The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity Book

The Price of Whiteness is primarily sociology. In style it reminded me of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, which I read last year: a series of heavily footnoted chapters documenting the author's points and assertions.

The overall thesis is that "whiteness" is an ideology, not some sort of God-given fact. For example, their skin color notwithstanding, for nearly the entire 19th century in America, Irish immigrants were not considered white.

Goldstein's thesis is, further, that the utility and impact of that ideology has been to assert the relative superiority of the earlier American-born immigrants--the group we have later come to consider WASPs--and build and maintain their status and their confidence relative to black Americans, who were the former slaves, and native Americans. In the U.S., the overriding narrative has been black-white, with African Americans cast as the ultimate "other," the racial outsiders. Jews didn't completely fit into that story. They were racially ambiguous. So they have been a proverbial monkey wrench in the works.

His thesis also is--as per the title--that being accepted as "white" has costs as well as benefits. There are pressures on Jews to "melting-pot" themselves out of existence as a separate entity. Sometimes it seems he's even saying it's like extortion. Also, if one wants to engage in a battle of who has suffered more, one isn't going to win that battle, not regarding life in America, at least.

The book is organized into periods of history. For most of the 1800s, Jews were often the beneficiaries of a benign neglect because the narrative of color was so predominant, compared to Europe, where the narrative of the times was one of Aryan/Semite. Also most Jewish immigrants of that time were from Germany and central Europe. They readily adapted, ending up with jobs viewed as consistent with whiteness. My ancestors on my maternal side fit that pattern: first generation, shopkeepers; second generation, professionals.

By the 1890s or so, things got stickier. For one thing, a lot of Jews who were now immigrating from eastern Europe weren't initially acculturated to America's black-white racial narrative and didn't necessarily act "white."

The author also explains changes in attitudes toward Jews in terms of their being identified with alarming political changes in Europe and with the progress of industrialization in general. Changes were occurring in American life--urbanization, industrialization--and one way people explained the part they didn't like was by blaming Jews, who were already identified with commercialization and urbanization.

In the Progressive Age and then the '20s, there was an ambivalent response to the burgeoning popular culture, leading, for example, to blaming Jews for destroying American values for their own enrichment via Hollywood. You can see what's behind that thinking: "the international Jew" who's infiltrating, exploiting, and destroying American Christian society. In that scenario, Jews aren't "really" white, but masquerading as such for their own benefit.

On the other hand, America never rejected commercialization and popular culture en masse, since the dominant group wanted the attendant benefits. Nor were all WASPs during these times antisemitic. Some WASPs even looked on Jews as good biological material for the "melting pot." But nobody was thinking it was really a great idea for them to continue to exist as a separate entity.

The more change and the greater the economic hardship, the greater loss of confidence and the need to find someone to blame. Racial antisemitism. "The Jewish problem"--here, too; not just in Europe. Even those Americans who were not antisemitic bought into the paradigm of a Jewish problem. Public pronouncement in terms of "just a few" could be absorbed; policy to restrict immigration. Quotas, not just in the American South, as people today easily fall into thinking. For example, Harvard. Because Jews were raising the competitive bar. Also, they were "fraternizing" with Negroes, undermining American standards and values.

I was really surprised at what the author says about the era of FDR and WWII. With reference to the novel The Golem and the Jinni that I just read, you might say I felt I had discovered my maker. During that era, the powers that be here in America decided that antisemitic language and sentiment, in fact, anti-immigrant language in general, was harmful to the war effort. So they initiated propaganda (i.e., shaped public opinion) to associate that sort of thinking with Hitler and Nazism. All white European immigrants were now considered ethnic groups, not races. Prejudice against them was un-American. The only other "race" was African Americans. That's where I came on the scene and how I was "created" "white"!

