves as temporary exiles in the United States, waiting to return after Fidel Castro’s fall. Expected to be welcome as a new chapter in a long history of Jewish migration, Cuban Jews instead received closed doors. “The Miami Jews think of us only as Cubans,” Ginzburg recalled, “they don’t think of us as Jews.”
Stories like Gizburg’s are central in this project, which starts in early 20th-century Cuba and tracks Cuban Jews as they transitioned from Cuban nationals to Cuban exiles to US residents and citizens. After the 1959 revolution, Jewish migrants joined the waves of people exiting Cuba. They built community in Greater Miami as their parents and grandparents had done when they arrived in Cuba decades earlier. Jewish life in Cuba, American Jews’ perilous position, and Jim Crow segregation and politics all influenced the migrants’ choices upon arrival. U.S. Jews excluded Cuban Jewish newcomers, forcing them to develop their own institutions and find other resources to help them settle.
Focusing on members of two overlapping racialized groups—Latinxs and Jews—this project uncovers hidden and unpredictable ways white supremacy shaped immigrant experiences.
Dr. Mark Goldberg
Dr. Mark Goldberg is an Associate Professor of History and Director of Jewish Studies at the University of Houston. He researches and teaches courses on U.S. Latinx history, immigration, and the history of borders.
Dr. Mark Goldberg
Dr. Mark Goldberg is an Associate Professor of History and Director of Jewish Studies at the University of Houston. He researches and teaches courses on U.S. Latinx history, immigration, and the history of borders.
Jewish Ethical Responses to the Problem of Racism
What role do antisemitic conspiracy theories play in White nationalist thinking?
Researcher: Dr. Sophie Bjork-JamesWhite nationalism remains a serious threat to our communities. It is associated with hate crimes and other forms of harassment as well as threats to democracy. The movement is also committed to spreading antisemitism and remains one of the most influential spaces for spreading violent antisemitic conspiracy theories.
This project explores how understanding the relationship between antisemitism and anti-black racism is important to challenging white nationalism. It explores:
- What is white nationalism and what role does antisemitism play in this movement?
- What are some of the dangerous conspiracy theories in this movement, including replacement theory?
- What strategies exist to counter this movement given the entanglement of racist and antisemitic beliefs in the movement?
This project hopes that having a broader public more aware of the white supremacy movement, its different iterations and goals is important for both developing strategies to recognize where it is spreading and how to become involved in to countering it.
Dr. Sophie Bjork-James
Dr. Sophie Bjork-James is an Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University with more than 10 years of experience researching both the US-based Religious Right and the white nationalist movements.
Her work has been featured on NBC Nightly News, NPR’s All Things Considered, BBC Radio 4’s Today, and in the New York Times. She has published op-eds in the LA Times, Religious Dispatches, and the Conversation. She is a senior fellow with the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right.
Dr. Sophie Bjork-James
Dr. Sophie Bjork-James is an Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University with more than 10 years of experience researching both the US-based Religious Right and the white nationalist movements.
Her work has been featured on NBC Nightly News, NPR’s All Things Considered, BBC Radio 4’s Today, and in the New York Times. She has published op-eds in the LA Times, Religious Dispatches, and the Conversation. She is a senior fellow with the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right.
How do we reckon with the ways our holy texts both limit and countenance slavery?
Researcher: Rabbi Jonathan K. Crane, PhDA recurring concern in the United States is about reparations, or what is owed to the formerly enslaved. Besides a smattering of sermons and op-eds, little Jewish scholarship has emerged on reparations. This project attends to this gap by first closely examining biblical and rabbinic sources that explicitly speak of reparations. It then offers ethical analyses of those sources to generate openings to think about the (Jewish) ethics of reparations and their relevance to contemporary conversations in the United States.
Rabbi Jonathan K. Crane, PhD
Rabbi Jonathan K. Crane, PhD serves as the Raymond F. Schinazi Scholar in Bioethics and Jewish Thought at Emory’s Center for Ethics.
