Meditations on a Jewish Subjectivity Roealin Krieger for the Degree Of

Strategies of Sumival: Meditations on a Jewish Subjectivity

Roealin Krieger

A Thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of Sociology and Equity Studies Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto

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Degree: M.A. Year of Convocation: 2000

Name : Rosalin Krieger Graduate Department: Sociology and Equity Studies University: OISB-UT (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto)

ABSTRACT

This thesis is a reflective analysis of Jewish responses to anti- Jewish prejudice in Post World War II Toronto and an examination of the literature of various Jewish academics and a number of the author's family rnembers, including herself. Krieger concludes that Jewish self-hatred is both a concern of the scholars and laypeople, leading some to contemplate or attempt to "passW unnoticed in the Christian- ttmainstreamtlsociety. The goal of this dissertation is to challenge monolithic, ahistorical and simplistic discussions of the concept of "white privilegen. The history of anti-Jewish prejudice indicates that Jews have been and continue to be treated differently from other [Christian] whites . Secondly, this thesis is intended to address the lack of knowledge among most non-Jews with regard to the history of anti-Jewish oppression and its negative psychological effects on Jews, and to challenge the current notion that Jews are not oppressed, Writing about Jewish self -hatred and "passingM is perhaps not the most popular or understood research interest, let alone a subject fcr a thesis. When 1 tell people what 1 study, 1 am met with confusion or blank stares, 1 mean, "Jewish what?" or 9sthere such a thing?IV.Therefore it takes special people to support you when you choose to write about it. For the writing of this thesis, 1 wish to thank people that have both directly and indirectly helped it into being, that is., people 1 have had the pleasure to know personally and those who mentored me through their scholarship, political activisrn, and yes, the awful medium of television. First and foremost, I must thank my mother, Yaffa Krieger, who always believed in me when others told her not ta and who told me that 1 could do anything 1 wanted ta, even though she misunderstood me at times, and for, as she has reminded me over the years, taking al1 four of us al1 over the city without a car. As a graduate student , 1 am living part of her dream in that 1 earned a

Bachelor' s degree and now a MasterfS. 1 love her for this, because she is truly happy for me. I must also thank the special people who have helped me with unwavering support and enthusiasm: Rinaldo Walcott, the busiest Canadian man in academia, for believing that 1 could be a promising graduate, our discussions about "living in betweenw black and white, and attending to al1 my questions and anxieties; Winston Smith for our conversations in the books tore about Gilman, racial-ethnic *codingIt in Seinfeld and the IV secret It

iii lives of old Hollywood stars; Greg Malszecki, for being open and caring as 1 muddled through women's studies at York University; Roger Simon, a true mensch, for always being a phone-cal1 or e-mail away and enjoying a good laugh; f inally, Arun P. Mukherjee, my greatest teacher at York University, who introduced me to the essays and activism of Audre Lorde, the literature of Anita Desai, and who by example taught me to publically challenge bigotry in the classroom. For the actual writing of this thesis I must thank two very special people: Grace Feuerverger and Sandra Acker. 1 thank them for joining my thesis committee without me having to beg them; for their insightful comments, suggestions and keen editing skills; for fixing my awful spelling and knowing what to keep and what to discard; most of all, for their courage to preserve my vision of the thesis. Finally, this thesis is deeply in debt to the work and visions of the following writers, scholars and activists : James Baldwin, Dionne Brand, Bonnie Burstow, Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon, Sander L. Giirnan (who answers your e-mail the next day) , Audre Lorde , Melanie Kaye/Kantrowit z , Manning Marable, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Adrienne Rich, Evelyn Torton Beck, and Cornel West. A final, but special thanks to the staff at the help-desk on the third floor computer lab at OISE-UT. Thank you all. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One Jewish Identity: Why Does it Appear to be so Difficult to Characterize?

Chapter Two Introduction

Chapter Three Literature Review

Chapter Four Mom, Dad and 1: Self-Hatred, l1Passingltand Identity

Chapter Five Conclus ion

Sources 128 " [The Jew] forgets bis [sic] Jewishness, or hides it...That is because he has ... admitted the validity of the Aryan system ...Evil is Jewish. Everything Jewish is ugly. Let us no longer be Jewsvt --Frantz Fanon Black Skin, White Masks (1967)

1 am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus shows. .. When they approach me they see only my surroundings , themselves, or figments of their [irnagination] - indeed, everything ...except me...lt is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although, it is most often wearing on the nervesH --Ralph Ellison Prologue, The Invisible Man (1989) CHAPTER ONE

OQHY DOES IT APPEAR TO BE SO DIFFICULT TO CHARACTERIZE? A Discuision of Jewiah identitiea, Blacki.88 and Whiteaesa, in Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Century North Aaaetica

In the sumrner of 1995 1 was at a bus stop having (what 1 thought was) a private conversation with a classmate about how 1 choose ta identify as a Jew. For me, being Jewish has turned into more of a cultural and historical link based on historical rnemory versus religious practice. 1 am what is now called msecularw or

I1ethnicIt.A woman nearby listened eagerly and rny colleague and 1 noticed that she was anxious to interject and finally she did. Çhe, asked me, how can you cal1 yourself Jewish and not be religious? 1 spent the next hour (the bus at York is always slow) rnaking my case about how 1 I1workI1at I1beingl1Jewish culturally by engaging in Jewish issues of political concern (anti-Jewish prejudice), by having a sense of a collective history and legacy, by reading Jewish essays and fiction, by being socially active, while also partaking in Jewish holidays. For non-religious Jews like me, " Jewish ident ity has been an intractable existential and intellectual problem. Some type of performance -- an act and not merely a gesture -- is sufficient but not necessary ...to maintain a Jewish identity, a sense of belonging to the Jewish c~mmunity~~

(Gibel Azoulay, 1997 :134) . I made my argument. To my surprise, in the end, she respected my concept of Jewiahness with a smile.

In this chapter, 1 shall take this discussion on Jewish

identity further by showing the multiple ways that Jews have 1 assumed authorship of their identities in relation to the practicalities of life in a non-Jewish world, in the late nineteenth century Europe, and throughout the twentieth century in the United States and Canada. Here are what are considered the historical and contextual I1rnainl1 concepts in Jewish identity: religious (belief, rituals), secularlethnic (cultural, historical continuity, memory, and political), nationhood (a measure of one's llloyaltyllto Israel) , a I1raceI1 (Semite, racial other, white, non- white), and in terms of the history of persecution, especially regarding the Shoah (Holocaust). 1 shall show that Jews historically (like other "othersN) have complicated and blurred the demarcations of blackness and whiteness. As anthropologist Ruth

Frankenburg states, Ir [whiteness is] the most [politically] significant ...dominant space. [Even though] whiteness can have no meaning: as a normative space it is constructed precisely by the way it positions others at its bordersIr (231). Regarding Jewish and blackness, Katya Gibel Azoulay asks pertinent questions, that also will be addressed, IlIf Jews are not a tlracialitcategory, then how do we find a language to describe the identities of children of

Jewish and Black parents?" furthemore, "How does this cohere with the idea of Blackness as a cultural and political identity?" (13). Finally, any discussion about Jewish identity would have to include a discussion on anti-Jewieh pre judicel in different periods and

'1 do not like to use the term "anti-SemitismN to describe al1 anti-Jewish prejudice. The continuous use of the term, not coined by Jews, is problematic. As Am Pellegrini arguesIw[naming] every incidence of hostility against Jews *anti-Semitismtlsuggests that the forms and meanings of hatred of the Jews are themselves contexts, to better understand how Jews have historically defined themselves in what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls their Ifposition in a hierarchically organized system of titlesm (1991:120; Gibel Azoulay, 1997:7) .' Like Katya Gibel Azoulay in her study, Black. Jewish and Interracial,

My concern with "identity" here ia not the word as an image of thought -- a mental constnict. Instead, the focus is, on the one hand, on particular people, in a specific historical moment and geographical location and, on the other hand, the actualization of the phenornenon that "identityW connotes: a continuous process of being as becoming. Identity, then, can also refer to a practice originating in and manifested through social interaction. fdentity has meaning only in the context of self and other and, in the twentieth century.... [Politics] are inherently embedded in the encounter between the two entities...thinkers writing against the horror of racism and anti-Semitism empha- size the power of the public sphere on the construction and reproduction of identities (emphasis in original, 32-33) .

1 shall, in brief, discuss the religious aspects of being Jewish. Anthropologist Manning Nash, writing against the social psychology approach to Jewish ethnicity that stakes a claim for "primordial tiesm, stresses the point that the Law and the Covenant (as a contract between God and a people) combine to make Jews a separate people. He contends, "the Law constitutes the category of

historically continuous and identicalIf (1997:lll).

'Questions of "public Jewish identity were never an issue for the ultra-Orthodox but always a problem for the upwardly mobile, Reform, many conservative, and most secular Jews who sought acceptance in mainstream Protestant American [and Canadian] arenasN (Gibel Azoulay, 1997 :71) . Jews, observance makes a person a Jew, and being a Jew is being set apart from a mere biological existence on the one hand, and from others who are not Jews on the othertt (1989:78;Gibel Azoulay,

1997 :164) . For these Jews, IVewishness is the content of the divine revelation to the people of Israel, through the instrumentality of Moses, which prescribes the way of life that is ~udaisrn"'

(Goldstein, 1993 :84) . In addition, according to halacha (Jewish Law), to be Jewish is to be born a Jew (to a Jewish mother) or to convert and becorne Jewish. In rare cases one rnay lose this recognition as a Jew -- as in the case of the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, a Jew who converted to Catholicism at the age of fourteen while attending a Catholic school to which his parents sent him at the beginning of world war two. He arrived in Israel at the invitation of Tel Aviv University. Lustiger insists

that "1 have always seen myself as Jewish, even if that is not the Rabbisf opinion. 1 was born Jewish and will stay Jewishtl

[furthemore] "1 am as Jewish as al1 the other members of my family who were butchered in AuschwitzIt (Gibel Azoulay, 1997 :183) . However, in the wake of his visit, a nation wide debate occurred that did not take on a religious or political dispute. According to Dr. Yosef Burg, former Minister of the Interior and currently the chaiman of the Yad Vashem international council, " [someone] who has converted ta Christianity has crossed the lines and doesnrt

'Recall the remarks that cornedian Billy Crystal made as the host of the 1997 Academy Awards . He tald a Kevin Spacey that he was enjoying his new life as a Gentile. That week a group of Orthodox Jews in New York annowiced that Jews who are not religious and Orthodox like them were not Jews. belong to the Jewish peopleb1 (Ibid.,184). In this case Jewish identity (especially in a post -Shoah (holocaust) world) was linked to group ethics and loyalty to the State of Israel (Nationhood), with conversion to Christianity being the ultimate betrayal.' In Israel, nationality and religion are the primary off icial categories of identification (Gibel Azoulay, 1997 :fn 26,lg) . Israeli identity cards register Jews under nationality (Ibid., 1997:19). However, Cardinal Lustiger's conception of Jewishness appears as a reductive essence that Jews cannot escape, even after conversion. It echoes the racist discourse on the connection between "bloodN and I1racel1, thereby echoing the saying "once a Jew , always a Jewl1.

4Gibel Azouiay explains further, l1 [the] ethical dimension reffects sentiments of betrayal and treachery: to align oneself with Christianity in senerai, and the ~atholic~hurch in particular, is to ignore at best, and disregard, at worst, theological anti-Semitism that fostered, encouraged, and justified violence against Jews -- because they were Jews -- culminating in the Holocaust, and not excluding the resounding silence of Pope Pius XII (Gilman 1986; Miles 1995; Gibel Azoulay, 1997:fn 183) . SHistoricaily Jews and Christians have utilized this aaying. European Christians used it to emphatically It show" that Jews would always be racial or religious others despite conversion. There was a Jewish essence that could not be escaped, especially in the way Jews spoke Christian languages such as German; they could never rnaster them. Please see Sander Gilrnan's (1986) Jewish Self-Hatred for further discussion about Jews, language and identity in German history . Long converted Jews like Marx and Lasalle remained Jews to the outside world, however much they berated Jews and disassociated themselves from Judaism, however much they saw themselves Getmans or "citizens of the worldit. Gibel Azoulay explains that "admirers saw Marx as a descendent of the Jewish prophets and commented on the messianic element in Manrism. Enemies belaboured upon the Talmudic craftiness of the Red Rabbi. It was above al1 this hostility on the part of often being Jewish is narrowly defined as religious: to be Jewish is to be religious6. For some, this equation negates the richnees and diversity of Jewish culture (Cossman, Flanders,

Haax, Pearlston, Saunders, Segal, 1992 :7) . Indeed, in Canadian censuses which have a question and category for Jews by religion and by ethnicity, the number of Jews who self-identified by ethnicity were significantly higher than those who marked religion

(Gibel Azoulay, 1997 :114) . In her study on Jewish blacks in America, Gibel Azoulay posed the question to her participants, if you were asked to define being Jewish, how would you define it? Religious practice played a very small role in their def inition,

indeed one of the participants answered, "1 guess the struggle. The Thing 1 identify most with in the Jewishness is I guess the Holocaust . . .no matter how far away 1 might be from Jewish faith

the outside world, and in particular Christian opposition to emancipation and later on the anti-Semitic movement, that prevenied the total disintegration of the Jews as a-groupN (1997: 67-68) , In a contemporary incident, A Jewish mother named hre responded to her son' s shouts of "1 don' t want to be a dirty JewN, by telling to him that he was a "dirty Jewu, and he better accept it. For Eve there is no flexibility, one is Jewish. The lesson Eve wanted her son to learn was that his Jewishness was ascribed, that it was impossible for hirn to wish it away, and that his only option was to embrace it. Being Jewish was about "otherness, about one's being or essence, understood reductively and hierarchically (Frankenberg, 1993:224). 61n addition to Jewishness being solely identified with religious observance, Jews in general are characterized as al1 being alike (white and/or Ashkenaz), looking and behaving in stereotypical ways, and not as varied individuals. Hence the often stereotypical and anti-Jewish notions of " Jewish looksn (especially noses, lips, and for women large hips and breasts and dark, thick hair) , itself, if ...there was another Holocaust, I'd be taken in two seconds (137). Similarly Chelsea explains,

[my] feeling about identity and Jewishness is historical and cultural. Religion is not really my thing ...but the religiousness is so wound up in the culturalness and historicalness. Like holidays, like Passover. 1 feel like 1 bring my whole self into passover and look at my whole history. . . [My] philosophy was always 1 better accept the fact that 1% Jewish ...because if Hitler was here today, he would take me.. . "' (1997:138) .

These two woments comments resonate with the conceptualization of being Jewish by looking to the themes of struggle and oppression

(Gibel Azoulay, 1997:138) . More directly, they speak ta the possibility of violent anti-Jewish prejudice that, in varying degrees, Jews keep in the back of their minds, and it is this fear that grounds being Jewish to a political identity regardless, and especially in the absence of, religious or cultural feelings of affiliation (Ibid., 1997:66). This explains whey being ethnically

Jewish for many has the appearance of a contextual identity (in theses cases due to the threat or possibility of violent anti-

Jewish racisrn) (Ibid.,1997 : 177) . In addition, generally, Gibel Azoulay States,

[A] Black person who is Jewish may find him/herself emphasizing different aspects of his/her identity among Jews or among Blacks. As a Jew, s/he may insist on the absence of any relation between Jewishness and race. As a Black persan, the insistence might be on a distinction between American notions of race, which promote the illusion of community by fetishizing race, in contrast to Judaism as a religious and cultural entity that bonds its adherents on the basis of shared beliefs and rituals, an ancient language, historical continuity, and a geagraphical center (1srael) (11).

