Just a few months ago, New York University Press published a revised edition of my book, Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance In the 1960s. It includes three additions: a new chapter that tells the complex and multi-layered story of the book’s initial reception; a new preface that sparked deep divisions with the original publisher; and an afterword by Ilana Kaufman, the founder and CEO of the Jews of Color Initiative. These pieces tell the story of a Jewish communal scandal that surfaced important and troubling race-centered questions for Jewish Studies academics, Jewish communal leaders and the American Jewish community at large.[1]
Black Power, Jewish Politics made three claims that upset some in American Jewish life. First, it credited the Black Power movement for inspiring American Jews to launch a religious and ethnic revival in the late 1960s and 1970s. Second, it challenged widely-held idealistic narratives about white Jewish liberal support for racial equality. Third, it argued that one’s Jewishness did not necessarily immunize white Jews from participation in racist systems of oppression. The book sold well, running through three print runs in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020 and the national reckoning on race that followed.
In advance of its fourth printing, the original publisher invited and approved a new preface connecting the historical themes of the books to the contemporary moment. While the editorial leadership of the book’s first publisher called the new preface a “very thoughtful essay,” an “excellent overview of the issues of the last two years,” “a strong essay” and wanted it co-published in a large circulation publication such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, an anonymous gatekeeper intervened, ordering the book’s fourth printing without its new preface included.[2]
As emails flew back and forth, I learned of two specific objections to my piece. First, it asserted that post-war suburban Jews, joining segregated neighborhoods, “reinforced elements of white supremacy in their own lived experience.” Second, it acknowledged my own implicit biases as a white man writing about race. “Jews of Color have been erased from almost all of the historical literature in American Jewish history,” I wrote, “this book included.” It would have been better, I learned from my publisher, had I used the words “white privilege” instead of “white supremacy.” And there was no need, I was told, to hold myself accountable for a book about Blacks and Jews that did not mention a single Black Jew. I took, it seemed, “too apologetic” a tone.[3]
This dispute raised important questions for larger Jewish communal consideration, and I urged my publisher to find other ways of getting the new preface into circulation. On the largest level, how did the censorship of the new preface reflect larger thinking around white Jews and race in the midst of the national reckoning? More specifically, how did the arguments in Black Power, Jewish Politics as well as the debates following its publication reveal deep divides, even among Jewish Studies scholars, over the limits of white Jewish liberalism in the civil-rights era? How could an academic press, ostensibly committed to academic freedom, reverse its approval of the new preface and prevent readers from considering its thesis?
In the weeks and months that followed, I reached out to the leading scholars in the field of Jews and race, asking for their perspective on the content of the new preface as well as the publisher’s decision to censor it. To a person, they objected to the publisher’s decision-making, arguing that the new preface should have been printed. Even more, some of them explained, the issues at stake rose far beyond the new preface or the book. When private efforts failed to reach a compromise, I chose to go public, agreeing to a request by the Forward newspaper to cover the story. By the time the article dropped, a group of 11 senior scholars in American Jewish history penned an open letter criticizing the press for its actions. The press, in turn, offered its own open letter response. In the days and weeks that followed, op-eds popped up on various Jewish news sites staking positions for and against my own. When the national Jewish press gathered to celebrate its journalists, the article’s author, Ari Feldman, earned distinction for writing what it considered the most important news story of the year.[4]
From a racial perspective, the new preface controversy surfaced unsettling truths about the refusal of many in white Jewish America to address longstanding racism within the Jewish Studies academy and American Jewish life. As Professor Samira Mehta pointed out in stark terms, a race and gender-based meta story developed around the new preface controversy. Even as her social media feed lit up with Jewish Studies scholars condemning the censorship of the new preface, she wrote, “I remained quiet, not because I do not care but because I have been hesitating about whether to say anything and if I spoke, what to say about the piece, especially given my own experiences of persistent racism in Jewish Studies as a field.” She questioned her own future in the academy “if we cannot, as scholars, talk about Jews and white supremacy at the historical distance of 50 years.” For her, the censorship decision “means that there is one less press for junior scholars who are working on race issues, at a time when resources are shrinking overall.”[5]
