11.4 ? Karen Brodkin Sacks: How Did Jews Become White Folks?
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❗️Please read Karen Brodkin Sacks' work
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Sacks examines the social construction of "whiteness" throughout American history in order to illustrate the way that race and social status changes over time.
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Questions
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1. Using specific examples from the text, explain how power and racial identity intersect.
2. Using specific examples from the text, explain how racial categories change over time. What does this reveal about the cultural reality of race?
CLASSIC
CONTEMPORARY
CROSS-CULTURAL
How Did Jews Become
White Folks?
KAREN B. BRODKIN
46
One way to see how societies construct race and ethnicity is to look at the historical ex-
periences of particular categories of people in the United States. A century ago, the autho
of this selection explains, Jews and other European immigrants were defined as nonwhite.
After World War II, however, Jews were included among “white folks.”
The American nation was founded and developed by
the Nordic race, but if a few more million members of
the Alpine, Medite
anean, and Semitic races are
poured among us, the result must inevitably be a hy-
id race of people as worthless and futile as the good-
for-nothing mongrels of Central America and South-
eastern Europe.
(Kenneth Roberts, quoted in Carlson
& Colburn, 1972:312)
It is clear that Kenneth Roberts did not think of
my ancestors as white like him. The late nine-
teenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries
saw a steady stream of warnings by scientists,
policymakers, and the popular press that “mon-
grelization” of the Nordic or Anglo-Saxon race—
the real Americans—by inferior European races
(as well as inferior non-European ones) was de-
stroying the fa
ic of the nation. I continue to be
surprised to read that America did not always
egard its immigrant European workers as white,
RACE AND ETHNICITY
that they thought people from different nations
were biologically different. My parents, who are
first-generation U.S.-born Eastern European Jews,
are not surprised. They expect anti-Semitism to be
part of the fa
ic of daily life, much as I expect
acism to be part of it. They came of age in a Jew-
ish world in the 1920s and 1930s at the peak of
anti-Semitism in the United States (Ge
er,
1986a). . . .
It is certainly true that the United States has a
history of anti-Semitism and of beliefs that Jews
were members of an inferior race. But Jews were
hardly alone. American anti-Semitism was part
of a
oader pattern of late-nineteenth-century
acism against all southern and eastern European
immigrants, as well as against Asian immigrants.
These views justified all sorts of discriminatory
treatment, including closing the doors to immi-
gration from Europe and Asia in the 1920s.1 This
picture changed radically after World War II.
Suddenly the same folks who promoted nativism
and xenophobia were eager to believe that the
Euro-origin people whom they had deported, re-
viled as members of inferior races, and prevented
“How Did Jews Become White Folks?” by Karen Brodkin
Sacks, from How Did Jews Become White Folks & What
That Says About Race in America, by Karen Brodkin Sacks,
pp. 79–83, 86–87, 88–92, 96 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1998)
274
MaciCh46ff.qxd 2/4/06 2:15 PM Page 274
from immigrating only a few years earlier were
now model middle-class white subu
an citizens.
It was not an educational epiphany that made
those in power change their hearts, their minds,
and our race. Instead, it was the biggest and best
affirmative action program in the history of ou
nation, and it was for Euromales. There are simi-
larities and differences in the ways each of the
European immigrant groups became “whitened.”
I want to tell the story in a way that links anti-
Semitism to other varieties of anti-European racism,
ecause this foregrounds what Jews shared with
other Euroimmigrants and shows changing notions
of whiteness to be part of America’s larger system
of institutional racism.