Gibel Azoulay also asked her I1bi-racial"Jewish participants other pertinent questions, such as, how they Ildefine the whole notion of uBlacknessN?Elinor, one of the participants, answered with a common response,

tll[Itws]a struggle in the historical sense and it's the color of my skin. And both sides--it's a struggle in the United States and a struggle that starts way back generation and generation aga ...My great-aunt was a slave. And so itfs kind of funny 'cause you get it from both sides. You think about slavery and you think about the Holocaust there are so many similarities between them and 1 just wish that these communities could come together ...1 think that thatfs the biggest problem that I have with being Black and Jewish: the fact that the two sides canrt come togetherf1(138) .

The theme of struggle and oppression resonates here in the context of the tension between Jews and Black Gentiles. In some instances Jewish blacks find themselves in the position of being mediaries when disagreements arise in social situations (Gibel

Azoulay, 1997 :163) . There is much to be learned intellectually and politically from destabilizing the category of I1identityNas self-evident (Ibid., 1997:153), identities are always being negotiated, moving, and in process (Ibid., 1997 :155) . Therefore we can cal1 American Jewish radicals (intellectuals and activists) of the 1960s as Isaac Deutscher did, "non-Jewish JewsIt.' Gibel Azoulay explains,

This radical perspective combined political perspica- city with an acute sense of Judaism, thereby provid- ing a moral and spiritual structure that permitted -- indeed encouraged -- not simply a universalist or particularist but multiparticularist attitude. Radi- cal Jewish activists advocated and represented the Jewish conunitment to social justice [tikkun olam - to repair the world] without necessarily an adherence or allegiance to refigious expression. This was an internationalist perspective that complimented Jewish values (social justice), but refused any obligation to acknowledge Jewi~hness.~In other words, being Jewish -- from a political standpoint -- was a necessary but insufficient reason to be on the side of the oppressed. Ironically, this attitude stands out against anti-Semitic stereotypes equating radicalism and sedition with Jews, itself as result of the disproportionate number of Jews in social movements on the political Left (italics in original, 1997:61).

The ideological principles of social justice and struggle against oppression, central tenets of socialism and communism, were not a contradiction to Jewish codes (Azoulay, 1997:76).

1 would now like to switch the focus of the discussion to the marner in which Jews have historically been raced, thereby complicating notions of whiteness and blackness in European discourses on "raceM and racialization, in order to challenge al1

'This phrase came to symbolize with contempt, Jews whose political commitments did reflect the prophetic tradition of Judaism oriented toward emancipation and liberation yet who rejected or abandoned the value of a Jewish identity (Azoulay, 1997: 60) . 'Please see Melanie KayefKantrowitz' s essay on this issue, "Stayed on Freedom: Jews in the Civil Rights Movement and Afterw in Brettschneider (ed,) The Narrow Bridqe, Jewish Views on Mul t iculturalism (New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, 1996) . too common and sirnplistic equations of Jews with whiteness . Whiteness and Jewishness are not CO-terminus. For those white folks who hate Jews today in North America and abroad, white and Jewish is an oxymoron. Therefore, it is perplexing that, as Gibel Azoulay states, despite,

[The] dispersion of Jews across the globe prod- uced a diaspora of people whose skin color ranges from the dark African and Asian to the pale northern European Jews. Why, then are those who [are] Black seen as "different" or tQmiquelrwhen they present themselves as Jewish? (1997: 11)

Among American [Canadian, and continental European] Jews [and non-Jews] , the initial assumption is that only white-skinned people are Jewish ... This is an example of the gap between having information and yet maintaining preconceptions (1997:107).

Therefore,

In the United States, where most Jews are white- skimed and of European origin, a person who is marked as different by skin color will be perceived as visibly different in the Company of a group of Jews. S/he will arouse curiosity. Equally, a Black persan who puts on a Star of David or a yalmulka to mark his/her Jewishness will also invite interest. Having a Jewish last name may, in some circumstances, also prompt questioning. In some ways, one might speculate whether given the stereotypes about Jews and Blacks,

'The question of the extent to which among Jews in Canada and the United States I1whitenesslthas been an ambiguous and ambivalent racial and social identity has been neglected in academic studies . it is easier for a brown-skinned person to pass as not Jewish than fox a Jew to pass as merely white (italics in original, 1997 :IO) .

Some Jews however do not accept the erroneous notion that al1 Jews are white. In Lise Funderburgfs 1994 book Black. White.other, Sandy Lowe (a f air-skinned Jewish black) says "1 think of myself as being Jewish, not white. 1 don't think of Jews as being white because they' re Semites" (19% :245; 1997 :113) . To be Black and Jewish in a race-conscious society is to be an obstruction, to symbolize a contestation, and to undermine the authority of classification (Gibel Azoulay, 1997 : 41) . Indeed. some of the Jewish Blacks that were interviewcd by Gibel Azoulay said they liked "to shock peopleit in order to educate them about the diversity of Jews (1997:162) .'O In American histary, Jews were just another kind of white exploiters for Black Christians, but for white Christians, Jews were a racial "otherIt (Gibel Azoulay, 1997 : 55) , as seen by the extreme anti-Jewish, 1915 lynching of Leo Frank in Atlanta. Frank was falsely accused and convicted of murdering a white, Christian woman named Mary Phagan. Frankfs accusors called him "a villain blacker than any Negro could aspire to bel1 (Berson, 1971 :38 ; Gibel Azoulay, 1997:66). His lynching and mutilation was intended to be

-- -- '*~hi~is something that I still do. 1 did it during Christmas. 1 made a point of telling people who asked me about "Christmas shoppingw that it was not a concern of mine. 1 got the usual reply, ttyourrenot Jewish?!" or "1 thought Jews celebrate Christmas* or buy Hanukah presents. a deliberate warning: "The Next Jew Who Does What Frank Did is Going to Get Exactly The Same Thing We Give to Negro Rapistsll

(emphasis in original, Weisbord and Stein, 1970:12; Gibel Azoulay,

19 97 : 66). l1 Sephardic Jews immigrated to New Amsterdam from Brazil in 1654, but contrary to popuiar misconceptions, Jews were not accepted as white. For example, in Virginia's laws pertaining to miscegenation, Jews were not viewed as merely a religious group, but were specifically marked as a non-white I1raceltas evidenced in the clah that Jews were of a different llcomplexionm (Gibel

Azoulay, 1997:63). The Virginia bill did not single out Jews alone for attention. However, this legislat ion does stress that Jews, along with North Africans and Muslirns, were "racial othersw and not, as some would believe, only an ethnic religious group (Ibid., 1997 :fn 16, 63) . Presently, Jews and non-Jews do not take into account the stereotypes of uothernessM that have marked the Jew as tlraciallydifferenttl throughout Christian Societies, whereas Jews in the past did. The case of Sigmund Freud keenly illustrates this point. In Freud. Race. and Gender, Sander Gilman argues that one of the definitions of the Jew that he would have internalized was a

racial one. Indeed, by the l87Os, Freud disliked being referred to as a "blackn Jew, and certainly wanted to believe he was white. The general belief in the ethnographical literature of the late nineteenth century racial biology, was that Jews (Semites - the negative half of the Aryan-Semite binary) had llblackltskin, or were

"1 must also note, that, Frank became the first white man to be convicted of murder on the basis of a black man's court testimony (Gibel Azoulay, 1997 : 66) . at least "swarthyf'. As early as the staged debates between Jews and

Christians during the Spanish High Middle Ages, Jews accepted that they were It dark and uglyl1l2while Itmost Gentiles were f air-skinned and handsomen (Gilman, 1993 :20) . The writer Franz Kafka was also aware of how he and other Jews were perceived, Vo the European we...have the same Negro facenD(Ibid., 1993:20). According to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a late nineteenth century proponent of racist pseudo-science of the period, Jews are a Itmongrelt1 race

(Gilman, 1986:7) , who bear the sign of the black, "the Af rican character of the Jew, his muzzle-shaped mouth and face removing him from certain other races, and bringing out strongly with age the two grand qualities -- disproportion, and a display of the anatomyIt1 (Gilman, 1993:21). Perhaps this is why the issue of "racet1 remains a sensitive issue for Jews (for example in race- related surveys) expressly also because of nazi ideology and the ways in which Jews have been defined and designated as a 18racettor

racial group (Gibel Azoulay, 1997 :83 ) .l3 In American secularism and civil religion, a constant Christian presence had imposed an Otherness that Jews as a collective and

I2~entilesand Jews believed that Jews were born white but grew black like plums. Their skin colour was also equated with illness, with disease written on the skin. By the end of the nineteenth century this image of the black skin of the Jews as a sign of their inherent illness came to be associated with their iriherent taracial"character (Gilman, 1993 :20) . "1 have only met one Jewish person who claims that Jews are a ttraceft.She believes Jews have been persecuted as a "racett. Even though 1 do not believe that Jews are a ltracet1 , there is clear historical evidence (that 1 have shown) that we have been perceived as treated as an inferior Vacetf. b some Jews as individuals could never completely elude. Greg Tate a Black cultural critic for New York's Village Voice, wrote a revealing reaction to Schindlerts List, I1After seeing Schindlerts

List, 1 finally understand why some Jewish folk donrt consider themselves tlwhitelt...TheHolocaust didntt happen to white people, because the Nazis decided they weren't killing human beings when

they killed Jewstl (58) . Jews, as a social category of otherness, have defied attempts to classify them. In one sociological textbook published in the mid 1960s the editors states, "the Jews constitute a fairly unique minority in that there is no adequate single basis

for categorizing them. Their racial, nationality and language ...and backgrounds are about as diverse as possibleM (Rose and Rose, 1965:s; Gibel Azoulay, 1997:58). In Canadian history as well, Deborah Yaffe's comments show

that the same misconceptions about Jews and whiteness have occurred, she states,

Jews are just lumped in with the whites, as though Canadian immigration policy never ex- cluded Jews, as though Jews were never subject to quotas, as though expressions like I1he jewed me domn werenlt used here...I feel more secure saying III m a lesbianI1 than saying "1 am a JewIt (1992:30) .

In a study conducted by American anthropologist Ruth Frankenberg on white women's views on we encounter Jewish women who do identify as white. She states, "given the persistence of anti-Semitism, some Ashkenazi Jewish men and women have argued that they are not white. However none of the women 1 interviewed 14 took this position. Al1 considered themselves "whiteI1 (1993:216). (Perhaps this identification is a result of the gradua1 movement toward secularization on the part of Jews and a lifting of restrictions on Jewish lifestyle. Political freedom enabled (limited) participation in the public sphere, but the price for acceptance was negation of difference (Gibel Azoulay, 1997:69)). But, being Jewish for the majority of this group of women was a defining feature of their identity (Frankenberg, 1993:216). Unlike the non-Jewish women, they mentioned religious markers of identity, that is., their parents' desire to keep a kosher house or send their children for religious instruction and to learn Hebrew, and celebrating Jewish holidays. In addition these Jewish women had a cultural identity that was for most a dimension of the present as well as the past.

These women8s lives were, however, by no means identical to one another, indeed, there was no one way to be Jewish (Ibid., 1993:216). Frankenburg says, "one gets from these women a sense of cultural belonging as flexible -- but flexible within a determinate range of options or meaningful expressions of Jewish identity" (216). For example, one might attend synagogue or not, be expected to "marry in" (inside the Jewish community) or not, and still consider oneself Jewish. However, it was clear to al1 the women what the range of markers were (Frankenberg, 1993 :216) . Looking at these womenrs lives we see cultural identity as sornething consciously built rather than just tltherett.In a town with no place of worship, the f irehouse became a temparary synagogue (Frankenberg, 1993 :220) . Unlike the participants in Gibel Azoulay's study, Frankenberg interviewed women who grew up learning to hate being Jewish, by learning to deny it from their parents negative behaviour. In the case of a women named Eve, she said, "1 had spent many years saying, "Ifm not Jewish, but my parents are. 1 was in a lot of denial.. -1 believe 1 leamed a lot of it from my mother. People would often assume that 1 was Jewish, and 1 liked that at the tirne" (222). But, later Eve spoke of Itfindingl1 [her] Jewishness, in fact what she did was find a new way of relating to the fact of being Jewish and found a positive value in her Jewishness. She explained, "ten years ago, 1 went through a lot of reading and a lot of groups and ...events about being Jewish. Tt's just become a very natural part of my life nowft(222). Unlike a religious Jewish identity, hre started a process of consciously choosing or crafting a way of belonging, a mode of relating to Jewish cultural and religious practices and communities . For Eve, this involved re j ecting rnany of her parentsr choices about Jewish identity, especially those that looked like assimilation or responding to anti-Jewish racism by hiding (Frankenberg, 1993 :223) . Like Eve, Frankenberg found that al1 the Jewish women she interviewed also had their Jewish identity shaped by anti-Jewish racism throughout their lives, through its "persistence. . .both in the memories and in [their] present -day [experiences] (223). Like other Ashkenazi Jews, the women (some of these women that grew up in the 1920s and 30s) , had a sense of Jewish identity ascribed rather than chosen,

Ashkenazi Jews for much of this century in the United States and Europe have been placed on the borders of whiteness, at times viewed by the dominant white culture as cultural outsiders, and at times as racial outsiders ...never as constitutive of the cultural nom. At times the cultural markers of Jewishness became the focus of or context for anti-Semitism, and this in turn affected cultural practice ...Jewish women mostly viewed their cultural identity as linked inextricably to being a target or potential target, for oppression based on ethnicity (1993 :224) .

Frankenberg's subjects experience of anti-Jewish racism varied somewhat by generation and also by country of origin. In the past they encountered it in the educational system, jobs, housing and university admission (at least until the 1950s). Today, the prejudice is more verbal, cultural dorninance (still), threats of violence. Like the participants in Gibel Azoulay' s study, the women expressed the view, " that while violent anti -Semitism is not widespread now, it has been in the past and easily could be again" (Frankenberg, 1993:227). In this introductory chapter 1 have shown that Jews have different concepts of being Jewish, and have been variously catagorized as different f rom other Christian Europeans . By the nineteenth century religious anti-Judaism becomes anti-Semitic racism, with the introduction of the Aryan-Semite binary, directed against Jews constructed as non-white and/or black (borrowing from early Christian doctrine which I discuss in the next chapters in more detail) . Non-Orthodox Jews have consciously built and created their identities, after engaging in various degrees of assimilation and acculturation, and experiencing anti-Jewish prejudice, in the United States and Canada. As 1 mentioned earlier, questions surrounding Jewish identity are of no concern for ultra-Orthodox

Jews, for them it is just a matter of following Jewish law, indeed according to many of them it is the only true way to be Jewish. This discussion necessitated a historical and sociological focus on the categories of whiteness and blackness. Indeed, as Ruth Frankenberg astutely points out, investigating whiteness is necessary and challenges claims of "rightful dominance1',

[Whiteness] does have content inasmuch as it generates noms, ways of understanding history, ways of-thinking about self and other, and even ways about thinking the notion of culture itself . Thus whiteness needs to be examined and historicized.. Jiewing whiteness as "no culture1'has the same double-edged effect on the question of identity as it has on that of practice: [whites] at times view themselves as I1emptytt,yet at other times as the center or nom (the real Americans [and Canadians] ) . Naming whiteness and white people in this sense helps dislodge the claims for both to rightful dominance (italics in original, 234) .

