The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism

Notes

227 Notes Preface 1. The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s Anthology, eds., Melanie Kaye/ Kantrowitz and Irena Klepfisz (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989; 1st pub., Sinister Wisdom, 1986). 2. I first coined the term in 1996 in a talk I gave at a conference in Toronto, published as “Diasporism, Feminism, and Coalition,” in Jewish Women’s Voices, Swartz and Wolfe, eds. (Toronto: Second Story Press, 1998). I have since discovered Philip Roth’s brilliant satire Operation Shylock. Roth’s diasporism solves the problem of anti-semitism by forcing the Jews to leave Israel and return to Europe. As should be apparent, this is not my meaning. See Adam Shatz’s trajectory from a traditional Zionist home to an opponent of Zionism: “In Praise of Diasporism, or, Three Cheers for Irving Berlin,” The Nation, web only, 4/9/04 (www.thenation.com/doc/20040426/shatz). 3. Whatever one’s stance on nationalism, I think most people in the United States are ignorant about what Zionism has meant and continues to mean to the Palestinian people. See Edward Said, “Zionism from the Standpoint ,” in Bayoumi and Rubin, eds., The Edward Said Reader (New York: Vintage, 2000), 114–68. 4. Shohat, “Reflections of an Arab Jew,” in Khazzoom, ed., Flying Camel, 120. Khazzoom, 234, explains, “Al Neharoth Babel is a traditional Jewish prayer that says, “By the rivers of Babylon, we sat and wept, when we remembered Zion.” 5. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/Las Fronteras (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987). Gloria, a Texas Chicana, used to half-joke that she was part Jewish— half-joke because of the vast mixing of Jew, Spanish, and indigenous people all over the Americas. 6. See interviews with Ivri-NASAWI leadership in chapter 5. 7. See Daniel Boyarin, “Masada or Yavneh?” in Boyarin and Boyarin, eds., Jews and Other Differences (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 305–30. 1. Are Jews White? 1. Cornel West, Keeping Faith Alive, 19. 2. Margaret Talbot, “Getting Credit for Being White.” 3. According to United for a Fair Economy’s 2004 report, “The State of the Dream: Enduring Disparities in Black and White,” by Dedrick Muhammad, Attieno Davis, Meizhu Lui, and Betsy Leondar-Wright. “Progress has been made 228 in narrowing the [white/black] divide in per capita income, poverty, homeownership , education, life expectancy and median wealth, but so slowly that the gaps would take decades or even centuries to close at the current rate.” Cf. the Community Service Society’s study “based on data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics and focus[ed] on the so-called employment-population ratio— the fraction of the working-age population with a paid job—in addition to the more familiar unemployment rate, the percentage of the labor force actively looking for work.” 4. Patricia Williams, The Rooster’s Egg, 29. 5. Kathleen Blee, Inside Organized Racism. 6. Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, vol. II; Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness. Others include Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White. 7. Robert Terry, For Whites Only (Detroit Industrial Missions, 1970), cited in Amanda Miriam Chaya Siegel, “Vital Distinctions: Ashkenazi Jews and Whiteness in the Contemporary United States,” unpub. paper, Hampshire College, 1998, 4. 8. Peter McLaren, “Decentering Culture,” in Wyner, ed., Current Perspectives on the Culture of Schools, 244. 9. Ruth Frankenberg, White Women/Race Matters, 1. 10. Peggy McIntosh, “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” in Peace and Freedom (July/August, 1989): 10–12. 11. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 47. 12. Katya Gibel Azoulay, Black, Jewish, and Interracial, 93. 13. Gibel Azoulay, “Jewishness after Mount Sinai,” Bridges 9, no. 1 (2001): 33. 14. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, 53–54. 15. Katya Gibel Azoulay (a.k.a. Mevorach), interview, 8/12/03. 16. See Elinor Langer’s compelling analysis, A Hundred Little Hitlers. 17. United Press International, “Biracial Baby Remains Interred in All-white Cemetery,” Thomasville, Ga., March 28, 1998. 18. The book, for many years available only by mail order, in survivalist stores, or at gun shows from the likes of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, has sold between a quarter of a million and 300,000 copies according to its publishers, an astonishing feat of underground distribution. The Turner Diaries: A Novel (Hillsboro, WV: National Vanguard Books, 1995; 1st pub., 1980); on the Web, at http:/ /www.skrewdriver.net/turner23.html. 19. Gibel Azoulay: “There are people here in...