The Jews' Indian: Colonialism, Pluralism, and Belonging in America by David S. Koffman (review)

About a decade ago, a modest cluster of scholarly texts were published that all examined, in some fashion, Jewish-Native literary relations (full disclosure: my own book was one of them).¹ Back then, we were writing in the context of literary multiculturalism, meaning to add to the already robust conversations emerging about Jews and other "others" in American culture. David Koffman's impressive study builds upon and extends these earlier efforts but is more urgently engaged with a critical framework of settler-colonialism, over and against multiculturalism. "Jewish immigration history," he demands, "must be recast in the context into which all American ethnic immigration properly fits but within which it is rarely cast—namely, settler colonial expansion" (7).

At the same time, however, Koffman insists that religious and ethnic specificity conditioned encounters between Jews and indigenous people. The result is a rich and nuanced account of a broad history, beginning with Jews' selfconscious narrativizing of their participation in westward expansion as merchants and middlemen, and continuing through Jews' involvement with Native tribes as lawyers, policy makers, and ethnographers in the Indian New Deal era of the early twentieth century and the post–World War II period.

Throughout, Koffman resists reducing his materials to either a celebratory narrative of Jewish material success in America or a virtuous narrative of Jewish progressivism and civil rights advocacy on behalf of others. On the frontier, Koffman demonstrates in his first two chapters, Jews uncritically embraced identities as white, western pioneers, participating in actual and rhetorical acts of violence against Indians. At the same time, Indians could be vehicles for assimilation and engaged with in "productive capitalism" (15). But after the turn of the twentieth century, when racial panic fed both anti-immigrant and anti-Indian sentiment, Jews devoted substantial energy to justice for Native Americans, even as, Koffman observes, they did not necessarily see the ways in which their efforts often perpetuated colonial relations and structures. Chapters 5 and 6, devoted to liberal Jewish attorneys in the Department of the Interior, like Felix Cohen, and to anthropologist-activists, like Melville Jacobs, are notable triumphs.

Throughout, Koffman's deep and original work in the archive is in abundant evidence, and the moral thrust of his argument is crystalline: "Jewish class mobility and civic belonging," Koffman concludes, "were wrapped up in the dynamics of power, commerce, historical narrative, and myth making that so severely impacted Native Americans" (220). Grappling with this legacy, he reminds us, is both imperative and ongoing.