But a discussion of whiteness must also challenge claims of white homogeneity and "white privilegetl,a primary goal of this thesis. Blackness as a category of investigation and lived experience has also been crucial ta understanding the construction and diversity of Jewish identity, in order to challenge wilful misconceptions about Jews as solely being white and/or Ashkenazi, despite evidence to the contrary. 1 hope this beginning has gone some distance in disrupting %aturalizedtl and exclusive ways of thinking about Jews, blacks, and blackness, therefore challenging the hegemonic categories of interracial " and Ormixed racen. It is important that one takes away the point that Jews (and others) , at dif ferent times and dif ferent political perspectives, have been seen as "blacktt, (and ItnonwhiteN, a possible third category) and/or ltwhitetV.This chapter of course has by no means told "the whole storyN about Jewish identities and historical and sociological relations to whiteness and blackness. With this chapter, 1 have attempted to wet people's appetites with a brief overview, by focusing the lens on Jews, in a bid to introduce and encourage the reader, for further discussion, questioning, and investigation into what many consider the rnundane features of identity, in preparation for the specific focus of this thesis -- Jewish self-hatred and passing--products of living on the borders of and between blackness and whiteness. CHAPTER TWO

INTRODUCTION

"before Hillel Asked, "If 1 am only for myself," he asked, "If 1 am not for myself, who will be?" . . .~iterally,who will stick up for me if I dontt respect myself enough to stand up for myself, If I can't articulate my own concerns so that others understand and care about them? Here is our beginning. Have we been for ouraelves sufficiently already?"

lu [Class] cornes to be seen as identical to race. People of color are considered the same as working and poor people. Other aspects of racism--cultural erasure, assimilation, self-hate ...are simply not heeded, nor are ...strengths or ethnic or racial minorities acknowledged unless- -in a wash of white self -hate - people of color are romanticized as stronger, more authentic, somehow better than whites; but better because they are such victimsM

IlThe problem is not a lack of common issues, not a lack of desperate need. The problem for us, as Jews, is that we are often afraid to gather with other Jews, afraid to be visibly Jewish, afraid-too often with reason-to know the extent of anti-Sernitism in our comrades, neighbors, co-workers, friends, We are afraid of being or of seeming racist; afraid of our own ignorance of Jewish culture and traditionn

White-skin privilege is assumed to compensate for lack of power and privilege in every other sphere. Al1 white [people] are assumed to be exactly alike, a monolithic group who are wealthy, pampered and self-indulgent ...The ability to analyze complicated intersections of privilege and oppression can help us to grasp that having white skin does nor negate the reality of anti-Semiti~rn~~

--Barbara Smith, 1984 :81 1 have a formidable task ahead of me, in that, 1 must make a case for contemporary Jewish oppression in a North American context . For many people, both laypeople and scholars, at this historical juncture " Jewish oppression" sounds like an oxymoron, as Melanie ~aye/Kantrowitz explains,

Categorizing Jewish oppression tbeludesconven- tional categories [race, ethnicity, religion] , Jewish stereotypes prove that anti-Semitism does not exist. Jews are rich, powerful, privileged, control the media, the schools, the business world, international banking ...how could such powerhouses ever be in trouble? These stereotypes ...prevent recognition of how we are threatened or demeaned as Jews (Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, 1991 :99) .

Furthemore, instead of discussing threats and acts of violence and cultural loss, 1 choose to mite about a particular by-product of anti-Jewishness, which although discussed by North American, Jewish academic and activists for the last fifteen years

or so (Burstow 1992;Gilman 1986;Kaye/Kantrowitz; Rich 1982) is not something many Jewish laypeople or organizations feel enabled or perhaps interested in discussing--self-hatred. 1 believe that because Jews are not seen as oppressed, as mentioned in Melanie ~aye/Kantrowitzcomment above, that self-hate cannot be a serious problem or concern for us, but as Sander Gilman points out, self- hate is of wide concern for Jewish-oriented scholars, as the Itdiscourse concerning the internalization of dif ference appears thmughout contemporary Jewish writinp (Gilman,1991:33). But perhaps the mood among laypeople is changing. At a recent conference in Montreal, my host at the bed and breakfast, a Jewish woman in her sixties, asked what my research is. (Before 1 tell people there is always a moment of hesitation and nervousness on my part, but 1 never deny my interest in Jewish self -hate.) To my surprise she was interested and begin telling me about her sons, who have according to her, abandoned their "JewishnessM, despite being raised in a IrJewish homet1.She wanted me to stay and talk some more. Before 1 left she wished me well and asked me if there was much demand for this kind of work. I told her that I believe there is, especially with the help of work like Sander Gilman's on self-hate and the racing and gendering of the ttJewishttbody (among Jewish responses to anti-Jewishness) on the Jews of Germany in the last few centuries. I think her interest showed me that perhaps talking about Jewish self-hate is not as taboo as 1 initially believed, somebody just needs to begin or rather continue the discussion in Canada. I have to prove how detrimental and contemporary self-hate is for Ashkenaz Jews -- that it is indeed worthy of discussion. As Sander Gilman argues,

Negative images associated with concepts of race --whether of Jews or African-Americans-- persist atrongly into the 1990s and they are alsopreflect- ed in the internalization of these images within the groups stereotyped. The internalization of douhts about the body are not lirnited to the fin de siecle. The internalization of such stereotypes cari lead to self-destructive behavior (''self- hatredw), but it can also lead to productive and successful means of resistance (1991:XO) . In terms of resistance, Gilman believes that [poets], scientists, critics [such as myself], philosophers, physicians can take the doubts which are embodied in racial concepts and transform them into constructive actions for the individual, if not for the groupI1 (1991:240). But how does one embark on such a project such as this when self-hate, in the form of negative Jewish stereotypes, is such an integral component of Jewish humour, especially American standup comedy. My task seems insurnountable when cornedian Joan Rivers, in front of an international audience on Larry King Live, gleefully makes comments about Jews firmly rooted in centuries old anti- Jewish rhetoric and ideology. Recently Larry King asked her if she was cooking for Thanksgiving. She responded, by raising her manicured hands and asking, l'are you kidding? I'm JewishtB. Jews are reduced to caricature, and in other words, Jewish women do not work". We are parasitic, sound farniliar? Her comments are both anti-Semitic and sexist, and imply that al1 Jews are middle-class and/or wealthy. Her anti-Semitism reinforces Christian anti- Semitism and misogyny.

Finally, how does one discuss contemporary Jewish self-hatred in the monumental shadow of the discourses of the Shoah and its central importance as a trope for Ashkenaz oppression (and other forme of oppression), without seeming self-pitying or self-

"My mother, who works as a cook from six in the morning, five days a week, ia vezy angry by this continuous tljoketl about Jewish women not working . indulgent? Indeed, as Vivian Patraka explains in her essay (1997) "Situating History and Difference: The Performance of the term Holocaust in Public Discoursew, discussing less violent forms of oppression and anti-Semitism in relation to the Shoah is quite difficult:

the threat of genocide and even actions deemed potentially genocidal may not be the best measure for evaluating the everyday oppressions to which people and groups are subject, and auch a treatment MY aven serve to minimire the importance of daily opptemaiona, eapecially when they are not in lino with a teleological narrative of eacalating violence ...Auschwitz becomes a monumental metonomy for the Holocaust, for al1 anti-Semitism (s), and for the consequences of intolerance. Using auschwitz as an emblem of al1 anti-Semitism(s) may actually obscure the current mechanisms by which they functionm (emphasis added,72).

Therefore I write this thesis, with a profound sense of need and urgency, in the hope of filling a gaping and cornplacent academic void, as 1 seek a modicum of visibility and acknowledgement of one varied outcome of the negative ef fects of the legacy of anti-Jewishness - self-hatred and its sibling: trpassinglt,because as Gilman explains in his study (1991) The Jewr s

[Those] who are forced to internalize the projections of the dominant culture because of their position of powerlessness (and their desire to achieve the..,illusion of control over theix lives) suffer under a double burden. This is not to Say that this burden prevents people from living productive lives, but they are always lives lived against the sense that one is marked, that one is too visible (1991:241) .

This thesis is rny response - an analysis of a "strategy of survivalV1, in reaction to anti-Semitic rhetoric and acts of prejudice, in a Canadian context . In this introduction 1 provide an overview of why this work is necessary and generally define key terms such as self -hatredU, and what "sounding JewishIv has corne to mean historically, and the manner in which it applies to my parents and myself. The rest of the thesis consists of a literature review, a much needed review that introduces the reader to a significant part of the broader discussion of Jewish self -hatred within Jewish cultural studies and identity and related discourses, from the 1980s to the present time. For the second to last chapter I have written a persona1 narrative, as this kind of research is becoming more acceptable as an educational tool (see Carter, 1993; Cormelly & Clandinin, 1990; Eisner, 1991; Diamond 1991; Goodson, 1991; Schon, 1991; Feuerverger, 1997)15 consisting of selected moments of my childhood, growing up and revisiting periods of self-hate and passing in my parents, paternal uncle and myself. 1 limited the analysis to these family members, because within the close and intense proximity 1 found myself observing them, (as a youngster 1 fancied myself as quite the behaviour analyst) and remember

%race Feuerverger, a professor in Turriculum, Teaching and Learningtl at OISE-UT, shows in her references, that tr[narrative]research is becoming accepted as a means of understanding teachers' culture from withinw (1997:41). obaerving them growing up (perhaps believing that 1 would need to recall these childhood moments later in life?) , and because of how they eventually shaped my Jewish identity and Jewish responses to anti-Jewishness. Moreover, 1 suppose 1 also chose to limit the study to our four lives, because of the narrative works and studies of Adrienne Rich, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and other Jewish American lesbian feministsl narratives about their parents, particularly their fathers. The narrative about my parents f lowed easily . Looking back now, 1 know that f had been paying close attention to my parentst responses to anti-Jewish practice, as they eventually helped to shape mine and that of my siblings. 1 was the only family member interested in examining Jewish responses to self-hatred, especially Jewish passing.

1 became interested in Jewish ltpassingtl,because most of my farnily members were able to at least attempt it, especially my mother and 1. We had an nondescript German surname and we did not have JewishM names, except my mother, who had a Hebrew name. My mother and 1 were and are still light-skinned (despite suri damage) and we have light-coloured eyes and we colour our hair blond, but even with auburn hair and later brown hair in high school, 1 still passed. My self -1oathing was so deep, that I used to take pride in passing as a gentile. 1 thought it was a compliment not to ttlook Jewishn. This is by no means an tteasyttundertaking, indeed it is only recently that 1 perhaps fully appreciate this undertaking in Adrienne Rich's cornments from her brave, and groundbreaking essay ttSplitat the Rootm, "writing this seems to be so dangerous an act, fiiled with fear and shame. .-1 have to face the sources and the flickering presence of my own ambivalence as a Jew; the daily, mundane anti-Sernitism of my entire lifett(1982 :100). 1 am exposing my family members and myself , exposing our internalization of ant i - Jewish ideology. But 1 do so as a means to an end. 1 want my readers to realize how hurtful self-hate is, and that Ashkenaz Jews internalize an anti-Jewish belief system the way non-whites and non-Jews internalize racism, and f ind it hard to love ourselves and other Jews . In this narrative about my parents, uncle and myself, 1 do not daim to speak for al1 Ashkenazi Jews. Like Roger Simon, III speak here as a Jew without claiming any authority to speak for Jewsu (1995:93). 1 consulted my mother16 about the purpose of this project and ta gauge her comfort level with such personal disclosures. She was initially scared and adamant and did not want to be included, for fear of negative repercussions about discussing the anti-Jewishness she experienced as a child growing about among Poles in 1940s Poland. I1It's only my wordsIt she said, "1 mean ...thatls what 1 was told, they can say 1 was lyingll. She was afraid of upsetting the very people who oppressed her. So manifests the power, the mental imprint of anti-Semitism that rny mother lives with. Al1 these years later, they, these Poles, have the power to scare and silence and contra1 my mother. 1 told her al1 the more

%y paternal uncle died four years ago and 1 am not in contact with my father. reason that we must go ahead with this narrative in order to show the seriousness and endurance of anti-Semitism and the by-product of self-hate. 1 must qualify the comment 1 made above, regarding the "need and urgency to be heardtb,as Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin point out in their introduction to their 1997 anthology Jews and Other Dif ferences. The New Jewish Cultural Studies, the problem is not that Jews have been denied a voice.. .the problem is that "few outside of the Jewish community have imagined that anything they said was worth listening tott (1997,ix) . This speaks to our invisibility as Jewish oriented academics. Furthemore,

While exciting work plausibly identifiable as Jewish cultural studies has been done in recent years ...the work of establishing a l1Jewish placettwithin the shifting field of cultural studies has barely begun. To a profound extent, a retrospective devaluation of Jewish difference in exile has been a key corn- ponent of the dominant historiography of- Jews since World War II. The conception according to which the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel constitute a Jewish return to history... reinforces a conception of pre-modern, post-Exhilic ~ewishexperience as being primarily of antiquarian or philological interest, rather than cfitical responses for the necessary refashioning of Jewishness in the present (1997:vii.i).

The Boyarins argue that this invisibility and discounting of Jewish diasporic experience and subsequent scholarship, is perhaps the result of the unique framework of Jewish studies, which has differed from other fields in cuitural studies, in that most of the faculty have been over the years predominantly Jewish, whereas the mernbers of other disciplines within cultural studies have not been members of their area of cultural studies or their area of intellectual specialization. This fact has created a dilemma, the problem of Vew outside of the Jewish community [imagining] that anything they said was worth listening toI1 (1997,ix). In his 1995 essay "Face to Face with Alterityfl,Roger Simon, a professor in the department of curriculum, teaching and learning, at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto (OISE-UT), writes that "teaching as a Jewu might elicit questions from his non-Jewish students, such as "Iwhy does Simon need to constantly refer to things Jewish?I1 1s he having an identity crisis?I1 This question makea sense only because of the absence of refereace to Jews and Jewiih perspectives in the

*nomtalm course of university teachingIt (emphasis added, 1995 :101) . 1 am one of the llyoung [scholars] who happens to find questions of Jewishness a productive field for exploring more general issues relating to the politics of difference. Although each cultural situation has its own dynamics and special epistemological problems, they have much in common as wellw (Boyarin and Boyarin, 1997:~).As Boyarin and Boyarin point out,

Research and critique of Jewish culture has much to offer to the cultural studies corn- nity as well, much that is specific enough to Jewish cultural history to be most richly articulated there but nevertheless applicable and useful in other cultural studies as well. Let us take, for example, the issue of diaspora ...This has lately become a pivotal concept in certain parts of cultural studies, especially those involved in the study of postcoloniality. Cultures of peoples in diaspora, their cultural preservation, and the doubled conscious of such ieoples--as well as the ways that diaspora be- cornes paradigmatic of a certain cultural condition, in the postcolonial era tout court -- are increasingly vivid areas of thought within the paradigm. The Jewish diaspora, for which the term was invented, provides the longest history of diasporic cultural survival and production. Thus both its details and its theorization have much to offer to scholar-critics whose primary area of focus are the black-Atlantic or the Indian diaspora, for example" (italics in 0riginal~l997:x-xi).