Regarding Jews and African Americans, the author questions whether there ever was an actual "alliance," as lore would have it. That isn't as alarming to me as it could be to others because I'm getting in the habit of seeing how people always relate out of their needs and hopes, anyway, rather than out of some ideal of pure altruism, and I hope to accept human beings in all our glory and limitation. Anyway, in general and on average, Jews probably did relate sooner, more easily, and better to African Americans than the average white American. One can always find an economic substrata to these patterns, and early on, Jews were merchants and had to relate well to their customers, many of whom were black, i.e., Adam Smith's invisible hand in its beneficent sense. The African American "you exploited us in the ghetto" narrative comes later, from the Depression era, when the poorer Jews and other immigrants and African Americans, who by then had had their Great Migration from to South to the large cities of the North and Midwest, were all pitted against each other for crumbs in the ghetto.

The rise of black nationalism and repudiation of Jews by African Americans comes up in the last chapter. It's painful to read and more to learn from.

I'll tell one little story here. In 2008 there was a to-do at The Temple, a large synagogue on Peachtree Street in Atlanta, it being the 50th anniversary of when The Temple got blown up, back during the Civil Rights era. In the audience was one particular black man, kind of tall and gaunt, in a suit, who stood up to speak during the question-and-answer period, and I had a moment of suspense as what was going to happen. What he said, though, was that when he heard that news back in 1958 was the first he heard of the fact that white people (not just black people) could get blown up.

So each of us is born into whatever we believe is "reality," and it's up to us to get our eyes open as best we can.

Prior to the WWII era, not only did antisemites think in terms of "a Jewish race," but so, also, did Jews. It was useful for pulling together and staving off pressures to assimilate. Nor has it entirely ceased post definition as an "ethnicity." In fact the more intermarriage, and the more assimilation, the more attractive is what might now be called "tribalism," the author says.

What he's always trying to get at is the ambivalence of American Jews regarding belonging to the majority white culture. On the one hand they wanted to belong, here in America. They didn't want to be persecuted--no mystery there. They wished to thrive. They didn't want to be bullied into accepting all of the prevailing values. They could more nearly assert their particularity during periods when they were more secure. According to the author, they often can't or won't assert all their values publicly, i.e., in front of the larger culture. I would agree he has a point there.

He says that by participating in the Civil Rights movement, Jews were able to express themselves vicariously while using the cover of general American values regarding equality and so forth. He says that was the pay off for Jews during those activities and also through identification with African Americans culturally. So, in other words, it's ironic but kind of nice: African Americans benefited from Judaism's liberation story as told in the Hebrew Scriptures, while Jews, in return, benefited from the African American civil rights movement.
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This was a difficult read, and all along the way I was thinking of why that might be. It's academic, of course, but that's not all of it. He's cramming in a lot of information. Also, it can be he's going over difficult material and difficult terrain. I'll give him that, but I don't think that's all of it. I think he's being very careful to remain dispassionate and academic. He's being careful in what conclusions he wants the reader to draw. Regarding his main thesis about the utility of racial thinking for the white majority, he does at times refer to "unity" but most often states that racial thinking serves to build attitudes of superiority and confidence. My thinking along the "indispensable enemy" line is that unity is predominant.

By use of a common enemy a group papers over their inner conflicts and projects it all out onto "them." "They" are then the troublemakers, the divisive ones, the cause of all difficulties, and the focus of ire.

The author continually keeps his focus on race. He very rarely mentions Christian theology. In fact the only times I remember are, first, a quote of a Ku Klux Klan accusation that Jews were corrupting Christian values through Hollywood and, second, a 1920s-era quote accusing Jews of "ruining a neighborhood to make money just like Judas did," because they were renting and selling to African Americans. I know he's trying to be dispassionate by keeping Christianity out of it and focusing solely on whiteness, but I think his caution along those lines is one reason for the impeded prose.

He has focused on the dilemma of American Jews as to what they can talk about publicly and what they can't, because they want to be accepted as Americans and not damned for their particularistic concerns. Maybe he's caught on the horns of his own dilemma. He has to be so very careful!

I may be, myself, as I struggle with what Goodreads shelves I should put it on or create for it. Jews?

He sees that because Jews became "white" they gave up some of the easy moral claims that come from being excluded, but he never says why Jews should bear a particular opprobrium for being "white" that others in that category are not assessed.

Nevertheless, this is an important book because the author has plowed through all these issues, and that's why I plowed through it.

Although this review is long, believe me, it's just the tip of the iceberg! Even if the book is one you'll never read, be aware it's there for reference, should you have the need.