Color Matters: Writing / Whiting Out the Jews in Twenty-First-Century African American Memoirs

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Abstract

This essay thinks through the implications of reading color into Jewishness in two memories, Rebecca Walker's Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (2001) and Emily Raboteau's Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora (2013). Each of these memories undermines attempts to police color lines between Jews and Blacks and the same time reinforces a narrative that excludes Jews as "White". Rebecca Walker and Emily Raboteau perform a blackness that excludes Jewish identities and perceive “Jew-ishness” as a rejected social construct, but also a catalyst to discover and reclaim blackness. The article argues that the contemporary context of global ideological discourses which white out Jews must alert us to the resurgent racialization of Jewishness in a postcolonial discourse that cancels antisemitism.
Original languageEnglish
Article number5
Pages (from-to)71-88
Number of pages18
JournalJournal of Contemporary Antisemitism
Volume7
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 2024

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