One of the other current themes in cultural studies in the construction of racial categories and is also the focus of research in Jewish cultural studies. Within this new research,

"the tortured question of whether Jews are "whiteN is shown to have a complex history --and that history in turn sheds light on the politics of identity and exclusion in American lifeot(Boyarin and

Boyarin, 1997:xi). Supporting my thesis, that Jewish self-hate and passing have been a Jewish appendage in diasporic history in the Americas, Boyarin and Boyarin argue that,

the persistence of racism has enabled Jews in the United States to be and become safely . Paradoxically, it can also reveal how such an indirect exploitation of racism curtails significantly the sphere in which

"Saying that Jews have been "safely whitett is quite a problernatic statement. While many Jews in the U.S. have risen to middle-class status and later viewed as ttmodelNimmigrants, especially after world War II, they have not been safe from hate and violence, from the KKK and other neo-nazi sympathizers, as the recent shootings in the US. have shown. ~learlythese groups do not view Jews as being white. For that matter, there as Jews of European descent, likë entertainer Sandra Bernhard, who do not categorize themselves as white. we are free to continue being and to become Jewish, and suggests in turn unexpected in- sights into the constraints and creative potentials of other group identities in the United States (1997:xi) ,

When 1 applied for graduate school, I knew that 1 had to write about growing up Jewish and working-class, and eventually lower middle-class in Toronto as people often "ignore the variety of class experience and location of JewsIt (Kaye/Kantrowitz, 1991 :99) . I wanted to write about being marginalized by non-Jews and Jews in daily life. Mark Zarecki, executive director of Ottawa's Jewish Family Services expressed at a recent conference on Jewish poverty, "'We have in Jewish communities a misperception that al1 Jews are wealthy,", . As a result, the Jewish poor often consider themselves outsiders in their own communities. '"Among the poor, theyfre treated as Jews. Among the Jews, they're treated as poorur

(Canadian Jewish News, December, 16, 1999) .le In 1994, as an undergraduate at York University, in Himani Bannerj i s third year sociology course ItRace"and Racism, 1 learned the words to name and theorize the history of oppression 1 and other Jews and other marginalized Others had experienced. 1 felt ernpowered to look at anti-Jewishness for the first time in many years, having abandoned it as part of an anti-racist stniggle, like so many other Jews in progressive political activism. In 1984, Jewish American Lesbian activist Elly Bulkin wrote about this dilemma, how Jews and non-Jews,

18ftPovertyAmong Jews Explored at Conf erenceIt, December 16, 1999, Canadian Jewish News. who have not thought about, talked about worked against anti-Semitisrn ...with women, Jewish and not, who continue to take the position that the oppression of Jews today is not Mserious~perhaps arguing additiona- lly that attendance at workshops on internalized anti-Semitism merely reflect self-in- dulgence. It is further compounded when they argue that work against Jewish oppression necessarily drains energy from the fight against white supremacy (1984 :109) .

Learning about the as "signifierttand as a socially and historically constructed entity, towards developing an analysis of I1raceIt and racism and its intersection with class, gender and sexuality, 1 learned that 1 was historically raced, gendered and classed as an Ashkenaz Jew, like other historical Others. But the real "turning point" came when 1 saw the title of a then upcorning book by Sander Gilman at the bottom of the title page, in an article of his that we were discussing. It was called

I1Jewish Self-HatredIt. 1 was excited and relieved because 1 had waited to see those words for a long time, as 1 immediately acknowledged that 1 was self-hating. 1 began recalling the anti- Jewish rhetoric in American television, and movies, that is., most portrayals of Jewish women and men have been stereotypical (and written by Jewish men) , from negative to sentimental. Two of the most powerful and continuous caricatures have been the nagging

Wewish motherm (in "Bye Bye BirdieI1, "BeachesIr and WmdaN) and the neurotic, nerdy, and/or emasculated hen-pecked Jewish son or father (Rhoda, Mur~hvBrown [Miles Silverberg], Northern Emosure and Seinfeld) (Berger, 1996)19. Indeed, it is often down played like anti-Jewish oppression in the United States and Canada. It was part of my Jewish legacy that my parents and other Jews had passed on to me. Until that moment, I did not know it was possible to research and mite about Jewish self-hatred, in a non- judgemental way. Too often Jews with conservative leanings and/or attitudes arrogantly label Jews outside their group as I1self- hatingI1 (this streak 1 have recognized in myself) , especially if they are critical of Israeli government policies regarding Palestinians, because they do not fit neatly into some narrow essentialist (sometimes political, religious etc.) definition of

If JewishnesslI, therefore there are ftgoodllJews and bad Ir Jews , parodying anti-Semitic rhetoric. One Canadian writer, calls Jews he does not like, EJIS - "Embarrassed Jewish Individualsw (~almar,l994:l79) 1 had experienced feelings of self -1oathing growing up and had witnessed it in my parents and other Jews. Although 1 was born

or more information about the history of these stereotypes, especially in television, please read the collection Too Jewish ? Challensins Traditional Identities (ed.) Norman L. Kleeblatt (New Brunswick, New Jersey:Rutgers University Press, 1996) especially Riv-Ellen Prell' s ffWhyJewish Princess Don't Sweat: Desire and Consumption in Postwar American Cul tureIf and Maurice Berger' s It The Mouse That Never Roars : Jewish Masculinity on American Televisionfl. IOSee Gilman's discussion about how narrow essentialist definitions of ttJewishnesslllead to various Jews being labellcd Ir self -hatingtlor frbadlrand/or "corruptW Jews . Furthemore, he suggests that the categorization of some these Jews as IBbadnor *corruptl1 is in itself a an act of pro jected anti-Semitic-self-hate on the part of "goodlt Jews who do the labelling (Gilman, The Jew8s Body 1991:33). here, I have been an outsider in Canadian society, though some would argue otherwise, because of my fair skin etc., As a racially and/or ethnically marked person, 1 had to negotiate daily within the Jewish world of my home and private Jewish school, and mostly Jewish neighbourhoad (we were a mix of non-observant conservative Jews, Orthodox Jews and Italians) and the Christian world. Looking back, this insulated Jewish environment gave me a much needed feeling of being accepted. Yet, there were times that I did not like being Jewish, because there were constant reminders about how hated we were , via persona1 bigoted mot ivated vandalism (broken windows) at my private Jewish school, persona1 encounters (slurs) or media coverage of anti-Jewish incidents.

One of my strongest and last memories of rny Jewish school years came when 1 was sixteen. While waiting at the bus stop at the end of the school day, young men my age took dom one of the school bill boards in aid of Soviet Jews. They srniled and dismantled the sign slowly so that we al1 would watch. 1 just watched and did not know what to do. The helplessness of these situations never leaves you . 1 thought once that there must be a reason to hate us so much. We must have been bad people. There were also constant reminders, from birth, that we had to change, prune away at our Jewishnese to fit, tu be the right kind of Canadian. My Motherts physician, a second generation acculturated Jewish Canadian told my mother that she could not give us Jewish or Russian Names because the children at school would make fun of our names. So Gedalia became Gary, Mordechai become Michael, Dreiza became Debbie, and 1, Rosa, became Rosalin. Thus began a life of Jewish erasure to "fit inM and assimilate into Canadian middle-class society in Toronto.

While growing up, rny parents and my f atherls uncle, provided contrasting models of Jewishness and self -hatred. Although 1 began to construct my own Jewish identity, like other Jewish children growing up, it was my parents who decided what kind of Jews we would be, especially in terms of participation in Jewish community activities and knowledge of history (Frankenberg, 1993 :223) , with my mother in a more direct instructional rnanner, while my fatherts contrasting style, involved I1teaching1lus more by his example of non-interest and sporadic comments of self-pride and contempt for being Jewish.

It was rny mother who insisted that we attend Associated Hebrew Day School, a private conservative, orthodox and middle class Jewish school that taught religious instruction, history, literature and Hebrew, and Jewish pride. Before the beginning of each fa11 term, my mother had to %egotiateN, (that is beg), for lower tuition fees. My father said that it was a waste of money. My mother however, raised in a religious and culturally viable environment in Eastern Europe and Israel for seventeen years felt otherwise. She wanted us to grow up with a strong Jewish identity, not necessarily religious, but with a sense of history and cultural practice, keeping kosher (unlike my father) so that we would celebrate Jewish holidays and build a connection to the State of Israel, the place she learned to cal1 %ornem, after she and her family fled Germany in 1946. My father was, as I alluded to earlier, rather passive in Jewish identity, that is, he never thought about it the way 1 and mother did and still do. He simply believed that he was Jewish (in an ascribed essentialist way), and like he once remarked, it "was not such a bargain" (my mother scolded him for saying that in front of me). My father was referring to the constant persecution he and other Jewe faced growing up in Eastern Europe; in my fatherfs case the constant harassrnent he and his family experienced in 1920s and

1930s Minsk, in what is now the capital of White Russia, formally part of the Soviet Union. One tinte, his clothes stolen by Poles, as he sought refuge during the Shoah, in a Polish forest. 1 also learned about my father's Jewishness and his reacting ta anti-Jewish incidents at his variety store in the West Hill section of Scarborough, Ontario. You had to be tough and thick- skinned to run that store, and quick with responses and rebuttals. f would hear about and witness anti-Jewish attacks, masked as religious ttdebatestfabout who ' s religion was better, that resembled the medieval "debatest'that Christians invited Jews to participate in, in an attempt to embarraas them and degrade Judaism. Often these discussions in Scarborough er.ded with the Christian saying that Jews do not go to heaven, not even little Jewish girls. My uncle was a whole complex entity ont0 himself . He was given and f ashioned a very powerful persona with mystical overtones - the Godfather, (which 1 will discuss more in the narrative) . Even though my uncle only owned a variety store, a gold plated watch which he loved to let women touch, and a diarnond pinky ring, he was considered a "rich Jewtt; they conveniently overlooked his twenty year old suits, ehoes and old cars. Perhaps there was no other way they could interact with him. After turning sixteen 1 never returned to the variety store, mostly because of the anti-Jewish sentiment. 1 was tired of being told that Wews don't go to heavenN. I was privileged to be in a position where 1 was able to avoid the harassment, whereas my father and uncle were not. In this thesis 1 want to continue my research reflections on the cornplexities of Jewish diasporic identity, more precisely, Jewish self -hatred and its companion I1strategy of survivaltl,as Sherene Razack calls it - Jewish "passingn. While extensive work on Jewish and working-class self-hatred has been done by Jewish lesbian Americans like Adrienne Rich (1982), Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz (1991), and by Sander L. Gilman (1986), a study based on Canadian experience has not been forthcoming. 1 have read Canadian references to Jews' ambivalent relationship to Christmas

(Kalmar, 1994), but 1 have yet to find a narrative about Canadian Jewish identity that maintained an extended discussion of Jewish self -hatred and the Jewish response (strategy) of passing. Furthemore, in North America overall, despite its long historical practice, Jewish passing is never discussed alongside other forms of passing." This absence 1 reason is part of the invisibility

"NO Jewish accounts of passing were included in the popular collection on passing called, Passincr and the Fictions of Identitv (Durham and London: Duke University, 1996) , edited 37 that Jews face generally in academic discourse, especially regarding discussion of ItraceN and sexuality, despite a growing body of Jewish scholarship in these intersecting areas (aee Gilman, 1991; 1993; Pellegrini, 1997) . Confronting and analyzing Jewish self-hatred is important for me as an anti-racist activist, because the self-loathing in Jews is an obstacle in the pursuit of combatting anti-Jewish oppression. It is hard to combat anti-Jewish oppression in non-Jews while many

Jews, both laypeople and those in the media (the aformentioned Joan Rivers), often indulge and promote negative (and sentimental or mpositivett)stereotypes about themselves and other Jews . But I feel that my research is a step in the right direction; there is nowhere else for me to step at this juncture of my life. In any case, 1 feel obliged to discuss the self -hatred in myself and others and try to unpack it, in a bid to understand its roots and try to eliminate it. In his 1986 book on Jewish self-hatred, Jewish Self-Hatred,

by Elaine K. Ginsberg. In the introduction she States, The genealogy of the tenn passing in American history associates it with the discourse of racial dif ference and especially with the assumption of a fxaudulent "whitetr identity by an individual culturally and legally defined as "NegroN or black by virtue of a percentage of African ancestry (1996:3) . This is a narrow definition of American experiences of ttpassingMfor white and therefore probletnatic considering, as Deborah Britzman explains about the relationship between Jews and the category of "white- nessn, "Given the shoah, the idea of the Jew as Itwhitenin both North America and Europe is barely fifty years oldtr (1998: 104) . Anti-Semitism and the Hidden lanwase of the Jews, Sander Gilman begins by asking a rather legitimate question, "Why hate yourself when there are sa many willing to do it for you! (1), (a question 1 have been asked once or twice, by white gentiles and Jews, who do not take anti-Jewishness or racism seriously) . It is a question that stems from the ignorance that comes from privilege2'. However, intellectually the question must be asked in order to investigate this phenornenon, as Gilman keenly points out, "...the ubiquitousness of self-hatred cannot be denied. And it has shaped the self-awareness of those treated as different perhaps more than they themselves have been awarel@ (1986:l). In order to begin a discussion on Jewish self-hatred and passing, we must answer the key question posed by Sander Gîlman in his 1986 study, which 1 will use as the def inition of self -hate for this thesis, tv.. .what is self-hatred? what foms does it take?"

(1986:1), and understand the integral role of stereotypes to this whole process, and that of any form of oppression itself. Based on psychoanalytic theories of personality development, according to Gilman,

Self-hatred results from outsiders' acceptance of the mirage of themselves generated by their reference group - that group in

''~merican anti-raciat educator Jane Elliot has been trying to remedy the situation of white ignorance of racism against people of colour in the United States, for over thirty years by dividing her seminar participants into two groupe based on eye colour. One outcome is that the privileged participants learn about the self-doubt and self-hate that arises from racism. society which they see as def ining them as a reality. This acceptance provides the criteria for the myth making that is the basis of any cokal identity. This illu- sionary definition .. .contains an inherent, polar opposition. One the one hand is the liberal fantasy that any one is welcome to share in the power of the reference group if he abides by the rules that define that group. But these rules are the very definition of the Other. The Other compromises precisely those who are not pedtted to share power within the society. These outsiders hear an answer from their fantasy: Become like us --abandon your difference-- and you may be one of us (1986:2).

Furthemore,

The First sign - be like us, and you will become one of us--implies accepting one's own difference. But the more one attempts to identify with those who have labelled one as different, the more one accepts the values, social structures, and attitudes of this determining group, the farther away from true acceptability one seems to be (1986,2-3).

Gilman algo explains how and why he believes stereotyping serves the dominant group,

the mechanism of stereotyping is brought full cixcle, for the group defining the Other has projected its own insecurities concerning its potential loss of power ont0 the world in' the shape of that Other through which is ima- gines itself threatened. This projection of Othemess, with its implied definition of what is or is not acceptable within the reference group, is accepted by the outsiders as the definition of both what they should not be and what they should become. In subcon- sciously integrating their rejection into their definition of themselves, they, too proceed to project their sense of the un- resolvable dichotomy of the double bind, but they project it ont0 an extension of themselves. For it the power group if cor- rect in defining their Otherness -- and by definition it must be, or al1 attempts at identification with it are pointless -- then there truly must be something within them that is inherently different. In projecting this Otherness ont0 the world, they select some fragment of that category in which they have been included and see in that the essence of Otherness, an essence that is separate from their own definition of themselves and embodies al1 of the qualities projected onto them by the power group The central problern with this secondary level of projection is that it is almost always impossible to create a complete break with the new Other. For even as on2 distances oneself from this aspect of oneself there is always the voice of the power group saying, Under the skin you are really like them anyhow. The frag- mentation of identity that results is the arti- culation of self-hatred (1986,3).

