In the Blood? Consent, Descent, and the Ironies of Jewish Identity

Anyone who doubts that blood narratives have lost their relevance to discussions of modern Jewish identity has only to consider the emotional debate that ensued in 1997 when the Washington Post exposed the "secret" history of Secretary of State Madeleine Korbel Albright's family background. Because Albright's parents were Holocaust refugees and her grandparents were victims, much of the controversy focused on the conflict between one family's desire to escape history and the public's call for Albright to remember it. ¹ But at the center of this particular storm lay another, equally controversial issue revolving around questions of descent and consent, blood and belief. If Albright was reared as a Catholic and became an Episcopalian upon her marriage, asked novelist Louis Begley, "was she really honor-bound to become, in her late 50s, all of a sudden, a Jew?" His answer was no. And he argued that whether or not Albright "is or is not of Jewish origin should be, in our society, strictly her own business." ² The historian David Hollinger later echoed this view, insisting that "anyone can ascribe Jewish identity to Albright by regarding her as a passive object, invoking in relation to that object one or more of the criteria by which she is a Jew." But in our post-ethnic age of "voluntarism," argues Hollinger, "only she, as a willing subject, can affiliate as a Jew, and to whatever extent and by whatever means she chooses." ³

Perhaps. But only if we ignore the centrality of blood logic to modern Jewish identity narratives. As Judaic Studies scholar Lawrence Shiffman observed at the time of the Albright debate, the "knee jerk reaction of most Jews . . . is that Albright is certainly a Jew, assuming that her mother's mother was herself born to a Jewish mother. Jewish tradition teaches that a Jew, no matter how he or she may transgress, remains a Jew." ⁴

Throughout all of the de-racializing stages of twentieth-century social thought, Jews have continued to invoke blood logic as a way of defining and maintaining group identity. Religious doctrine is not the only reason. During the twentieth century, as Michael Marrus, Eric Goldstein, and others have shown, secular movements and institutions also relied upon blood logic as a way of forging a sense of community and common destiny among Jews. ⁵ It is one of the ironies of modern Jewish history that concepts of tribalism based on blood and race have persisted not only in spite of but also because of the experience of assimilation.

In this article, part of a larger study of strategic Jewish self-fashioning and the uses of social science in the twentieth century, I will examine some of the secular social and institutional practices that have perpetuated this dualism. A revealing methodology for tracing the tension between modern individual claims for identity choice and communal assertions of blood logic is to analyze the 100-year-old practice of "Jewhooing."

Jewhooing

What is Jewhooing? It is the social mechanism for both private and public naming and claiming of Jews by other Jews. Jewhooing is what parents and grandparents like mine did when, while reading the newspaper or watching television, they wondered out loud if this or that public figure or celebrity--perhaps with their Christian-sounding name and all-American looks--was or wasn't a member of their tribe. It is also in keeping with what Robert Reich, secretary of labor in the first Clinton administration, does when he mentally transforms Federal Review Board chief Alan Greenspan--"the most powerful man in the world"--into a prosaic "Jewish uncle":

We have never met before, but instantly I know him. One look, one phrase, and I know where he grew up, how he grew up, where he got his drive and his sense of humor. He...