Response to Jonathan Freedman

Jonathan Freedman's "Do American and Ethnic Studies Have a Jewish Problem; or, When Is an Ethnic Not an Ethnic, and What Should We Do about It?" highlights the degree to which Jewish American studies has fallen outside the purview of American studies and ethnic studies. The author attributes this marginalization in part to a disciplinary rigidity that dogmatically delineates "white" from "non-white." As Freedman avers, "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," but it is another "to think about Jewishness in the context of Asian American or Latino or even Native American identities and experiences." At stake in Freedman's polemic is another way of seeing Jewishness outside established racial scripts of whiteness and privilege. Such a recuperative proposal—which "re-members" the contested ethno-religious registers of Jewish American selfhood—revises the role of such affiliations in the making of American studies, engages other ethnic studies fields of inquiry, and expands the purview of Jewish American studies by way of transnationalism, globalization, and diaspora. In so doing, Freedman charts an evocative course for a comparative American/ethnic studies, wherein identities are relationally contextualized, subjectivities are presently fluid, and notions of US citizenship shift.

To be sure, the essay's title explicitly calls forth an intersectional framework. Freedman's so-named "Jewish Problem," which speaks to the current state of American studies and ethnic studies affairs, accesses a turn-of-the-twentieth-century anxiety about Anglo-Saxon whiteness and heteronormative selfhood that was matched by the "Immigrant Problem," the "Chinese Problem," the "Negro Problem," and the "Woman Question." Such dilemmas substantiate Freedman's call for the evaluation of "relations between Jewish and other forms of ethnic belonging" and bring to light connective national stories of anti-Semitism, nativism, racism, and sexism. This intersectional American studies/ethnic studies approach eschews essentialism in favor of complexity, privileges dialogues over monologues, and imaginatively restages the American experience by way of inter- and intra-ethnic movements.

The invisibility afforded Jewish Americans—who, as Freedman maintains, are nonethnic ethnics—is most familiar to those in Asian American studies. Born out of late-1960s student strikes and a Civil Rights Movement concerned with self-determinism, human rights, and representational politics, Asian American studies suffers from an analogous "whiteness" crisis. In particular, Asian Americans (like their Jewish counterparts) are de facto "model minorities" who achieve "probationary whiteness" by way of hard work, perseverance, and traditional family values. This model minoritization obscures histories of racialized immigration prohibition, masks the increasing frequency of anti-Asian hate crimes, and uneasily coexists with a paradoxical characterization of Asian Americans as "perpetual foreigners." Correspondingly, Asian Americans are, as Leslie Bow notes in her comparative examination of the Jim Crow South, "partly colored," "anomalous subjects and communities . . . brought to heel within a prevailing cultural logic—whether by exclusion, erasure, or incorporation" (4). Similarly, Jewish Americans, the "other model minority," remain "partly colored" because of their unique status as an anomalous ethno-religious minority.

Such "problems" of ethnic invisibility have real political implications and render discernible what Vijay Prashad argues is the "problem of the twenty-first century": that of the "color blind" (38). This "colorblindness"—born out of a conservative multiculturalist imaginary predicated on emphasizing universal sameness—relegates W. E. B. Du Bois's "color line" problem to the annals of history and perpetuates a false reading of progress and exceptionalism. A colorblind sensibility foregrounds the 2010 passage of Arizona's HB 2281, a law that banned ethnic studies in public schools on the "colorblind" assumption that "pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people" (qtd. in Okihiro). Such a mindset enables Tea Party activists to claim a tolerant racial politics despite racist acts to the contrary. Furthermore, "colorblindness" engenders a reading of ongoing white, anti-Semitic supremacy as individualized rather than systemic aberrations. Set against an increasingly polarized US body politic, these reminders of difference—and the particular histories and...