Gilman then explains the integral role that stereotyping plays in self-hatred. He explains that,

self-hatred arises when the mirages of stereotypes are confused with realities within the world, when the desire for acceptance forces the acknowledgement of onefs dif ference . It is therefore one of the universal products of the way we are forced to see the world. On one level or another we are al1 Others to some group. But it ia pernicioui existence of culturally daterxniaed pattern6 of Othernrii, applied no+ to individuah but to groupe, that is mort in- taresting. . . [and most dangerous 1 would add] While we can outgrow the stereotype of adole- scence, with its implied lack of power and its potential for self-hatred, one caanot emcape one'. ethnie, religioua and clam ideatity. OPe caanot eicape there labels becauae of the privileged group8i myth that theae categorfer are imaiutable...These are simply myths about the na- tue of differencea that are spun about realities, such as skin color or age. The myths, are, however, powerful enough to substitute for realities. Outsiders view themselves as marginal and are thus dependent on such real or imagined categories to define the borders of acceptability, which must be crossed into the world of privilege ascribed to the ref erence group. . . (emphasis added, 1986 :4-5) .

Having drawn a thumb-nail sketch of Gilman's theory about self-hatred and its intimate connection to stereotyping, we must now explore the specificities of the beginning of European Christian stereotyping of Jews, in order to contextualize and try to analyze Jewish responses, like that of mine, my parents' and uncle. Second, 1 must outline the historical roots of what it means to I1sound JewishIt or tvtooJewishIt in order to lay the foundation for the form of self-hate that 1 internalized. As Gilman explains, [the] form that this self -hatred takes is not arbitrary.. . [it] follows the needs and demands of historical accident and social change;" (1986:3-4). Gilman provides a detailed history of the origins and history of the stereotyping of Jews as "blackW, with the ascription of blackness to Jews taking on various forms (1986:7). My discussion will focus on the pseudo-scientific racialization of Jews as %lackI1 and its Christian origins. Gilman begins his inquiry by

explaining that there are ulgoodu and Ht badI1' qualit ies associated with the Other, that are perceived as real. These construction of good and bad qualities are both protean and interchangeable

(1986:5) . He begins with a brief discussion of the "mythic qualitieslW of skin color, and then moves into Frantz Fanon's definition of the meaning of blackness in western culture, as a Itprojection of Western anxiety concerning the Other in terms of

42 colorI1. Fanon explains, that It In Europe. . . [black]. . .is the symbol of mil. . .Satan is [black]. . .when one is dirty one is black - - whether one is thinking of physical dirtiness or moral dirtiness ...and on the other side...the white dove of peace . . .heavenly light ( 1986 :6) . Gilman connects Fanon' s def inition of blackness symbolizing everything negative and argues that it is one of the mythical qualities associated with the Other, that people perceive as tlrealfl,as 1 mentioned above, having to do with being llgoodllor llbadll(1986: 6) . But, Gilman adds a crucial point in his analysis of anti-Jewish ideology and how it informs

Jewish self -hatred, namely that "the very concept of color is a quality of Otherness, not of reality. For not only blackr are black in thia amorphou. world of projection; 80, too, are JewiH (emphasis added, 1986: 6) . As evidence, Gilman cites Adam Gurowski, one nobleman of Polish descent, who in his 1857 memoirs writes, "numbers of Jews have the greatest resemblance ta the American mulat toes . Sallow carnation complexion, thick lips, crisped black hair. On rny arriva1 in this country (United States) I took every light-colored mulatto for a Jewf" . In the eyes of the non-Jew who defined them in Western Society the Jews became the blacksn (1986:7-8)." In Germany as well, the image of the black Jew appears with serious political implications in the late-nineteenth-century

23~sa European resident at the time of the Dreyfus trial, famed African American Scholar, W.E.B. Dubois was himself able to pass as a Jew in Slovenia, Eastern Europe. He was asked by his cab driver if he was Jewish. He answered in the affirmative and was taken to a Jewish inn (Gilroy,1993:212). racist publications. Il In his Foundations of the Nineteenth Centun (1899)It,Gilman shows, that Wouston Stewart Chamberlain, Richard Wagnerts son-in-law, categorized the Jews as !la mongrel race which always retains this mongrel characterIt (1986: 7) . Like many minds of the late nineteenth century, Chamberlain emphasized the centrality of "racial purityM, the Jews being the "least pure race1#,[and]

Ir the inf erior product of a "crossing of absolutely dif ferent typesM . Chamberlain stressed the Jews as the ultimate negative result of interbreeding (1986:7). He believed the Jews of his time, in their last period of ' I1hybridization1' ' , were the ' ltadmixtureof Negro blood with Jewish in the Diaspora of Alexandria, of which many with a man of Jewish persuasion at this day offers living proof" (1986: 7) . Gilman stresses the seriousness of Chamberlaints racist project by arguing that the Jewish focus was not one of general inquiry. Chamberlain wanted to,

document the biological basis of the "Jewish Ques- tion" as perceived by racist thinkers at the turn of the century. He sought out the idea of Blackness, a myth that had even stronger implications within the German tradition...because of the almost total absence of blacks in the German experience of the world (1986:7) .

By this historical periad, Germany had been a colonial power for less than two decades. The Germans associated their myth of Otherness ltto the paternalistic treatment of blacksN in their

colonies, who were powerless in these German-speaking colonies of central Europe. This myth of blackness waa then applied to Jews, who were taking on "a promised status in Europe1! (Gilman, 1986 :7) . Otto Von Bismarck commented in 1862, that the Jews had become the "white Negroestt, "because the demands of the Jews for political and social equality created in the privileged group, the Germans, the need to see the Jews as politically subservient and imutably differentn (1986:7) . But Gilman takes us back in history, back to Christian doctrine, to the origins of the mythical concept of Jews as black. He explains that "the association of the Jews with Blackness is as old as Christian tradition. Medieval iconography always juxtaposed the black image of the synagogue, of the Old Law, with the white of the churchn (1986:8). This juxtaposition is a relic of the Christian perspective of the Jews "which has been simply incorporated into the rhetoric of race.. . [it is] the model through which Jews are perceived, treated, and thus respond as if confronted with the reflection of their own realityI1 (1986:7). But it does not only have abstract, intellectual properties, it serves as a model through which Jews are viewed and treated. Jews in turn respond as if they are being show a true reflection of thelr own real existence (1986: 7) . Therefore Gilman asks, [if] the Blackness of the Jew is the synthesis of two projections of Otherness within the same code, then how did the Other, the Jews, respond to being labelled as black?" (1986:8) . In his 1993 book Freud, Race and Gender, a study on the racing and gendering of Jews in Freud's scientific circles of Vienna, and Freudts responses to being anti- Semitically pathologized as ef feminate and innately prone to mental disease, Gilman discusses the "blacknessn of Jews in more detail. He states that,

The blackness of the Jew was initially associated with the diseased nature of the Jewish body as well as with the syphilitic body. Jews are black because they are different, because their sexuality is different, because their sexual pathology is written on their skin. [one man] described the typical Vien- nese Jew in the 1780s as "the color of a black." the fabled skin disease plica polonical associated with the Jews and other from the East, rnarked the Jew as visibly different. ..,The essential Jew ..., even worse than the Polish Jew, is the Galician Jew, the Jew from the eastern reaches of the Haps- burg Empire. This theme reappears in Arthur Schopen- hauer's mid-nineteenth-century evocation of the Jews as "a sneaking dirty race afflicted with filthy diseases (scabies) that threaten to prove infectiousM (Italics in original, 1993 :159) ,

In his 1986 study of Jewish self-hatred, Gilman stresses the metamorphic nature of "al1 perceptions of dif ferenceIf (1986: 12) . Since the Jew can be perceived as black Gilman argues, like al1 beings who are Othered, based on "raceN, sexuality and gender, the Other can be made to possess any kind of negative quality, with variations in emphasis and construction in the creation of Otherness. In the case of the Jews, the stereotypes are different because they occur in a different context, but they are made of the same basic material as the other constructions of Otherness. Herein lies the heart of the methodology and direction of Gilmanfs study on Jewish self-hatred and that of mine,

[in] examining the projections of the dominant society concerning the Jews, in seeing the Jews as society has perceived them, one has the first key ta the structure of self-hatred. For what we shall be interested in examining is how Jews see the dominant society seeing them and how they project their anxiety about this rnanner of being seen ont0 other Jews as a means of externa- lizing their own status anxiety (1986:ll) .

Gilman explains that this complicated practice of the projections of the dominant group, in this case European Christiana, is a powerful formula and not some abstract equation. It is a powerful formula whereby European Christians act out their image of the black in their actions towards Jews. Furthemore, Gilman explains what Jews face when they attempt to resist the trappings of the stereotypes,

[when] Jews do not respond to this mode1 of treatment , a backlash occurs, Jews, responding to being treated as "b1ackN, strive even more to escape this category. European society sees this response as a "typically Jewishtlone, in which Jews, by trying to change, denies the truth of the category of perception as well as treatment, In altering their sense of self, Jews reify the reference grouprs treatment of them as lacking "trueW character (like their analogue, the black). Jews respond by projecting this image ont0 the world and creating a Jew who possesses al1 of the negative qualities ascribed to the image of the Jew as black (1986:12).

Focusing his analysis on American Jews from the twentieth century, Gilman defines the Jewish discomfort and/or dilemma with sounding "JewishN as such, "for some American Jews [sounding llJewish]represents the hidden Jews within the cormpt Jew of the Gospel, the mark of difference which offends even after the Jew is integrated into the mainstream of American cultureIr (Gilman, 1991:28) . Furthermore,

The creation of the image of the Jew who is identifiable as different because he or she sounds "tao Jewishu provides a mode1 through which we can see the structure of the image to create an absolute boundary of the difference of the Jew even as this boundary historically shifts and slides. Jews sound different because they are represented as being different (Gilman, 1991:î.l) .

My study is a significant undertaking for me and offer me a chance to analyze self -hatred and passing in a modern Canadian context, something that has not been undertaken, at least at great length. Whereas there have been Canadian Jewish collections that have included work about anti-Jewish practice in Canadian history and diasporic Jewish identity (see, Fireweed 1992 Jewish edition) , I have yet to find a study on Jewish self-hatred specifically. 1 believe that Jewish self-hatred is a key component of Jewish identity, one that can no longer be ignored, as Gilman argues, Ita study of self-hatred can provide a history of the myth building within a group, such as the Jews, as to the essence of their own identityBt (1986 :12) . Also, my study is important because it examines two Jewish women's lives as well, that of my mother and myself , in addition to Jewish menfS. Indeed, in his 1986 study, Gilman suggested that a study of Jewish self-hatred in women would be "well worth undertakingBr (1986 :21) . In this study 1 hope to provide for the interested reader an introduction of sorts as to how anti-Jewish oppression survives, in a parasitic-host relationship . That is ., anti-Jewish pre judice - the parasite, latches ont0 and feeds off the host - the Jew. The two components are one of the key functions that enable any form of oppression, in this case anti-Jewishness, to flourish. It is a way to insidiously enslave the (Jewish) mind, via the (Jewish) body. This narrative study will include my analysis, and wherever possible that of my parents and uncle, of situations that I have categorized as self -hating, a term also known as ' Vewish anti- Judaismtl' or ' " Jewish ant i -Semitismtl' is as Gilman points out, a "label for a specific mode of self-abnegation that has existed among Jews throughout their historyn (1986: 1) . The history and practice of the negative projection of the Jew as ttblackltis the stereotype that I and my family members, and other Jews in North America and elsewhere struggle with on a daily basis. 1 saw and still see, the daily attempts at negotiations in myself as a response to anti-Jewish slurs outside the home, and in observed, sometimes solitary comments and practices of my parents and uncle. As Gilman argues, 1 hope this thesis will help us understand and acknowledge,

the role which the Jews play in the cultural world of Christianity as the ultimate object of projection, The ~ew,caught up in such a system of representation, has but little choice, his essence, which incorporates the horrors projected on to him and which is embodied (quite literally) in his physical being, must try, on one level or another, to become invisible (1991: 236) .

and that, "bodies have a way of being seen again and again in the past, and identity--whether that of the Jews, or Blacks or Hispanics or women-- [the other] always has to perform a perilous balancing act between self and Otheru (Gilman, 1991:243). But before 1 continue 1 must put forth a necessary caution from Roger

Simon, who warns about I1romantically idealizing [oneself] as Other and drawing tao dualistic a picture of our social order" (1987: 34) . He states that [within] many pervasive social forms, 1 am not , and cannot totalize myself as an Other. The position of Other is not the only one from which 1 define my social identity", furthemore, I1my social identity is multiple. Who 1 am is both Jew and non-Jew (white... class-structured) ... or rather a particular historically and materially constituted version of a Jew and non-JewI1 (1987:41) . The goal ie to think of the '!concept of social identityw as

I1multiple, fragmented and oftime contradictory... ordered through the historical relations of power and control that have constituted the particular structured configuration of the social formation in which [we] livetl (1987~34-35). CHAPTER THRLE LITERATURE REVIEW

[There] axe people who want to meet us in our wholeness instead of fragment, and others who do not want to know, who run away, who want us to be quiet, who will use al1 kinds of indirect and gen- teel means to keep us that way, including the charge that we never talk about anything else"

Writing a thesis about the formation of Jewish identity and self -hatred, and passing, and the added tension of working-class status is quite a formidable and often daunting task. Different dilemmas arise throughout the whole process . The overarching problem though is finding material about Canadian Jewish identity that does not have a predominant focus on religious ritual. Apart from the notable and landmark Jewish feminist anthology like the Jewish Fireweed issue of 1992, 1 have had little luck finding Jewish narratives with a Canadian secular and cultural perspective on Jewish identity. Therefore, one can imagine how difficult it is to find Canadian narratives and other scholarship on Jewish self-hatred and passing. As a result of this dearth, 1 find myself looking south of the border once again, and revisiting texts that have become the foundation of my intellectual growth and scholarship, and going as far back as the now classic Jewish anthology, Nice Jewish Girls (1982).

But this predicament is double-edged, for it is these multiple and varied Jewish American and non-Jewish scholars who have introduced me to discussions about identity, about blackness and whiteness and Jewish identity and self-hatred, and passing in particular, with Jewish and non-Jewish lesbian feminists in the forefront of my reading experience. These works taught and encouraged me to become more introspective and to analyze and unpack my Jewish identity and to reflect on the inherent tensions of growing up whitez4,Ashkenaz-Jewish and working-class from 1970s Toronto to the present time. In 1984, Jewish American lesbian feminist Elly the debt Jewish scholars like myself owe to the scholarship of American lesbian, women of colour,

both the increasing number of wornen who define ourselves as Jewimh feminists and our growing activism against anti-Semitisrn within and outside the woments community awe a significant debt as well to the emergence in the last decade of a broad-based Third World feminist movement in this country. Women of color, especially lesbians, have been in the forefront of creating a theory and practice that insist on the importance of differences among women and on the positive aspects of cultures and identities.. (emphasis in original, 1984:98).

