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195 chapter twelve The White Man, the Jew, and the Indian Let us picture a small town near the border of a western reservation. A white man, a Jew, and an Indian walk into a bar. . . . The white man settles onto a stool, relaxed; it’s his culture, his country, his solid right to be there. The Jew stands, uncertain—he doesn’t usually go into small-town bars. The bartender too is uncertain—what do Jews drink? The Indian barely steps into the bar. The bartender’s stare makes it clear that Indians aren’t served there. There’s an Indian bar on a back street. Racism is ingrained into Anglo culture. Second-generation Jews’ push into the professions undermined the nineteenth-century idea that Jews are a race. American born, well nourished, active outdoors, Jewish Americans were less distinctive than their immigrant parents. Still, they were outsiders , not routinely hired by the better law firms, discriminated against in medicine and universities. World War II broke down overt barriers against American Jews as they served in the armed forces alongside white Christians , while African-American troops were still segregated in Negro regiments . American Indians also served in white regiments, usually singled out by being called “Chief,” a stereotype but not a derogatory one. Perhaps the postwar benefits given to the nation’s defenders, the GI Bill and housing assistance in Levittowns, were the strongest forces against customary racism, moving millions of young adults out of the lower class. Elite colleges dropped their Jewish quotas and the new suburbs melted veterans’ families into a mass-produced middle class. Jews among them joined Reform temples resembling large liberal Protestant churches. They became white folks, in anthropologist Karen Brodkin’s (1998:2) felicitous phrase. 196 • Chapter Twelve Philosopher Steven Gimbel (2012:211) sees the mid-twentieth-century secular Jew as an icon of modern cosmopolitanism. Albert Einstein, in Gimbel’s view, exemplifed this, his rumpled person and enjoyment of jokes embodying the freer spirit of modernism, as his forced emigration from Nazi Germany reflected its dark authoritarian opposition. His theory of the relativity of time and space rejected Newton’s laws supposedly set by God, the Final Cause. The universe was freed to expand. As with the popular entertainers Jack Benny and Danny Kaye, Einstein being Jewish did not seem to matter in modern America. The Indian New Deal was radically antimodern for John Collier, a powerful push to save primitive, earthy, soulful communities from the horrors of twentieth-century warmongering capitalism (Jenkins 2004:88–89). For Harold Ickes, it was Progressive, fulfilling principles of social justice his party saw promised in American democracy. Nathan Margold and Felix Cohen felt injustices to Indians as sons of Jews who similarly suffered dispossession, massacres, and their religion banned. Unlike their families in Europe who were denied citizens’ rights, Margold and Cohen were legally full citizens of the United States of America, and so were the Indians, since 1924. Law was an instrument they were entitled to use to gain equality in practice, as it stood in principle. Young Cohen innocently went along with Collier’s paternalism when he was hired in 1933, inexperienced with the lives of Indians except for the few working with Boas at Columbia. Those Indian congresses Collier held preliminary to the Indian Reorganization Act opened Cohen’s eyes to that paternalism, to the stranglehold it maintained over First Nations. With his philosophical inclination to legal realism, Felix saw his mitzvah was to find a lawful foundation to free Indian citizens from Anglo domination. Working as a civil servant in 1930s Washington, he knew that as a Jew, he had to be circumspect . The Handbook of Federal Indian Law’s assertion of the principle of inherent sovereignty is a stunning challenge to four centuries of Anglo arrogance brooking no brake upon its drive for supremacy. “Settler sovereignty” is the term historian Lisa Ford uses for the claims of British settlers in the American and Australian colonies. Closely analyzing the histories of Georgia in the United States and of New South Wales in Australia, she shows that colonizers in both regions initially respected indigenous communities’ jurisdiction over the persons of their members when defining and dealing with crimes, as reciprocally, settlers assumed the right to deal with their own people. In other words, jurisdiction was phrased in terms of persons, not territory. Increase in numbers of invading settlers, their farms and towns, changed the landscape. When colonists in [18.218.138.170...

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