A Professor of Medicine and Director of the Food Studies and Ethics Initiative, he is a past president of the Society of Jewish Ethics, founder and co-editor of the Journal of Jewish Ethics, and author or editor of several books, including and Judaism, Race, and Ethics: Conversations and Questions (2020).
Rabbi Jonathan K. Crane, PhD
Rabbi Jonathan K. Crane, PhD serves as the Raymond F. Schinazi Scholar in Bioethics and Jewish Thought at Emory’s Center for Ethics.
A Professor of Medicine and Director of the Food Studies and Ethics Initiative, he is a past president of the Society of Jewish Ethics, founder and co-editor of the Journal of Jewish Ethics, and author or editor of several books, including and Judaism, Race, and Ethics: Conversations and Questions (2020).
What kind of teshuvah, repentance, and repair, is appropriate for our communal role in colonizing America?
Researcher: Dr. Maxwell GreenbergThis project explores how Jewish Americans remember/misremember Jewish history in the 19th-century American West through the process of historical preservation.
Focusing on two sacred Jewish sites in Southern Arizona that have undergone formal restoration processes, Dr. Greenberg explores how the myth of the Jewish Pioneer, rooted in 19th-century narratives that celebrate the racial and gendered violence of US westward expansion, distorts our memory of Jewish western history by failing to acknowledge Indigenous dispossession as a precondition to Jewish settlement.
By naming Jewish immigrants as setters rather than pioneers, this research asks us to reconsider the collective myths we've inherited and invites meaningful reflection about how our memories—spoken, written, and situated--might serve a process of historical repair (or teshuva), and divestment from the settler colonial violence that continues to threaten the sovereignty of those Indigenous to the region presently known as Arizona-Sonora borderlands.
Dr. Maxwell Greenberg
Dr. Maxwell Greenberg is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Jewish, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
He received his PhD in Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA. He teaches, writes, and researches about race and religion in settler border contexts, with a focus on North America.
Dr. Maxwell Greenberg
Dr. Maxwell Greenberg is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Jewish, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
He received his PhD in Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA. He teaches, writes, and researches about race and religion in settler border contexts, with a focus on North America.
How do we prepare ourselves and our children to respond to racial harm?
Researcher: Dr. Buffie Longmire-AvitalThrough both narratives, anecdotal sharing, and recent survey data on the experience of Jews of color [JOCs], the Jewish community is learning more about the ways JOCs intentionally engage in concurrent racial-ethnic and religious identity socialization. However, there is minimal research on the racial-ethnic socialization experience of Jewish families who do or can identify as white. This project will explore how Jewish American parents consciously and subconsciously engage in Jewish racial-ethnic socialization. Specifically, it will examine
- How white Jewish parents talk about race and the Jewish people in comparison to Jewish parents of color.
- To what extent do parents socialize their children to be aware that the Jewish people in America are multi-racial
- The cultivation of hypervigilance for racially biased behavior among the Jewish people.
Simply, are parents socializing their children to identify and root out racism when it occurs within the context of Jewish spaces?
Dr. Buffie Longmire-Avital
Dr. Buffie Longmire-Avital is a diversity, inclusion, and racial equity (D.I.R.E ©) scholar-educator. She is a professor of psychology and the inaugural director of the Black Lumen Project, an equity initiative at Elon University.
Her research focuses on how systemic injustices and resulting psychosocial factors contribute to health inequities that impact racial and sexual minorities.
As a DIRE consultant and speaker, she works closely with Jewish communities and organizations throughout the US on how to begin having conversations about race, equity, and inclusion.
Dr. Buffie Longmire-Avital
Dr. Buffie Longmire-Avital is a diversity, inclusion, and racial equity (D.I.R.E ©) scholar-educator. She is a professor of psychology and the inaugural director of the Black Lumen Project, an equity initiative at Elon University.
Her research focuses on how systemic injustices and resulting psychosocial factors contribute to health inequities that impact racial and sexual minorities.
As a DIRE consultant and speaker, she works closely with Jewish communities and organizations throughout the US on how to begin having conversations about race, equity, and inclusion.
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