Foreword

When did Jews become white? This may sound like an unusual question, but according to scholars American Jews were not widely considered white until the early twentieth century. They were not alone in their peculiar racial and ethnic situation. For many decades, Irish, Italians, Slavs, Latinos, and a whole range of eastern, southern and central European immigrants were not considered white by many of their American compatriots.

The essays in Beyond Whiteness: Revisiting Jews in Ethnic America survey a wide variety of Jewish experiences as well as Jewish interactions with other ethnic groups. Although ethnic identity often served as a source of division, the volume’s authors show how instances of multi-ethnic cooperation in groups such as the International Workers Order served as a source of strength as myriad ethnics worked together to enhance the lives of all minorities.

The eight essays in this volume cover myriad aspects of ethnic identity both among Jews and between Jews and other ethnic groups. We see how after World War II, the Jews and gentiles of Levittown and Parkchester lived unchallenged and unperturbed in a segregated suburb and city where the issue of “getting along” with a minority race was yet to be a source of concern and turmoil. Other essays examine the ways in which Jews interacted with other ethnic and racial groups who were also seen as outside the accepted ideas of “whiteness”: Asians, Mormons and Puerto Ricans. Yet another essay explores the often-problematic situation of Jews of color. How did the experience of Jews of color differ from Jews who were later considered as “white”? “There is no question that Jews of Color experience challenges to their Jewish authenticity,” observes Bruce Philips, “because they ‘don’t look Jewish.’”

Finally, two authors look inward at the ways in which Jews used vehicles of popular culture such as film, television, stand-up comedy, and writings by authors from Alfred Kazin to Arthur Miller to Philip Roth to Larry David to define what it means to be Jewish—and an ethnic—in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

I wish to thank the volume’s guest editor, Jonathan Karp, for assembling such a fascinating set of essays. I also wish to thank Marilyn Lundberg Melzian for her superb work as the volume’s production editor.

Steven J. Ross

Myron and Marian Casden Director

Distinguished Professor of History