Whiteness Scholars vs. the Jews.(Brief Article)

That large numbers of American Jews have been attracted to the tenets of twentieth-century liberalism is a long-established fact. Scholars like Seymour Martin Lipset, Earl Raab, Steven Cohen, Lawrence Fuchs, Charles Liebman, Stephen Whitfield, and Marshall Sklare have all concurred, to varying degrees, with Milton Himmelfarb's famous dictum that "while Jews earn more than any ethnoreligious group for whom data exist, they are more liberal to left in their opinions than other white groups, and they vote like Hispanics."(1)

The only inspired debate regarding Jews and liberalism takes place over the causes and consequences of this commitment. It was in this context that I began to explore the topic of Jews and blacks in the postwar era. My thought was that the movement for black equality--as opposed to, say, gun control or feminism--was the one arena in which the impact on the Jewish community of liberal politics could be most easily evaluated. The research for my book was briefly scuttled, however, when I discovered that, according to the most recent scholarship, Jews were in fact neither liberal when it came to civil rights, nor particularly sympathetic toward blacks. Apparently, a new paradigm has arisen among academics in which any and all distinguishing features of American Jews must be subordinated to the fact of their European origins. When it came to the topic of race, I discovered, American Jewish liberalism had become the most conspicuous victim of the contemporary scholarship of "whiteness."

Whiteness scholarship emerged in the late 1960s as a response to the growing consensus among liberal social scientists that the persistence of black inequality in the wake of civil rights victories resulted from cultural deficiencies laid upon blacks by centuries of slavery and discrimination. Sociologists like Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Oscar Lewis promoted the idea that when black Americans could find their footing in the urban milieu, developing strong institutions of self-help, a more stable family life, and political unity, they would eventually take their place as equal partners in a culturally diverse urban system.(2)

Repulsed by the twin ideas that white racism should be losing its explanatory power in relation to black impoverishment, and that some ethnic groups possessed cultural traits more suitable for success than others, the scholars of whiteness emphasized the very sharp distinctions between the black experience and the experience of European immigrants. They sought, in effect, to recast American history as a story of racial exclusion rather than of immigrant inclusion. Beginning in the 1960s with the work of Robert Blauner, and continuing today with authors like Ron Takaki, David Roediger, Noel Ignatiev, Michael Paul Rogin, and Matthew Frye Jacobson, whiteness scholarship seeks to show that the social mobility of the Irish, the Italians, the Greeks, the Poles, and, most of all, the Jews, resulted not from any habits of culture or individual effort, but from a mutable definition of whiteness, a definition that ultimately evolved to the point where it included all European immigrant groups, but not to the point where it included blacks and other non-Europeans.(3) Matthew Frye Jacobson says it best in his book Whiteness of a Different Color when he writes that the pretty immigrant story of ethnic mobility and assimilation on the European model quickly "fades once one recognizes how crucial Europeans' racial status ... was ... and how completely intertwined were the prospects of becoming American and becoming Caucasian."(4)

It is no accident that this effort to wrap all European immigrant groups in the blanket of "white privilege" so often focuses on Jews. It is they, after all, who stand out in the public conscience as having the strongest claim to historical victimization. So the first thing the whiteness scholars set out to do is to deny all forms of Jewish exceptionalism--that is, to resist or reinterpret all evidence that the Jews are in fact different from other white Americans, and to do so in precisely those areas where they appear most different: (1) in their economic success, and (2) in their political liberalism.

In his highly regarded 1989 book The Ethnic Myth, for example, the sociologist Stephen Steinberg sets out to "whiten" Jewish economic mobility. Discounting the nuances of any cultural habits, customs, or beliefs that may have followed Jews over the centuries, Steinberg insists Jewish success in America was really a matter of chance. Steinberg writes that "[Jewish success in America was a matter of historical timing.... [T]here was a fortuitous match between the experience and skills of Jewish immigrants, on the one hand, and the manpower needs and opportunity structures on the other." In an earlier book, The Academic Melting Pot, Steinberg took aim at Jewish educational achievement. American Jews, Steinberg insists, "did not become middle-class and produce a class of scholars because they placed a special value on learning, but because they were middle-class first, and then adopted education as a component of middle-class values." So easily, for proponents of Marxist determinism, are the centuries of rabbinic tradition discarded.(5)

Taking her cue from Steinberg, the historian Karen Brodkin argues that the theorists of American Jewish exceptionalism are gravely mistaken in their belief that Jewish success in America has been the result of such cultural traits as strong family ties, a high value placed on education, and hard work. In her estimation, it was the postwar economic boom accompanied by massive government programs like the GI Bill of Rights and Federal Housing Administration mortgage insurance that were largely responsible for the mobility of Jews in the postwar period. While Brodkin does not bother to determine if Jews benefitted from these programs any more or any less than other groups of whites, it does not prevent her from labeling these programs "affirmative action" for all white males, or from lumping Jews together with other "Euro-ethnics" as equal partners in a white opportunity pool. For Brodkin, Jews, like all other white ethnics, were essentially passive players and furtive beneficiaries of a century of increasing economic wealth and government good cheer.(6)