Mehta explained how the dynamics of racial (and gender) privilege played out as well. While it’s never pleasant to go through such an experience, I landed well, with multiple unsolicited university-press offers to republish Black Power, Jewish Politics after its first publisher returned the book’s legal rights to me, unsolicited. As Mehta reflected, “The fact that this is going well for him is a mark of privilege-the earned privilege of his academic reputation but more importantly the privilege of a white Jewish man in Jewish Studies. Other scholars,” she continued, “junior scholars, women scholars, scholars of color, would likely not fare so well.” Centering her own intersectional identities, Mehta concluded, “If a senior scholar with all of the white, male ‘Ashkenormative’ privilege of Marc Dollinger finds himself censored as a bad scholar for how he represents white supremacy and Jews, his example tells me that I certainly cannot do that work as a relatively junior scholar who is a Brown, female, Jew-by-Choice.”[6]
Mehta’s thesis extends beyond the academy. Even as up to 20% of American Jews identify as racially or ethnically diverse, with some 12% to 15% defined as Jews of Color, few present themselves in organized Jewish spaces, a consequence, in part, of both micro and macro racist aggressions from those in the white Jewish community. Many white Jews remain unaware of our community’s diversity because Jewish communal demographic surveys never asked questions about Jewish ethnic and racial diversity. Only very recently, with the creation of organizations such as the Jews of Color Initiative, along with other JoC built and led groups, have white Jewish America even started to process the impact of whiteness, racism and white supremacy within our communal walls.[7]
Raised in this sort of racialized American Jewish culture, I did not see Black Jews growing up in synagogue spaces. And as I’ve shared this learning with white Jewish leaders, I often hear skepticism: There can’t be that many Jews of Color, they explain, because I don’t see them in my Jewish organization. This mindset extends to the academic world, where scholars can’t see Black Jewish stories in the research archives because records of their existence, and activism, aren’t included. With this one-two punch, Black Jews … and Jews of Color in general … suffer erasure in both communal and academic spaces. Only when Jewish communal practitioners take a hard look at racism within their own institutions and only when Jewish Studies scholars take a hard look at racism within our own methodologies will we all get to see the diverse American Jewish community that already exists.
Implicit bias exists and gets reflected at every stage of scholarly writing.
The critical response to the new preface also laid bare the false claim, so common in history Ph.D. graduate school, that scholars can divorce their own racial, gender, class or other identities from the supposed neutral third-person analytic writing they are tasked to complete. Within much of academia, we learn that scholars should be apolitical, unbiased, critical thinkers who teach students how to think rather than what to think. Political advocacy belongs outside the academy, which is a place reserved for smart people engaged in critical inquiry.
Except, I learned through this experience, none of that is true. Implicit bias exists and gets reflected at every stage of scholarly writing. As a white male scholar writing about race — and getting lots of feedback through all of this — I have learned that there is no such thing as academic impartiality. In a series of conversations with Professor Javon Johnson, director of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, I learned the racially privileged nature of such an analytic approach to academic writing. Every word Professor Johnson published, and every word he taught, revealed his blackness. Every word I published and every word I taught revealed my whiteness, he pressed, except I didn’t need to say so. After those exchanges, I reached out to my editors, adding a last-minute section to the manuscript that called out my gender, racial and class identities with stories of my years growing up in the white suburbs of Los Angeles. Much of the new preface’s critique held on to that dated and biased notion of scholarship as value-free.
White racial privilege is an important factor in understanding post-war American Jewish history. Our history books must reflect that fact.
Jewish racial status mattered, whether for the scholar writing the book or for the individuals described in its pages. In many ways, the debate over the new preface and the book’s eventual revised edition reflect deeper disagreements among scholars over this question. I argued that academics must center white racial privilege in our analyses. The series editor of the book’s first edition, Jonathan Sarna, seemed to disagree. On the pages of the Jewish newspaper Forward, he argued that “in Jewish circles, where Jews know that their parents or grandparents struggled and were kept out of jobs, and were kept out of universities, and couldn’t live in certain neighborhoods, forgetting all of that and just saying ‘Ah, they got there because of white supremacy,’ is not only wrong, but deeply hurtful … Instead of that struggle, it’s all, ‘Well, they got ahead because their skin was white.’ ”[8]
It can be deeply hurtful for Jews of Color to read histories that discount white racial privilege. As their intersectional identities illustrate, race did (and does) matter in their lived experiences as Jews.
