[...] On Dr. King’s Legacy and American Jewish Segregation: A Moment of Honesty by Walter Isaac [...]

The racial dynamics of Euro-American Jewry are complex and historically placed. There’s no doubt that all Jews have been scapegoats throughout history and even to the present. When things go badly, synagogues are bombed (like the one in Toulouse, France a couple months ago, or the Reform Temple here in Atlanta in the sixties), Jews are targeted as “Christ-Killers,” etc. So Euro-American Jews ‘whiteness is complex and contradictory–something I think Melanie Kay/Kantrowitz points out quite well. Rozelle and Walter, I very much appreciate your eloquent comments. Adam, you say that you want evidence beyond anecdotes, but you rely on the same measure of veracity when you’ve not personally seen racism in white-dominated Jewish communities.

One more general point: I think we should get away from the idea of a monolithic idea of “The Jewish Community.” That title carries with it a multitude of implicit meanings–and, perhaps more noticeably–absence. At the very least, it connotes the normative ‘Yiddish speaking, heterosexual, nondisabled Jew’ at the exclusion of all other facets of what any Jew living on the margins of a culture composed of structures of race, class, nationality, gender, sex, and dis/ability. I’m a queer, disabled/chronically ill cis-gender Jewish man form the south. I live on the margins of a lot of different minoritzed peoples, and I very rarely feel safe or ‘at home’ in any of them. We need to recognize, I think, the importance of multiplicity without losing our sense of shared, if different, histories and ways of living in this world.

http://www.jewishexponent.com/article/18598/

Daniel, your comments are quite revealing. Recently, a population study on Jews here in Cincinnati publicly released its findings, and it, too, had little or no reference to race or ethnicity.

http://www.jewishcincinnati.org/local_includes/downloads/28789.pdf

These are interesting and important questions, and so as our years progress, let us keep raising them. Perhaps, someday our children will learn many lessons from both our successes and our shortcomings. Peace be to you all.

http://www.ujc.org/page.aspx?id=46185

I don’t see how you can look at this and state with any degree of confidence that there was a systemic attempt to under count Jews of color. I mean, look, reasonable people can take issue with the methodology w/o assuming malicious intent. How did this go down? Did the UJC instruct Roper ASW to do what they need to do in order to under count Jews of color in the survey? Is that what you are saying?

Finally, when you use loaded terms like “manifest destiny” to demonize observant Jews, there really is no discussion that can take place between us. Jim Crow, apartheid, and manifest destiny have absolutely no place within a reasonable debate about the Jewish community. Again, you’re sounding awfully similar to the language used by anti-Semites (not saying you are one, obviously, by why would you advance the same tropes about a clannish, racist, exclusionary people? Have the anti-Semites been right about us white Jews all along?).

There’s something about blogs which causes people to use the most incendiary language….not helpful in promoting rational debate about often important topics.

“Demographic research on American Jewry still systematically excludes the vast majority of Jews of African descent.”: Where is this research? Again, this is an extraordinary claim…how is it done systematically? That implies that there is a de facto policy in the organized Jewish community to exclude Jews of color. Is this your claim?

the typical ‘best practices’ of u.s. jewish demographic research are well illustrated by the UJA-Fed’s “Jewish Community Study”. just how bad those practices are, generally, can be seen by a quick read through its methodology section.

some highlights, through the lens of racial justice within jewish communities, are as follows. this is based on the 2002 survey, which i did a more extensive analysis of at that time for Jews for Racial & Economic Justice.

the basic structure is a phone survey, calling different numbers of lines in different neighborhoods, which were weighted in “a priori” decisions based on “pre-study estimates” of the expected population. the “estimates” were done based on UJA and JCRC phone lists, and on prevalence of stereotypically jewish (i.e. ashkenazi) last names. this guarantees an extreme disproportion not only of white ashkenazi respondents, but of wealthy and observant ones.

further, the survey was available only in english and russian, in a city with ‘known’ populations of jews whose primary language is spanish, arabic, yiddish, bokhari, azeri, tajik, malayalam, farsi (to name the larger communities). which is a deliberate decision to make it much more difficult for immigrant jews to participate. even so, the survey found 27% born outside the u.s., giving a hint at the scale of the actual number. now, plenty of immigrant jews are white ashkenazim. but even in NYC – where that’s more true than in, say, L.A. – the stereotype of the jewish immigrant as russian/ukrainian conceals (among many others) 30,000 people in the bukharian community alone. the treatment of this particular group of jews of color is worth noting: they’ve been welcomed with open arms more or less only by the lubavitshers, who are actively trying to replace their centuries-old bokhari traditions of worship with their hasidism-a-la-falwell ashkenazi missionary model. which is less Jim Crow than Manifest Destiny, but also pretty damn repulsive.

in any case, even at its root, the UJA-Fed survey’s approach is not a methodology based on asking how to find out who the jews are and where they live. it’s based on nothing but stereotyped answers to those questions, and aims rather directly at reproducing those stereotypes. and, as you’ve been so elegantly illustrating, when these surveys reproduce the stereotypes, they become a rationale for denying that the stereotypes are problematic.

it works like this: the UJA and JCRC aren’t welcoming to jews of color, so they have very very few jews of color in their mailing lists. their mailing lists are the basis of the survey approach, and thus the survey results reflect the demographics of their mailing lists, finding very very few jews of color. so the UJA and JCRC answer all such questions with “but our survey shows these communities are tiny and insignificant”.

but it gets better. they can’t actually make that answer, because the survey asked no questions about jewish ethnicity (ashkenazi/sefardi/beta yisrael/bnei yisrael/bukharian/&c) or race. in other words, there was an active decision made to make it impossible to identify jews of color if they were found.

that’s systematic erasure piled on systematic exclusion. sounds like Jim Crow to me.