"Identifying myself as white is by no means an easy task. Indeed there are light-skinned and "oliveN skinned Jews who do not see themselves as white, because of historical experiences of anti-Semitism and the historical meanings of uwhitenessw. 1 attribute the choice perhaps as having been raised in white and Christian supremacist environments and having what has corne to be called "white-skin privilegefi. However, my experience of whiteness differs from Christians because of my experiences of anti-Semitism. Therefore it is problematic, and historically inaccurate, to paint Jews as solely privileged or oppressed. Furthemore, Bulkin States, [the] concept of identity politics has contributed greatly to the political thinking of other women who share both a positive identification and a specific oppre~sion~~(1984 : 98) . 1 have gleaned much about identity politics from these lesbian, American women that Bulkin mentions. In Canada, non-Jewish, non-white feminist-marxists scholars have introduced me to these American texts, but also their own scholarship, teaching and activism. Professors Arun P. Mukherjee and Himani Bamerji of York University, have especially given me a rigorous education of the interlocking systems and of ttracelm, gender, sexuality and class. In their classes, 1 also was introduced to the early work of bel1 hooks, but 1 was especially inspired by Audre Lordets collection Sister Outsider (1984), because of its keen analysis of the tensions of being both an oppressor and oppressed; and like Minnie Bruce Pratt, she also integrated anti-Semitism into her analysis of the interlocking forms of oppression. Furthemore, under their tutelage, (as I mentioned in the introduction), 1 regained an interest in Jewish subjectivities, especially Jewish self-image and self-hatred. This brief historical outline of my reading and researching experience is important in order to understand how 1 came to be interested in the study of Jewish identity, particularly self - hatred and passing. The scholarship of what is now known as identity politics" , of people of colour, particularly American lesbians, gave me the historical and conceptual foundation to begin work on building, alongside other Jewish-oriented scholars, awish 53 scholarship, with a secular interest. The problem 1 find in researching Jewish identity is finding material that deals with secular identity and angst. A lot of the resources on Jewish women in particular focus on Jewish religious rituals, which do not speak to my experiences as a Jewish woman. In 1993 1 was introduced to the writings of Adrienne Rich in an introductory class in womenls studies, and indirectly introduced, via rny teaching assistant Mary Polita, to Mimie Bruce Prattts now famous 1984 essay, "Identity: Skin, Blood, Heartw. It was my first exposure to a candid assessment of the multi-faceted construction of identity, a narrative of middle-class, Protestant, white-skin privilege. Pratt developed a ferninist consciousness like other white middle-class women in the 19709, and like them she lacked an analysis of racism and classism. Only later in her life, when Pratt came out as a lesbian, and experienced the discrimination, especially being seen as an unfit mother, did she begin to empathize with women and men who experienced racism and anti-Jewish pre j udice . She characterized her metamorphosis as an "exhausting process, thie moving from the experience of the llunkn~wnmajorityI1

(as Maya Angelou called it) into consciousnesstl~(1984 : 12) . It was a moral and "truthI1 gaining journey of sorts, whereby Pratt used the image of a "constricted eyetlthat only saw what she was taught to see (Ibid., 1984:17). Pratt created a multi-faceted analysis of her interlocking subjectivities as a white, southern, Protestant woman, growing up in the Post war American south. Her essay came to be known as an essay on lesbianism, heterosexism, white privilege, racism, and anti-Semitism. The essay taught me many things, as a layperson and an academic. A seed was planted in my mind -- a Jewish ~~~~n~~i~u~ness~of sorts, that is., a revived interest in anti- Jewish prejudice and its historical and complex relationship to diasporic Jewish identity. As T mentioned in the introduction, until 1994, like other north American Jews in leftist political activism, I played dom anti-Jewish prejudice, and did not feel entitled to broach the subject in class discussion. In the 1984 class, on "raceIl and racism, we discussed the body as a ttsignifierw,and only then did 1 learn and think about a concept of a Vewish bodyt1 as a signifier, that is., a body that was raced and gendered. The combination of reading the work of non-Jewish and Jewish, especially non-white scholars discussing the racing and gendering of black bodies, and Sander Gilrnan's dicussions of Jewish and other historically rnarginalized bodies, as 1 would later discover on my own, ignited my present interest with Jewish perceptions and reactions to anti-Jewish prejudice, particularly self-hatred and the practice of passing.

In this literature review, 1 will focus my discussion on four interrelated areas of my research on Jewish identity, self-hatred and pasaing : whiteness, self -hatred, and passing. Most of literature combines al1 of these aspects of identity, each choosing or not choosing to highlight a particular aspect of identity. For example, I will discuss one exceptional piece of Black American scholarship that focuses solely on passing, Adrienne Piperrs ll~assing for white, passing for black" (1991). For this M.A. thesis 1 knew that 1 would have to return to Prattfs essay, but as a different layperson and student. In the interim period of six years 1 also had read rnany of Gilman's work on Jewish men's body in particular, such as his work on Sigmund Freud and Franz Kafka. In his work and that of Jewish American and Canadian f eminists, the practice and politics of Jewish passing was discussed. It was seen as a negative act of self-denial that resulted from anti-Jewish prejudice (Nosov, 1992:107). Having read the work of Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Ruth Frankenberg, Anne Pellegrini, Daniel Boyarin, to name but a few, dealing with Jewish identity and class, whiteness, self -hatred and denial, and passing, I began to see things in Pratt's essay that 1 had not seen before or discussed in feminist essays about the narrative, My experiences of whiteness and class were different from Pratt's historically, but also because of my status as a Jew in contemporary, urban Toronto. However, like me, Pratt had the strotegy of passing, in her case, as a heterosexual. Indeed she also talked about passing as a heterosexual woman. On hiding her lesbianism, Pratt candidly explains,

1 could conceal it from you. 1 could hide this part of myself as other light-skimed, European- looking folks in this country have hidden part of themselves, that kept them from fitting in, assimilating, being safe in white Christian culture: hidden their religion, or the poverty of working-class people; or their ethnicity, any co~ectionof wundesirable*people, to Jews, or Mediterranean or Middle Eastern peoples, or Na- tive Indians or Asian peoples. or to any people of color (1984:20) .

Pratt has written a lesser known, or perhaps less discussed essay among non-Jews, on the historical Christian persecution of

Jews called "The Maps in My Bibleu. In this essay she discusses the complexity of white-skinned Jewish experience, especially persecution, in contemporary United States and European countries of the past . She argues that (European) Jews are not simply white and privileged2', but that we have historically been placed precariously Itbetweenblack and whiten . Despi te economic benef its , of the past fifty years, Jews have an insecure hold on personal safety and ~ecurity'~.Furthermore, Pratt addresses the ignorance that so many non-Jews possess about the history of Jewish persecution in European history. She explains that racism in the

U. S. context discourages a more complex analysis of oppression that involved Jews:

Al1 of us caught on the black-and-white map of the U.S., in the history of white suprernacy and slavery, the necessity of being one or the other, slave or free, by blood, by race: white gentiles

'*~eborahBritzman argues that "the term white privilege is treated as if it were monolithic, ahistoric, and unambivalent in experience" (italics in original, 1998 :103) . 26~hisstatement has more meaning now, after the shooting at the Jewieh daycare centre in a suburb north of Los Angeles last year in 1999, and later that same year, the mugging of the two elderly Jewish men after attending a synagogue in north Toronto, with our privilege of thinking we always know who we are and what we are in relation to others, never even having to think about it. African Americans and others who we mark out visibly, by their dark- ness for hatred and discrimination, angry at those of us who are white for centuries of oppression and ignorance; angry wi th the anger of betrayal a t Jews wi th white-skin privilege who retain some economic benefi ts. Jews in their past of being hated and killed as the Warkest ones" in Europe, a history that few gentiles know or care about in this country; Jews caught in the middles of Black and white, offered a chance ta assimilate to safety and to a racist nom, while living with the history that safety has always vanished in past centuries, whether they have lived openly or secretly as Jewstt (emphasis in original, 1984, 1991:208) .

Furthemore, Pratt acknowledges the pressures that Jews (like other racial or ethnic Others) live under in a hostile anti- Jewish milieu, and that takes a great effort to like ourselves and nurture a positive Jewish identity:

Ifve seen in myself this lack of understanding about what it means ta nourish Jewish identity in a gentile world. Over the last ...y ears, 1 have watched, often with little comprehension. . [My] friends ...have labored arduously to create or maintain a foundation of Jewish identity in their lives (1984, 1991:211) .

Some Jews are tempted and able, like lesbians and gays, tu stay in a "c10set~~that is imposed upon us. In the 1992 Jewish Fireweed edit ion, Burstow makes a direct connection between Jewish and lesbian passing. She explains that both foms of passing are readily available, but fraught with psychic costs,

Our dilemma as invisible Jews is similar here to our dilemma as lesbians. We can pass; so the temp- tation to pass is omnipresent. While this tyranny is not as awful as the tyranny of having no choice, for indeed, we do have a choice and do have privilege, there is a unique tyranny to the choicë that continually confront us. Some non-visible Jews choose to be nevex seen, hence assimilation, loss of identity, and the illusion of safety. (This was the case with many Jews in the twentieth-century Germany; and they were gassed just the same (1992:17).

Elly Bulkin's scholarship has been pioneering as well in various intellectual interests to Jewish women on the left, in particular Jewish identity. While she has not devoted whole works to self-hatred and passing feminist activist, she has written eloquently on the subject, especially on the effects of self- hat red . In the 1984 Yours in Strussle, Three Feminist Pers~ectives on Anti-Semitisrn and Racism, Bulkin focused Jewish identity in an except called ThreadsIt, and connected Jewish passing to other forms of ethnic passing:

1 think too of the decision to celebrate one's identity: for those Native American women, Latinas, and Black women who could "passn as white; for the Jewish woman whose father changed his name in the thirties so he could "make it, and raised her, ignorant of her identity, as a Christian; for the Arab-American woman, who after internalizing her racial oppression, came only in the last few years to identify as a woman of color; for the Jewish-Latina, the Arab-Jewish woman (1984: 106) .

In addition to her analysis of passing and class mobility in 1930s and 40s United States, Bulkin also provides important historical analysis and cultural differences amongst different women and their ability to pass. She points out: Whereas white Jewish women usually have had the option of being in the movement as white women, not as visible Jewish women, women of color, except for those relatively few whose skin color features, and accent allow them to "passu for white have had to be there as who they werell (emphasis in original, 1984 :146) .

Adr ienne Rich's 1986 collection ent itled, Blood, Bread, and

Poetrv. Selected Prose 1979-1985, 1 have chosen to discuss several dif ferent essays, essays that 1 never heard or seen discussed in any kind of setting2'. Rich waxes eloquently and poignantly about the loss Jewish culture in middle class America and the particular narratives that her parents drew upon in order not to appear and sound like IlNew York JewsH. In the essay "Resisting Amnesiatt she describes the connection between the pressure to assimilate to an Anglo-Saxon nom, passing and class mobility in the United States:

To recover history, or herstory, means resisting two powerful pressures in present-day American culture ...One is the imperative to assirnilate; the other, the idea that one can be socially Ittwice- barn" . In its quest for a middle-class standard of life, every wave of immigrants who were not already Anglo-Saxon has been haunted by the pressure to assimilate. By constructing an ideal of America- nization and equating this with virtue, progressive- ness, decency and worth, the assimilation imperative has also assured that those least able to assimilate --most often because of skin color or gender but also because of ethnicity or religion--could be cast as absolute Other, sentenced to live by different laws, treated as victims of inf erior biology . (1983: 141)

"I believe the lack of discussion of Rich's Jewish focused easays, has to do with the Jewish invisibility that so many Jewish academics, like Torton Beck (1996) and Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin (1997), have been discussing. Please see my comments regarding Jewish invisibility in my introduction. Furthemore, Rich describes the various painful strategies that people who have been "othered" embark upon, tactics that specially speak to Jewish diasporic experiences in the United States and Canada as well:

The pressure to assimilate says different things to different people: change your name, your accent, your nose; straighten or dye your hair; stay in the closet; pretend the Pilgrims were your fathers; becorne baptized as a Christian; Wear dangerously high heels, and starve yourself to look Young, thin and ferninine; don't gesture with your hands; value elite European culture above al1 others; laugh at jokes about your own people; donft make trouble; defer to white men; smile when they take your picture; be ashamed of who you are. To assimilate means to give up not only your history but your body, to try to adopt an alien appearance because your own is not good enough, to fear naming yourself lest name be twisted into label. Through thia imperative, those who can npaa~mare cheated of the chance to define thexn8alvea and to rnake mutually reipectful and ~treagtheningalliances with othet self- defining people. It leaves th- uaanchored whea stem aria., ignotaat of their inharitance (emphasis added, 1983 :141-142). and,

[Iavi~~ibility]ii not just a matter of being told to keep yout private life private; if's the attempt to fragment you, to ptevont you ftom integrating love uad work and feelinga and ideaa, with the empowerpwirt that crn bring (emphasis added, 1983 :199-200) .

It takes some strength of soul--and not just individual strength, but collective understanding- to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which you are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard ...to make yourself visible, to daim that your experience is just as real and normative as any other, ...But at hast you are not doing the oppre~ior'e work, building your own closet l1 (emphasis added, 1983: 199) .

Like other Jewish feminists involved in leftist politics, including myself, a Jewish void developed in Rich that led her on a recovery mission of sorts. In the essay "If Not With Others,

How?I1 (1985), Rich delineates the psychic price she has paid and the process she has undertaken to salvage and/or create a Jewish identity, as a result of her parents' efforts to hate and hide her

Jewish roots and growing up in post-war United States:

It is feminist politics -- the efforts of women trying to work together as women across sexual, class, racial, ethnic, and other lines -- that have pushed me to look at the starved Jew in myself; finally, to seek a path to that Jewishness still unsatisfied, still trying to define its true homeland, still untamed and unsuburbanized, still wandering in the wilderness. Over and over the work of Jewish ferninists has inspired and challenged me to educate myself, culturally and politically and spiritually, from Jewish sources to cast myself into the ancient and turbulent river of disputation which is Jewish culture (1985:202) .

Despite my Jewish Conservative and private school upbringing for sixteen years of my life, I too became a I1starving JewIt. As 1 turned to the Left, and feminism 1 estranged myself from Jewish roots, not knowing how much 1 would eventually hunger for Jewish culture and interactions with ather Jewishly identified Jews. For the last six yeara or so, 1 have been weaning myself on Jewish scholarship and engaging in Jewish secular, cultural activities. 1 have found Rich's essay of Jewish self-discovery most insightful and comforting. Sometimes the passages read like a slice of my life experiences as a Jewish outsider growing up in Anglo Saxon Toronto, and as an outsider arnong religiously observant and acculturated Jews. Importantly, Rich also goes on to state, that "we have been stereotyped both viciously and sentimentally by others and have often taken these stereotypes into ourselvesN (1985:203). Jewish stereotyping of Jews is one of the hardest facts that 1 must bear, indeed, many Jews do not understand why 1 get so angry about stereotyping . They often respond, that the stereotypes are true, or that the jokes are just jokes and that 1 am too serious. They do not understand how dehumanizing the stereotypes are, and how they make other Jews, who do not fit them, feel. It is very painful to constantly have your Jewish identity questioned and therefore undermined. People constantly Say to me and other family members : tlyou'renice for a JewI1 ; "you don' t look JewishI1; or "you don't dress like a Jewu, etc., . Richrs most famous, or perhaps most well-known essay on Jewish identity is "Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish identityl1 (1982), whereby she outlines her family history of indoctrination into self -hatred and encouragement to %of tentl or hide her Jewishness, however she encounters Jewish women at cdlege that maintain a strong Jewish identity despite practices of plastic surgery and other kinds of alterations. Rich describes her encounters with these Jewish women: 1 found myself, at Radcliffe, among Jewish women. 1 used to sit for hours over coffee with what 1 thought of as the "real"Jewish students, who told me about middle-class Jewish culture in America. 1 described my background--for the f irst time to strangers -- and they took me on..,I learned the names of holidays and foods, which surnames are Jewish and which are Vhanged names" ; about girls who had had their noses VixedN, their hair straigh- tened. For these young Jewish women, students in the late 1940s. it was acceptable, perhaps even necessary, to strive to look as gentile as possible; but they stuck proudly to being Jewish, expected to marry a Jew, have children, keep the holidays, carry on the culturem (1982: 108) .

