Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism (review)

To those of us who have not been paying close attention to the theories evolving around multiculturalism and who dismissed the shrill outcries in the conservative press against academic postcolonialism as the predictably pained protest of the old powers now justly under siege, this extraordinary collection of essays comes as a stunning flash of illumination. Edited by David Biale and Susannah Heschel, seasoned critics with strong liberal credentials, and the somewhat younger scholar Michael Galchinsky, Insider/Outsider outlines the politics of multiculturalism as practiced in the academy, examines Jews' contribution to its evolution, evaluates their current relation to it, and suggests ways in which insights based on analyses of Jewish history may modify some of the more problematic aspects of multiculturalism, such as its recourse to essentialist categories and its inability to account for the American Jewish experience. Insider/Outsider is extraordinary in its internal cohesiveness, analytical clarity, and unpolemical tone.

The book is divided into three parts each comprising four essays. David Biale's astute introduction sketches one aspect of the problem: Jews "experience multiculturalism with such a special ambivalence" (p.4) because their successful integration into American life and subsequent paticipation in its powerstructure make them insiders, marking them as white or facsimile WASPs, while their memory of discrimination and persecution and their resulting self-consciousness or drive toward advocacy on behalf of Others preserve their sense of being outsiders.

In his opening essay "The Melting Pot and Beyond: Jews and the Politics of American Identity," Biale refines his observations. He notes that early in the twentieth century "much of the discourse about America as a 'melting pot' or as a pluralistic nation of cultural minorities was originated by Jews to address the particular situation of Jewish immigrants" (p. 18). It was then thought that the acculturation of the Jews was "emblematic of the problem of Americanization" (p. 19).

In the mid-1960s, when it became apparent that Jews were moving into the center of American society whereas African Americans, Jews' closest allies during the 1940s and 1950s, would remain on the margins, there occurred a "fundamental shift . . . from ethnicity to race as the paradigmatic problem of America" (p. 26). African Americans displaced Jews as the test case for America's ability to deliver on its social promises, and ethnicity-based theories of integration, such as Horace Kallen's cultural pluralism or Israel Zangwill's melting pot, gave way to the race-based thinking of multiculturalism that, in Cheryl Greenberg's words "viewed individuals as inevitable members of their biologically determined group" (p. 58). By putting race first, Greenberg argues, multiculturalism "removes Jews from the outsider community they had helped to legitimize" (p. 59).

In her outstanding essay "Pluralism and Its Discontent: The Case of Blacks and Jews," Greenberg picks up the historical thread where Biale left off and provides a detailed analysis of Black-Jewish relations and the alienation of the old allies as large numbers of Jews moved into the middle and upper middle classes and Black leaders began to demand for their entire group what Jews, ignoring the asset of their white skins and centuries of practice at communal organization, thought they had acquired on the basis of individual merit. While African-American leaders clamored for affirmative action quotas to ensure opportunity of outcome, Jews largely opposed "strategies that formally identified race or assigned individuals to fixed legal categories that were not of their own choosing" (p. 73).

It is precisely the rigidity of multiculturalism, especially where it overlaps with the "problematic 'politics of identity'" (p. 56) that most writers in this collection object to. "By denying the multifaceted nature of identity and by reducing human beings to their biology," writes Greenberg, "identity politics distorts by overgeneralizing, insisting on a single dimension of experience, and ignoring the complexities created by the interaction of . . . different identities within a single individual" (p. 56). To address...