This 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:

1. How race and religion have been and continue to be co-constituted, intertwined, and formed in relationship to one another.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

In 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.

White 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:

1. What is white nationalism and what role does antisemitism play in this movement?
2. What are some of the dangerous conspiracy theories in this movement, including replacement theory?
3. 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.

This 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.

Through 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

1. How white Jewish parents talk about race and the Jewish people in comparison to Jewish parents of color.
2. To what extent do parents socialize their children to be aware that the Jewish people in America are multi-racial
3. 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?