Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination (review)

In the fifteen years since Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin called for a "new Jewish cultural studies" in Jews and Other Differences (1997), exciting new intersections have emerged between Jewish studies and cultural studies. Rachel Rubinstein's fascinating Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination represents a recent development in which the nature of Jewish "difference" is reconsidered.

Unlike the either/or approach to difference taken by some influential critics—in relation to the black/white binary, for instance, Michael Rogin's Blackface, White Noise (1996) and Karen Brodkin's How the Jews Became White Folks (1998) characterize Jewish immigrants as moving in only one direction, toward whiteness and the erasure of their difference—Rubinstein heeds the more radical implications of the Boyarins' formulation by imagining a more diverse Jewish difference in which assimilation and acculturation are seen as multiple, conflicting, and unstable processes. She focuses on Jewish Americans' simultaneous attempts to preserve ethnic uniqueness, which she labels "tribal" identity, while endorsing the liberal (and presumably white) "universalism" claimed in modern America as the prerequisite for successful assimilation. In other words, she proceeds from a presumption of both/and rather than either/or.

In this context, it is not surprising that Rubinstein is interested in Jewish writers' engagement with the figure of the American Indian. This figure offers these writers and Rubinstein a constellation of concerns that moves beyond the racial binary of black and white, beyond the performative binary of blackface, and beyond the cultural binary of native and other. When Jewish writers contemplated American Indians, they shifted the axis of their structural interests to other binaries that resisted the either/or template, such as native/cosmopolitan, diasporic subject/citizen, and ancient/modern, and then proceeded to break down those boundaries.

Members of the Tribe pursues these concerns by considering texts mainly by American Jewish writers from the nineteenth century to the present. The range of links between Jews and American Indians established by these works is extraordinarily diverse: identifications, dis-identifications, negotiations, dialectics; connections through and against "Euroamerican cultural fantasies" (9) and through "the tropes of disguise, passing, performance, and discovery" (11). By analyzing explorer accounts, journals, novels, dramas, museums, and music, as well as Jewish cultural criticism from Sigmund Freud to Leslie Fiedler, she examines "not just . . . how Jews in the United States have imagined Indians in relation to themselves, and themselves in relation to Indians, but how Jews have imagined both in relation to white Gentile culture's ambivalent representations" (16). While her focus is primarily literary, she engages methodologies and tropes of such fields as anthropology and sociology, turning a critical eye toward the links between Jewishness and Native Americanness established by these fields' own early practitioners and critics.

Rubinstein's focus is not just on American identity but also on the positioning of Jews in modernity. For Jews, modern identity meant one in which Jewish beliefs and practices might be made compatible with secular Enlightenment values such as individualism and liberalism. The political dynamics of these negotiations are a keen undercurrent here, leading Rubinstein to hone in on writings that challenged even as they imitated the dominant culture.

The book begins with an introductory analysis of contemporary critic Arnold Krupat's recounting of the affinities between his Jewishness and his study of Native American materials, thus establishing Rubinstein's focus in miniature: a modern Jewish writer negotiating between "Jew and Indian, cosmopolite and native, modern and ancient, Enlightenment individualist and tribal collectivities" (7). The first chapter takes us through nineteenth-and early twentieth-century representations including American novels and poems by James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Herman Melville; explorer reports and pamphlets by Solomon Nunes Carvalho and Mordecai Manuel Noah; the first surviving Yiddish theater playlet, Tsvishn Indianer (Among the Indians) (1895), by Khanan-Yakov Minikes; a short story, "Noah's Arc" (1899), by British writer Israel Zangwill; and popular songs such as "I'm a Yiddish Cowboy" (1908...