Do American and Ethnic American Studies Have a Jewish Problem; or, When Is an Ethnic Not an Ethnic, and What Should We Do about It?

Many years ago, while serving as an acting chair of the University of Michigan's American Studies program, I was presented with a conundrum that might have tried the wisdom of Solomon. Our program possessed an ethnic studies requirement for its undergraduate majors. The graduate student who served as concentration advisor, a Jewish woman, routinely had approved courses in Jewish American literature for satisfying the requirement. Two faculty of color demanded that this practice be halted, the advisor reprimanded, and the students asked to take other courses to satisfy the requirement. While I understood their view that such courses might be contrary to the spirit of the ethnic studies requirement, the study of Jewish American culture did seem to satisfy its letter and might even prove an interesting supplement to it. After all, weren't Jewish Americans ethnic too, I asked? No, my colleagues, insisted: to be Jewish was to be white; to be ethnic was to be something other, if not Other. A course in Jewish American history was just another course in white American culture—hence, just another way in which the social dominant maintained its hegemony, by appropriating a counter-hegemonic discourse. I was in an impossible position, since as chair I was required to maintain a sense of department comity—and as an acting chair, I had sworn a solemn oath to make sure that none of the usual alarms would sound on my watch. Also, I am a white male of Jewish origin, which meant that my standing in this charged situation was potentially dicey. Politically, I did the only thing I could: I deferred the issue to the return of the "real" chair, who made the entire problem go away with a wave of his hand.

The faculty involved have moved on to other jobs; so has the advisor. But the questions they raised lingered on. The notion of the whiteness of the Jew—then a relatively novel conception, now a commonplace— seemed indisputable to me, at least in the terms by which such matters were then arrayed and understood. But the implications of this insight were not so clear, particularly when they bumped up against the freighted term ethnicity. It is one thing to think about Jewishness-as-whiteness in the context of the black-white binary that structures the historical constitution of the United States. It is another thing to think about Jewishness in the context of Asian American or Latino or even Native American identities and experiences; in all these cases, relations between Jewish and other forms of ethnic belonging become much more complicated.

Consider the problems raised by model-minority mishegas (as a sociologist friend once called it, invoking the Yiddish term for craziness). "Asian Americans have superseded American Jews in the imagination of ethnicity," Frank H. Wu wrote in 2002. "An anecdote about a striving youth from the city that would have featured a Goldberg fifty years ago stars a Park today" (47). Yet this widespread belief in the myth of the model minority is problematic: it ignores the poverty and economic failure embedded in both communities as well as the de jure and de facto barriers faced by other racial and ethnic groups which made—and make—experiences of success in America tellingly distinct. This apotheosizing of Goldberg and Park comes with an implicit denigration of their black or Latino counterparts—a sense that striving, and hence success (not always linked, but it remains ideologically convenient to believe so), are related to group behaviors (at best) and group abilities (at worst).

Even this typecasting is hardly simple. The names themselves point to social rifts within the categories "Jewish" or "Asian" and to the imbricated national and extra-national histories that underlie these rifts and generate the experience of both groups. Goldberg, although frequently taken to be quintessentially Jewish (there is, for example, a classic Jewish joke, the punch line of which is "Iceberg, Goldberg, what's the difference"), is actually a German name—and is still held...