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

Rachel Rubinstein has contributed the first significant scholarly book to what will hopefully be a new subgenre of American Jewish studies, namely, Jewish–Native American relations.¹ With rich prose, Members of the Tribe examines the ways Jewish writers mobilized imagined Indians in their efforts to work through competing desires, anxieties, and irresolvable tensions about Jewish particularism (tribalism) and the particulars of American modernism (liberalism). The work is timely. The first academic conference about Jews and Native Americans took place in April 2010, pulling together a multidisciplinary cohort of academics and lay dialogists.² Last year saw the publication of two books drawing together Jewish and Indian themes, Stephen Katz's Red, Black, and Jew, a literary study that intricately details American Hebrew writers' interests in both African and Native Americana, and Jonathan Boyarin's The Unconverted Self, a brilliant, book-length cultural theory essay about late medieval and early modern Christians and their engagements with Jewishness and Indianness.³ Several forces help explain this ripeness, including the competitive appeals by both Jews and Arabs to the idea of indigeneity in Israel/Palestine and a public relations battle around the Americanization of the Holocaust and Americans' failure to rally around memorializing and nationalizing the legacy of the seismic trauma perpetrated against Native Americans. Likewise, American Jewry has developed a contemporary environmentalist consciousness, one that frequently makes appeals to Native American worldviews. And finally, we have been witness to a growing interest among Jews in Native spirituality since the 1970s. Members of the Tribe provides a compelling framework through which many of the unexplored aspects of Jewish–Native American relations may be conceived.

Through a series of literary readings of imagined kinship, Rubinstein argues that Jewish authors interpreted, projected, and appropriated Indians in their efforts to resolve the dialectic of tribal fidelity and liberal universalism for at least two centuries. As a superb literary analyst engaged in conversation with critics and cultural theorists, Rubinstein is careful not to fix or presume the content of either Jewishness or Indianness, aware that both are contested and constructed. In her first chapter, "Playing Indian, Becoming American," she offers insightful analyses of a range of texts, including Mordecai Manuel Noah's 1819 play She Would be a Soldier, or The Plains of Chippewa, Noah's scheme to build a semisovereign Jewish state near Buffalo, New York, that would include Indians as Lost Tribesmen of Israel; Solomon Nuñes Carvalho's diary and photos; H. I. Minikes' 1895 play Tsvishin Indianer [Among the Indians]; tales about "Jewish Indian Chiefs" Nachum Blanburg and Solomon Bibo; and vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley acts, including Whoopie! and Girl Crazy. Jewish authors "theatricalized, disguised and Americanized themselves all at once" through their imaginary engagements with Indians (58). The author's coverage of such an expansive period, with sources from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, is both an asset and a liability. On the up side, her broad strokes allow for an encompassing and effective conceptual apparatus that is subsequently applied to her readings throughout the rest of the book. On the other hand, she invariably sacrifices historical specificity.

The chapter "Going Native, Becoming Modern" argues that Indians provided a figure through which Yiddish intellectuals in the early twentieth century intervened in literary modernist efforts to define American nationhood. Popular culture posed an opposition between Jews, representing aspects of modernity gone wrong (alienation, intellectualism, commercialism), and Indians, representing aspects that modernity ought to recapture to move forward (authenticity, integrity, rootedness). In a period fraught with nativist anxiety, progressive reform, and xenophobic tensions aimed both at immigrants and Natives, Jewish writers responded. Rubinstein focuses on Di Yunge, a Yiddish literary circle that took an interest in Native themes and translation projects from 1912–1926. These writers turned to primitivism in order to become moderns and were perhaps more deeply engaged with the poets associated with the journal Poetry than they were in Native life per se. In "Red Jews...