EURORACES
The U.S. “discovery” that Europe had inferior and
superior races came in response to the great waves
of immigration from southern and eastern Europe
in the late nineteenth century. Before that time,
European immigrants—including Jews—had been
largely assimilated into the white population. The
23 million European immigrants who came to
work in U.S. cities after 1880 were too many and
too concentrated to disperse and blend. Instead,
they piled up in the country’s most dilapidated
u
an areas, where they built new kinds of work-
ing-class ethnic communities. Since immigrants
and their children made up more than 70 percent
of the population of most of the country’s largest
cities, u
an America came to take on a distinctly
immigrant flavor. The golden age of industrializa-
tion in the United States was also the golden age
of class struggle between the captains of the new
industrial empires and the masses of manual work-
ers whose labor made them rich. As the majority
of mining and manufacturing workers, immigrants
were visibly major players in these struggles
(Higham, 1955:226; Steinberg, 1989:36).2
The Red Scare of 1919 clearly linked anti-
immigrant to anti-working-class sentiment—to the
extent that the Seattle general strike of native-born
workers was blamed on foreign agitators. The Red
Reading 46 How Did Jews Become White Folks? 275
Scare was fueled by economic depression, a mas-
sive postwar strike wave, the Russian revolution,
and a new wave of postwar immigration. Strikers
in steel, and the garment and textile workers in
New York and New England, were mainly new im-
migrants. “As part of a fierce counteroffensive,
employers inflamed the historic identification of
class conflict with immigrant radicalism.” Anti-
communism and anti-immigrant sentiment came
together in the Palmer raids and deportation of im-
migrant working-class activists. There was real
fear of revolution. One of President Wilson’s aides
feared it was “the first appearance of the soviet in
this country” (Higham, 1955:226).
Not surprisingly, the belief in European races
took root most deeply among the wealthy U.S.-
orn Protestant elite, who feared a hostile and
seemingly unassimilable working class. By the
end of the nineteenth century, Senator Henry
Cabot Lodge pressed Congress to cut off immi-
gration to the United States; Teddy Roosevelt
aised the alarm of “race suicide” and took Anglo-
Saxon women to task for allowing “native” stock
to be out
ed by inferior immigrants. In the twen-
tieth century, these fears gained a great deal of so-
cial legitimacy thanks to the efforts of an influential
network of aristocrats and scientists who devel-
oped theories of eugenics—
eeding for a “better”
humanity—and scientific racism. Key to these ef-
forts was Madison Grant’s influential Passing of
the Great Race, in which he shared his discovery
that there were three or four major European races
anging from the superior Nordics of northwestern
Europe to the inferior southern and eastern races
of Alpines, Medite
aneans, and, worst of all,
Jews, who seemed to be everywhere in his native
New York City. Grant’s nightmare was race mixing
among Europeans. For him, “the cross between
any of the three European races and a Jew is a
Jew” (quoted in Higham, 1955:156). He didn’t
have good things to say about Alpine or Mediter-
anean “races” either. For Grant, race and class
were interwoven: The upper class was racially
pure Nordic, and the lower classes came from the
lower races.
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Far from being on the fringe, Grant’s views
esonated with those of the nonimmigrant middle
class. A New York Times reporter wrote of his
visit to the Lower East Side:
This neighborhood, peopled almost entirely by the
people who claim to have been driven from Poland and
Russia, is the eyesore of New York and perhaps the
filthiest place on the western continent. It is impossi-
le for a Christian to live there because he will be
driven out, either by blows or the dirt and stench.
Cleanliness is an unknown quantity to these people.
They cannot be lifted up to a higher plane because they
do not want to be. If the cholera should ever get among
these people, they would scatter its germs as a sowe
does grain. (quoted in Schoener, 1967:58)3
Such views were well within the mainstream
of the early twentieth-century scientific commu-
nity. Grant and eugenicist Charles B. Davenport
organized the Galton Society in 1918 in order to
foster research and to otherwise promote eugen-
ics and immigration restriction.4 Lewis Terman,
Henry Goddard, and Robert Yerkes, developers of
the so-called intelligence test, believed firmly
that southeastern European immigrants, African
Americans, American Indians, and Mexicans
were “feebleminded.” And indeed, more than 80
percent of the immigrants whom Goddard tested
at Ellis Island in 1912 turned out to be just that.
Racism fused with eugenics in scientific circles,
and the eugenics circles overlapped with the na-
tivism of WASP aristocrats. During World War I,
acism shaped the army’s development of a mass
intelligence test. Psychologist Robert Yerkes,
who developed the test, became an even stronge
advocate of eugenics after the war. Writing in the
Atlantic Monthly in 1923, he noted:
If we may safely judge by the army measurements of
intelligence, races are quite as significantly