Rich goes to describe in great detail the process that she and the women her family were supposed to engage in to become the right kind Jews, in order to appease her acculturated Jewish father's and gentile motherOs notion of proper behaviour, ta protect them from anti-Jewish harassment. The processes of passing began in Richts childhood,

We - my sister, mother, and 1- were constantly urged to speak quietly in public, to dress without ostentation, to repress al1 vividness or spontaneity, to assimilate with a world which might see us as too flamboyant . . .The Rich women were always tuned dom to some WASP level my father believed, surely, would protect us al1 -- maybe also rnake us unrecognizable to the real Jews tt who wanted to seize us, drag us back to the shtetl, the ghetto, in its many manifestationsM (1982: 111) .

Rich' s mother directly monitored Rich' s friends at the university, encouraging her to stay away from Jews, especially those Jews that were lower class: my mother once wrote me, criticizing rny largely Jewish choice of friends in college ...1 wonder if that isn't one message assimilation -- of Amewica-- that the unlucky or the unachieving want to pull backward, that to identify with them is to court downward mobility, lose the precious chance of passing, of token existence. There was always within this sense of Jewish identity a strong class discriminationt' (emphasis in original, 1982:lll).

Rich astutely points out that , " [anti-Semitism] could thus be justified by the bad behaviour of certain Jews..." (1982:112). 1 have often been told by various people that Jews are to blame for anti-Jewish prejudice, because we possess negative characteristics. The idea to analyze my father's and unclets feelings about being Jewish came after reading the section of the essay where Rich discusses quite straightforwardly the complex tensions in her fatherrs Jewish identity --a combination of self-loathing and pride, and equally important, how his pride and self-loathing shaped her own identity as a Jew:

[what] isn't named is often more permeating than what is, I believe that my father's Jewishness profoundly shaped my own identity and our family existence. They were shaped both by external anti- Semitism and my father's self-hatred, and by his Jewish pride. . . [Whatever] was unacceptable got left back under the rubric of Jewishness or the "wrong kindu of Jews" (1982 :li2-ll3).

In this next passage Rich outlines the historical circumstances of Jewish persecution and the great psychic costs that Jews must bear if they try to attempt to become acculturated and pass as non-Jews. Despite her fathercs economic privilege, and his aspirations to lead a different and more lffreet1life from his Jewish ancestors in Europe, he became a recluse. What is important is that Rich speculates about the price Jews and others pay to assimilate to "the white gentile worldu . Too often this psychic cost is not addressed, even worse, it may be acknowledged, but it is downplayed and deemed quite harmless or not as serious as the predicament of non-Jews of colour:

Easy to cal1 that intensity Jewish; and 1 have no doubt that passion is one of the qualities required for sumival over generations of persecution. But what happens when passion is sent from the original base, when the white gentile world is softly saying, "be more like us and you can be almost one of us? What happens when survival seems to mean closing off one emotional artery after another? His forbearers in Europe had been forbidden to travel or expelled from one country after another, had special taxies levied on them if they left the city walls, had been forced to Wear special clothes and badges, restricted to the poorest neighborhoods. He had wanted ta be a "free spirit," to-travel widely, among "al1 kinds of peopleM. Yet in his prime of life he lived in an increasingly withdrawn world, in his house up on a hi11 in a neighbourhood where Jews were not supposed to be able to buy property depending almost exclusively on interactions with his wife and daughters to provide emotional connectedness (1982: 114) .

Rich paints a portrait of a very sad man. Her f ather was a man who could take no comfort or find solace in being Jewish. Despite my feelings of self-hatred, unlike my father as well, 1 found comfort and happiness in being Jewish. 1 know people like Rich8s father, people who do not realize or who cannot acknowledge what they have given up as Jews to become upwardly mobile or avoid harassment. Despite reaching middle-class status, the anti-Jewish harassment never dissipates, because one constantly worries about it. Somewhere Beverly Smith writes of women of color, "inspiring the behaviourI1 in each other where therets nobody to "inspire the behaviourll, act out of the culture, there is an atrophy, a dwindling, which is partly visibleB1 (1982:114). An integral aspect of Rich's analysis of Jewish assimilation and self-loathing is the class mobility that accornpanies it. That is., middle-class Jews, and those Jews that saught rniddle class status began to differentiate between themselves and the wrong kind of Jews--working class Jews; the kind of Jews that were a great source of embarrassrnent for Rich's parents. As a working class Jew, who reached at most a lower middle-class status, I did not fit into many Jewish groups at my private Jewish school, and other middle- class Jewish organizations. By age twelve or so, 1 begged my mother for expensive clothes to keep up with richer friends. In the following passage Rich keenly outlines the role that class plays in Jewish assimilation and differentiation in post-war United States:

It took many years for me to understand -- partly because 1 understood so little about class in Arnerica -- how in my own family, and in the very different family of my in-laws, there were degrees and hierarchies of assimilation which looked askance upon each other -- and also geographic lines of difference, as between southern Jews and New York Jews, whose manners and customs varied along class as well as regional lines" (1982:117).

For various Jews, both acculturated and observant (Conservative and Ref orm)'' Christmas is a dif ficult holiday to

"one former Jewish teacher of mine, who attended synagogue regularly, found Christmas "difficultM, not because she or her Chilchen felt left out of exchanging gifts and visiting discuss. In my case, at least for me, Christmas was a non-issue.

That is, 1 can honestly say that I never hungered for a Christmas tree or presents like other Jewish children 1 have heard about. Nor did my parents compensate by creating a Jewish Christmas of sorts. 1 learned that some of the richer and second and third generations Canadian students in my school received presents for everyday of Chanukah, perhaps in an effort to outdo Christmas gift giving. 1 once over heard one Jewish boss of mine tell a Gentile employee, that we Jews, have our own version of Christmas and that we give out lots of presents. At Chanukah, undex my motherfs direction, we celebrated a religious and Israeli holiday with latkas, soofganeeot (Israeli jelly donuts for Chanukah) , dreidals and songs . Christmas actually scared me, 1 was often scared of Christian iconography in general. 1 could not deal with seeing blood on statues. Whereaa, like so many other assimilated Jews, Rich, "celebrated a secular, liberal Christmas,.." (1982:118)- As non-comrnitted to Jewish culture as my father was, a Christmas tree would never have entered our house. Looking back on her childhood identity, Rich recalls that,

1 didntt understand then that 1 was living between two strains of Jewish social identity: the Jew as radical visionary and activist who understands oppression first hand, and the Jew as part of Americars devauring plan in which the persecuted, called to assimilations, learn that the price is to engage in

Santa Claus, etc., but because she felt that Christmas was directed specifically at Jews to denigrate them in sort of a show of religious (Christian) supremacy and contempt for Judaism, in order to alienate Jews. persecution (1982: 120) .

As a result of her upbringing, Rich believes that she has developed a schism in her consciousness. This 'Isplitl1 in her ~l~~n~~i~~~ne~~~t,as she describes it, is an internalization of anti-Semitism and being Jewish simultaneously. This is a state of being that 1 and family members, and many Jews experience. In a relationship with a non-Jewish lover, Rich describes this split:

Sometime during the early months of that relationship, 1 dreamed that 1 was arguing feminist politics with my lover- Of course, 1 said to her in this dream, if youOre going to bring up the Holo- cuas t against me, there 's nothing I cm do. If, as 1 believe, 1 was both myself and her in this dream, it spoke of the split in rny consciousness. 1 had been, more or less, a Jewish heterosexual woman- But what did it mean to be a Jewish lesbian? What did it mean to feel myself, as 1 did, both anti -Semite and Jew? And, as a feminist, how was 1 chart- ing for myself the oppressions within oppression?" (emphasis in original, 1982 :121) .

Rich8s analysis of the psychic responses to anti-Jewish pressures from within her family and without is very honest and insightful. Her work, has enabled and empowered me to embark on my own persona1 work of self-analysis and that of selected members of my family. 1 am foremost in debt to the work of cultural historian, Sander L. Gilman, who in his extensive writing on the origins and historical and social practices of anti-Semitic rhetoric that have informed the social constructions of Jewish men and women from medieval Europe to fin de siecle Germany. The texts that 1 have found most helpful in exploring Jewish assimilation and self-hatred have been: Jewish Self-Hatred (1986), The Jewts Body (1991), Freud. Race. and Gender (1993), and Kafka. The Jewish Patient (1995). In the introduction to his book Jewish Self-Hatred Gilman outlines a general concept of the psychological (pathological) and I1mythicaln (irnaginary) aspects that people labelled as "difierenta as ltOthersw, respond to, in a rather futile atternpt to achieve a slippery hold on invisibility. He explains that lt[the] Other comprises precisely those who are not permitted to share power within the society. Thus outsiders hear an answer from their fantasy: Become like us--abandon your difference--and you may be one of usN (1986:2) . This "fantasyW on the part of Jews is that which motivates much of Gilmanrs work, and consequently mine as well. In the detailed study Gilman employs an analysis of the anti- Jewish myth of the tainted I1languageof the JewsIt as a vehicle to analyze self-hatred. In his book The Jewts Bodv (1991), his pathbreaking study on the racing of Jewish men's bodies, Gilman explains the deeply ingrained oppression that Jews faced after the 18709, Itnothing,not acculturation, not baptism, could wipe away the taint of race. No matter how they changed, they still remained diseased Jewa . . .marked by their physiognomy" (1991:179) . Trying to assimilate and detract from their Jewishness was of the utmost urgency. Jews were said to speak - a distinctive degenerate laquage - mauscheln (1986: 13 9) . In Freud. Race. and Gender, Gilman explains that Freud's Vienna was Ilan age of intense insecurity, of anxiety about themselves and their world that was a response to the level of public defamation" (1993:12) . Freud knew that it was to his advantage (and security) not to speak Yiddish and not be seen as an east European Jew -- ostjude --despite his east European origins (1993:13). Gilrnan's scholarship is as integral like Rich's. He provides insightful historical analysis, grounded in both psychological and psychoanalytical analysis, of various Jewish responses to anti-Semitism, such as: Jewish self-loathing that Jews seek to avoid through varied avenues of acculturation. In doing so, we better understand what motivated the work of prominent Jews like Freud and Kafka. According to Gilman, both Freud and Kafka felt the stigma of their times. Freud feared the persecution associated with being an

"eastern Jewu, the ostjude, that is he feared (and rightly so) that psychoanalysis was seen as a %Jewishu science, and therefore tainted, that is., not a "trueN science (Gilman, 1993) . Second, as a Jewish scientist, Freud was stigmatized by the anti-Jewish racing of the period, He also believed that Jews, "easterntlJews were more prone to madness as their gentile contemporaries prornoted (Gilman, 1993); Kafka believed that his being a Jewish man, that is., possessing a weak and sickly Jewish male body, was killing him (Gilman,1995) . But we must delve more into Sander Gilman's work on the historical meaning and context of the I1eastern Jew" and how it has been deployed historically, for its legacy will help shed light on the particular form of anti -Jewish pre judice that my mother experienced as a child in Poland and that informed her mindset living in Toronto -- the link between so-called I1easternJewsI1 and uncleanliness and disease, and the rather timeless anti-Jewish slur, I1dirty Jew" . The trope of I1eastern Jew" was appropriated by western (and txansplanted) Jews like Freud to distance themselves from anti - Semitism of the period, especially to deflect the Jewish stigma of mental illne~s'~(Gilrnan, 1993) . As Gilrnan explains,

The image of the Eastern Jews as I1filthyl1 (as opposed to the cleanliness and order- liness demanded of the Jew) simply trans- fers the locus of anxiety for the risk of madness from Western Jews (always fearful they are not quite clean enough) toward the East. In 1930, in a handbook entitled ItHygiene and the Jews, " one of the products of the regular Hygiene Exhibitions held in Germany since the turn of the century, at which there was usually a Jewish pavillion, there appeared a historical essay on mwhy the Jews of Poland were filthyf.IIHere the comments of Bertha Pappenheim were placed in the mouth of the eighteenth-century... Physician of Warsaw, August Ferdinand Von Wolff, the son of a Baptized Jew, the physician Abraham Emanuel Wolff (1993:103).

This passage about the anti-Semitic-pathologized environment of Freud and his Jewish contemporaries highlights the Jewish

29~anderGiiman explains that [from] the standpoint of Western Europe in the early twentieth century the Eastern Jews were at special riak for mental illness because they were either so unlike the Western Jews (as seen from a Jewish point of view) or so essentially Jewish (as seen from an Aryan, racialist point of view) (1993: 103) . internalization of anti-Semitic ideology, such as the innate maàness of Jews in general and the alleged llfilthinessn of I1easternl1,especiaily Polish Jews. Bertha Pappenheim, (a German Jew and Freud's Anna O. of the Studies on Hvsteria) criticized Galician Jews for the Ilabsence among [them] of the most primitive concepts of child care, nursing care, and the care of newly delivered women, indeed the absence of any knowledge of infection or even disinfection" (1993 :103) . To understand this eternal accusation of Jewish uncleanliness though, Giiman traces its roots, which are deeply imbedded in the discourse of the Christian New Testament. Gilrnan (being also an historian of German thought) chooses to examine Nietzsche's anti- Semitism, which is rooted in the anti-Semitism of the period. Gilrnan explains,

Nietzsche's understanding of the nature of the New Testament is important, for he sees it as an 1511-smelling Judaine of rabbinism and superstitiontt(Judaine is Nietzsche's neologism for the evil essence of Jewishness). The entire phrase points not to an image of the Jews of the New Testament, but to the rhetoric of late-nineteenth-century anti- Semitism with its stress on the false logic, the rabbinical sophistries, and the supersti- tions of the Jews linked to their appearance and smell, The synthesia of srnelling the illo- gic, of dirty sophistry, reappears in The Anti- christ[ian] in a much more specific context: l1what follows from this? ~hatone does well to put on gloves when reading the New Testament. The proximity of so much uncleanliness almost forces one to do this. We would no more choose the 'First Christians' to associate with than Polish Jews --not that one even required any objection to them: they both do not smell goodm. The first Christians were really just Eastern Jews. They contaminated through their very presence. Their presence, however, is felt through the smell of the word, through the stink of their language, through the stench of their rhetoric (1993: 151) . The smell of the Jew and the smell of the fernale are both incorporated to provide the sexualized stench of the Jews' rhetoric. Olfaccory qualities had long been used to label the Other as different in German racial "science". The mephitic odor of difference had been one of the central markers of the Jew in the biology of race in late-nineteenth- century Germany. At the close of the nineteenth century at least one distinguished Gennan biologist Gustav Jaeger, suggested that the Jewish sou1 was marked by a specific smell, aversion of the stench, the foetor judaicas, associated with the Jew as early as the time of the Roman poet Martial, but of central importance in defining the image of the Jew in the Middle Ages. Others, such as the anthropologist Richard Andree, associated the smell of the Jew with the Jewfs consumption of garlic, evoking Nietzsche's image of stench. But even this he sees as a reflex of the Jew's "southernM nature, acquired from long exposure to his original ~editerranean homeland, for only llsouthernltpeoples indulge in this disgusting habit. (This confusion of the "acquired smell of the Jew and the Jew's inherent "stenchI1 is paralleled by Johann Jakob Schudt, who describes the "stenchU of the Frankfurt Jews as inherent, as even their infants smell, but also as a result of their dietary habits.) (italics in original, 1993:152).