But Sarna’s argument misses several key academic points. First, neither the new preface nor the book made such a simplistic argument. Many causal factors, including race, accounted for white Jewish social mobility. Second, white racial privilege still proved an important factor in understanding post-war American Jewish history. Our history books must reflect that fact. Third, discounting racial privilege as a causal agent in history erases the experiences of Jews of Color who suffered racism, as Jews. To argue that whiteness did not help white Jews is to assert that non-white Jews enjoyed the same upward mobility when they did not. Fourth, it can also be “deeply hurtful” for Jews of Color to read histories that discount white racial privilege. As their intersectional identities illustrate, race did (and does) matter in their lived experiences as Jews. Whether enjoying racial privilege or suffering from racism, American Jews and the scholars writing about them must acknowledge its import. Here, discomfort with engaging questions of race led to an anti-intellectual assertion. If academics are to center feelings rather than historical truth, then we will have lost our scholarly way.
NYU Press, under the guidance of series editor Hasia Diner, agreed to publish the book’s revised edition. In its pages, a secondary source initially written to describe the social protest era of the 1960s also became a primary source reflecting 21st-century American Jewish attitudes and ambivalences about race. Three new sections supplement the revised edition. First, the new preface appears, unedited of course, so that readers can learn for themselves the source of the controversy. Second, a new chapter (labeled as the book’s epilogue) spells out, in much greater detail, the story described here. Finally, Ilana Kaufman, founder and CEO of the Jews of Color Initiative, a supporter and critic of the book from its manuscript stage, penned the book’s afterword, describing how the book’s thesis and its subsequent reception resonated for her as a Black Jewish woman.
With the book’s initial publication, its varied reception in Jewish America and now its revised edition in print, we all have the opportunity to reflect on some of the most important, and least considered, questions in American Jewish history. That sort of careful process can help clarify and guide not only future scholarship but also Jewish communal activism around racial justice, the limits of white Jewish liberalism, and the opportunities we enjoy as an ever more diverse American Jewish community.
[1] See: jewsofcolorinitiative.com
[2] Marc Dollinger, “Forbidden Words: Academic Freedom, Censorship, and University Presses,” AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom, vol. 12, 2021, p. 5.
[3] Marc Dollinger, “Forbidden Words: Academic Freedom, Censorship, and University Presses,” AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom, vol. 12, 2021, p. 8.
[4] Ari Feldman, “Brandeis U. Press and a historian split over how to talk about Jews and white supremacy,” Forward, Dec. 20, 2020, https://forward.com/news/460600/jews-white-supremacy-brandeis-black-lives-matter/ Accessed Aug. 6, 2024. Yonat Shimron, “He claimed white Jews gained from white supremacy. Now he’s more popular than ever,” Religion News Service, March 12, 2021, https://religionnews.com/2021/03/12/he-was-shot-down-for-suggesting-white-jews-benefitted-from-white-supremacy-now-hes-more-popular-than-ever/ Accessed Aug. 6, 2024. Guila Franklin Siegel, “Talk of Jews benefiting from ‘white supremacy’ is bad for fighting it,” Dec. 24, 2020. https://forward.com/opinion/461048/talk-of-jews-benefiting-from-white-supremacy-is-bad-for-fighting-it/. Accessed Aug. 6, 2024. Jonathan S. Tobin, “A toxic race curriculum has no place in Jewish schools,” Jewish News Syndicate, Dec. 23, 2020. https://www.jns.org/a-toxic-race-curriculum-has-no-place-in-jewish-schools/. Accessed Aug. 6, 2024. Ari Kelman, et al, “Open Letter: Brandeis University Press is silencing debate,” Dec. 23, 2020. https://forward.com/opinion/460889/open-letter-brandeis-university-press-is-silencing-debate/ Accessed Aug. 6, 2024. Sue Berger Ramin, Sylvia Fuks Fried, “Brandeis University Press is fully committed to open debate,” Dec. 23, 2020. https://forward.com/opinion/letters/460942/letter-brandeis-university-press-is-fully-committed-to-open-debate/. Accessed Aug. 6, 2020.
[5] Marc Dollinger, “Forbidden Words: Academic Freedom, Censorship, and University Presses,” AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom, vol. 12, 2021, p. 13.
[6] Marc Dollinger, “Forbidden Words: Academic Freedom, Censorship, and University Presses,” AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom, vol. 12, 2021, p. 14.
[7] See Jews of Color Initiative, Statistics one-pager on Jews of Color and Multiracial Jewish Families, https://jewsofcolorinitiative.org/resources/statistics-one-pager-on-jews-of-color-and-multiracial-families/. Accessed Aug. 7, 2024.
[8] Ari Feldman, “Brandeis U. Press and a historian split over how to talk about Jews and white supremacy,” Forward, Dec. 20, 2020, https://forward.com/news/460600/jews-white-supremacy-brandeis-black-lives-matter/ Accessed Aug. 6, 2024.