Foetor judaicus refers to the smell that Jews were alleged to have possessed in modern culture in the nineteenth century. Defecation and the stench of sewers were associated with the %me11 of shittt,which represented the root of decay in nineteenth century public health (Gilman, 1993 :153) . In Germany, in particular, Jews were played a special part in the fantasies of defecation. As Gilrnan explains,

Beginning with Luther, there had been a powerful 74 association between the act of defecation and being Jewish. As Luther wrote in of his late tracts against the Jews: "When we read that Judas hanged himself, that his belly burst in pieces, and that his bowels, fell out, we may take this as an example of how it will go with al1 Christ's enemies. ...when we read that the bowels fell out, this shows the posterity of the Jews, their whole generation, shall be spoiled and go to the cpoundi (Gilman, 1993 :155) .

In her essay (1992) ItJewish, Woman, Lacking Classu, Canadian Jewish lesbian activist, Bonnie Burstow has written an important essay on how Jewish women are stereotyped and in it she discusses that Jews are looked dom upon for sounding ItJewish and working classft. She states, [the] oppression of having ttundesirablelt characteristics projected upon us and/or exaggerated is joined with the oppression inherent in being judged by Anglo-saxon upper-class noms and found wanting.. .ft(1992:17). Burstow (in addition to Gilman's historical definition of sounding It JewishI1 or the l1 Jewish voiceIr) provides a contemporary meaning of sounding " Jewish and working classI1, l1 [the] reality is even when we are an [Irinvisibleu] minority, we [Ashkenaz Jews] are generally an audible one. We talk too loud. We corne out with a

Jewish [Yiddish] accent" (emphasis in original, 1992 :18)

In the same Fireweed issue, Susan Nosov argues that the ability to "passu is not a "positiveH strategy. She says, "Tassing, to me, is one of the iorms of racism imposed on me. Vassingo is not

30~ecallBarbara Streisand' s retort to Omar Sharif as Fanny Brice in the seduction scene in the restaurant in Baltimore in the motion picture I1Fun.ny GirlN, tlI'ma natural hollererm . a positive thing to do; it is self -denying and very painful and not something 1 take upon myself I1 (1992: 107) . In Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde calla it a "pretended [choice] and [reward] for identifying with patriarchal power and its toolsu (1984 :119) . Lorde argues that it is " easier . . .for white women to believe the dangerous fantasy that if you are good enough, pretty enough, sweet enough, quiet onough ...then you will be allowed to CO-exist with the patriarchy in relative peace.. . IV (emphasis added, 1984 :119) . The work of American Jewish lesbian writer and activist, Melanie ~aye/Kantrowitz, has greatly impacted rny study of the psychological components of self-hatred in myself, and other Jews.

Like myself, she has also written about her experiences of self- hatred and its connection to %oundingH Jewish and working-class, in her (1992) collection, The Issue is Power. She too was embarrassed by the sounds of Yiddish:

words like shmate trapped me--no matter who said them-- marked, stripped and revealed me. 1 came from people who talked like that. 1 came from them and would be stuck with their lives. In case 1 needed proof of the connection between their lives and that accent, I had only to attend C.U.N.Y. and discover that in order to graduate, 1 had to learn NOT to talk like thatI1 (italics in original, 1992:82) ."

)'~leasesee Grace Feuervergerrs I1personal narrative on minority language educationu, in her (1997) article "On the Edges of the MapM: A Study of Heritage Laquage Teachets in Toronton in Teacher Education, 13:1, 39-53. She describes the atmosphere of her childhood Yiddish classes as "disrnalt1 with %tories that held no rneaning and...no excitementW. Eventually she quit her Yiddish classes and forgot the language. As Feuervergerls reaction show, a stigmatized language ia in danger of fading away. Ln the case of potentially hostile work environments, Jews feel they must hide their Jewishness, and working-class origins, in order to secure work for themselves . Kaye/Kantrowitz realizes early on that her "styleN affected her job changes about ten years ago. She felt uncomfortable during an interview by an all-womenrs collective:

1 was applying for jobs and was interviewed by an all-womenls collective for one job, and by english department faculty (women and men) for another. 1 found myself cornfortable with the ttenglishllpeople-- ...most of them were either Jewish or very accustomed to women "like mem. with the womenrs collective members-- several of whom were lesbians--1 had an eerle sense of unbalance. None of them were Jewish; 1 was a surprise to them ...Most of the women troubled by me had been sent to e.xpensive colleges by their fathers; they spoke with well- modulated voices, and they quaked when 1 raised mine. They didn't understand that to me anger is cornmon, expressible, and not murderous . The found me ttloudm(of course) and "emotionaltl(1992 :83) .

Commenting on this interview, Kaye/~antrowitzkeenly points out IfIfrntalking not just about differences and fear of difierence. Ifm talking about also about power to suppress differenceM

(1992: 83) . Also, like Rich, Kaye/Kantrowitz clearly describes the classism involved in the interaction with the women. She is looked dom upon because of her working-class roots. The act of speaking and the consequences of not nsoundingB1 respectable should be analyzed. In "The Economics of Linguistic Exchangesr, French theorist Pierre Bourdieu explains why verbal exchanges must be analyzed to better understand interlocking systems of oppreesion. I1Language is not only an instrument of communication or even knowledge, but also an instrument of power. A person speaks not only to be understood but also to be believed, obeyed, respected, distinguishedw (1977: 648) . Bourdieu also pays careful attention to the concept of Ncompetencew embedded in the act of speaking. Some people automatically are seen as unqueitionably campetent while others are not, a clear case of respectability versus degeneracy. Some people are entitled to an audience, some are not. Historically, in addition to other markers, how people sound and look is crucial to how they are treated in verbal exchanges. As Bourdieu explains, how we speak gives us away,

Properties such as voice setting (nasal, pharyngeal) and pronunciation ("accentm)offer better indices than syntax for identifying a speaker's social class; we learn that the efficacy of a discourse, its power to convince, depends on the authority of the person who utters it, or that arnounts to the same thing, or [his/her] "accent funct ioning as an index of authority. Thus the whole social structure ie preaant in the interaction: The material conditions of existence determine discourse through the linguistic production of relations which they make possible and which they structure (emphasis added, 1977:653).

Although Bourdieu specifically stresses VlassN in this passage, "racen, "ethnicityM and sexuality and other social markers are implied by his use of the phrase that 1 emphasized. In her memoir, Lost in translation, Eva Hof fman also knows that changing the way she speaks and sounds is key to her successfully assimilating. After leaving Poland, Hoffman learns that, Irlanguage will be a crucial instrument, that 1 can overcome the stigma of marginality, the weight of presumption against me, only if the reassuringly right sounds come out of my mouthtt (1989:123) . Other key passages in the book also describe various ways that Jews try to avoid harassment in hostile countries like Poland. Some Jews even tried (as in the past) to hide their Jewishness completely. When Hoffman waa a child in Poland, 'lit was in this house ...that my parents came to know Ciocia Bronia ...one day, she revealed to my parents the tainted secret--she too was Jewish, She had come from far enough sa that nobody in this village knew itM (1989:15). 1 was told similar stories. Growing up, my mother told me how my grandmother was able to get food during world war II, because nobody thought she looked Jewish. She was blonde with light green eyes and these physical traits enabled her to line up for bread in Russia. A fellow Jew tried to expose her, but the Gentiles in line did not believe that she was a Jew, Attending Church was routine as Hoffman explains, and another way to avoid harassment, "1 go to Church with Danuta and other kids quite often; my parents.. .donrt stop me. They dontt want to make my young life umecessarily difficult ...Itts kind of a charadeN (1989:30). In the past, sometimes smugly, 1 thought 1 would never do such a thing, and my mother would never encourage to commit such an act. Today, 1 react dif ferently. I wonder what 1 would have done, if I had to live in such a hostile Catholic environment. Afterall there was the promise of harassment that could take on violent repercussions. But, as Hoffman explains, not al1 of the participation in

Christian activity was to avoid anti-Jewish harassment. Like other

Jews 1 grew up with in Toronto, Hoffman's parents did not want their children to feel neglected:

In the house, we have a Christmas tree every year, and I get gifts on St. Nicholaste Day; my parents do this not as a gesture of assimilation but so my sister and 1 wontt feel left out of the surrounding festivities. I dontt see any incongruity between this and the Pass- over dinner--the only Jewish ritual we observe at home ...Even after my mother unchristians me, the Christmas tree continues (1989, 31-32) .

Unlike Hoffman, 1 believe the celebration of Christmas is the typical outcome of an assimilated Jewish family of that time period throughout Europe, bef ore and af ter World War II. Many Russian Jews in my neighbourhood have told me similar stories about celebrating Christmas and not celebrating Jewish holidays . Some of them called the tree a New Yearts tree, Therefore, sometimes Jewish Canadians look down on them, and Say they are like "goyim". Hoffmanrs practices of assimilation a completely dif ferent from mine because

1 grew up in a kosher home that celebrated only Jewish holidays, with occasional chocolate on Holloween and Valentiners day. I found several provocative essays on Jewish identity in the 1993 collection edited by David Theo Goldberg and Michael Krausz, called Jewish Identitv. In the essay The Identity of Cultural and Persona1 Identity", Bernard Berofsky contrasts Cultural and halakhic Jewish identity. While the essay does address npaseingul and other Jewish forms of assimilation, it does outline for the uninformed reader the axis along which Jewish identity is created or assigned:

So 1 remain me and 1 remain my mother' s child, that is Jewish, so long as 1 exist. But, of course, this concept of Jewish identity is not a species of cultural concept. The cultural concept requires a psychological condition, that of identification with the Jewish people in one of a variety of possible forms. The halakhic concept imposes no such demand: one can be Jewish and never know it, that is, never identify or even have knowledge of the Jewish peopleH (1993 :39) .

What interests me is the theme of ltmemorytBin the exploration of Jewish identity. Berofsky argues that "memory is the thread without which we would lack a sense of identityI1 (1993:41). In ttIdentificationand Identityu, Nathan Rotenstreich focuses on the themes of exile and the ncollectivem in the formation of Jewish identity,

We point to the Jewish identity in the situation of exile, because the exile by definition lacks the territorial infrastructure that as part of space could be considered analogues to the body of the individual. The exile and the Jews living in it did not relate to a particular part of the space as a territorial basis of their collective existence (1993:52).

and, "the Jewish religion referred to the collective entity as has been strongly emphasized about the Middle Ages by Yehuda HaLevi. .." (1993:53); ItThe experience of anti-Semitisrn's years of hostilities toward Jews gradually transformed their

collective cohesi~n~~(1993 :53) ; IlThe community is not preaent in their existence, but preceding them and at most has been established and has to be reestablished day by day by their own

Zionism is a response to that situation in its attempt to establish a collective identity of Jews relating to a territorial basis and embraced by the institution of the state as well as by the xenascence of the Hebrew language as a spoken language and not only as the medium-of expression of the Scriptures" (1993:54). What is characteristic of Jewish identity in the modern era is, if at all, the internalization of identity or the ongoing erosion of the semi- objective components of that identity ...It is not by chance that Jews in the Western world, and mainly in the United States are looking for foci of identification, that is to say, for centers of their belonging, beyond the scope of their day-to-day existence (1993: 54) .

Hilary Putnam, (1993), States in "Judaism and Jewish

In one sense, there is no mystery about "Jewish identity". Anyone who considers himself or herself Jewish has, in that sense, a Jewish identity. Nor can 1 get seriously excited about the question, Does a Jew have an obligation to consider himself or herself Jewish in any serious sense? It may be a moral faiiing to conceal one's Jewishness under certain circumstances (this is what Wittgenstein accused himself of) , but if the only reason for having a Jewish identity is that Jews are still persecuted in some places, this would seem to be too "thin" a reason to keep anyone from assimilating in a country in which-~ews are not persecuted (emphasis in original, 1993 :114) .

In his essay Vu~todians~~,Eddy M. Zemach discusses the great loss of Jewish assimilation in the United States, in the following passages : Choosing not to align oneself with a group, Say, not to join the local Jewish community, shapes the community's destiny, for one makes it an even smaller minority. that decision may determine the life of the said community, for if due to lack of interest the community disbands the culture it embodied will no longer be an option for one's own children and for others in the future: It will be not be there anymore. Cultures can die (1993 :123) .

A culture is the most elaborate and complex thing that the human race has created; it takes hundreds or thousands of years for it to evolve, but only one or two generations to die out; a culture is therefore a most fragile and delicate thing (1993 :123) . Cultures ...are mortal: Think of the ancient Egyp- tians ...A great culture is therefore the object of duty by kinship: It places its members and their progeny under an obligation to keep it alive (1993 :123) . 1 think of the remnants, the pitifully few remnants of the once vibrant and creative Jewish culture in America. In some ways, tracing Jewish life in Arnerica is like walking through a bombed-out city, where skeletons of buildings mutely bear witness to the life that once thrived there. In a way, the tragedy is even greater for the destruction is self-inflicted, and those who deserted it do not lament the eradication of that rich cultural world. 1 will not speak of defunct Hebrew and Yiddish theaters, political parties, social organizations, newspapers, publishing houses. These stories of self-annihilation and decline are too well

The reason for paucity of attendance may by (as in the case of the Jews) brutal suppression of the culture by its enemiea including a-periodical physical annihilation of those who practised it. Thus the cultures destined to perish will be those that were mostly wronged against in the past; those whose people were forcibly kept from flourishing as long as they adhered to the culture (1993: 125) . The Hebrew language was once spoken by many nations from Carthage in the west to Moab in the east. It lost its people (though, contrary to cornmon belief, neither literary creation in it nor its use as a spoken language has ever ceased in four thousand years) due to forced obliteration, oppression, war, exile, and the need to survive in the world of the victors (1993:125-126)

llWe are in immediate proxirnity to a culture in danger of imminent drowningu (1993: 127) .

"Jewish men and women who have it in their heaxts can make their culture live. It can happen. But, truth to tell, I doubt that it will. Perhaps the proceçs has gone too far, and most American Jews have already lost the will to retain their culture. If that is sa, it is a true calarnity: for other Jews (who once again, for the second tirne this century, will have lost the greatest and most advanced part of their people), for America, who will as a result be culturally poorer, and, above all, for humanityw (1993 :l29) .

Perhaps there is hope for both American and Canadian Jews. Perhaps due to the loss of culture that Putnam has described, Ashkenaz Jews have responded by reviving Kiezmer music, and creat ing the new, bi -annual Ashkenaz festival at Harbourfront in Toronto. Jewish cultural studies, is growing in the U.S. and nibbing-off on Jews Canadian academics like myself. In the essay "Revealing Moments, The Voice of One Who Lives with Labels" York University educator Didi Khayatt discusses the way stereotyping has shaped and placed limits on her Coptic and lesbian identity and subjectivity in Toronto. She also describes the negative effects, such as loss of identity, of living under generations of British colonial rule in Egypt:

[The] distinction between identity and label may become blurred when the label is threatening in a way to marginalize or exclude the one labelled. For

84 instance, 1 may have been sexually involved with women, but have chosen not to identify as a lesbian. Or, conversely, 1 may identify as a lesbian, but be afraid to disclose it publicallyIt (1994:82-83).

Racism is not about colour, it is about power. Racism is power. It is not only a recognition of difference, but also the explicit emphasis on difference to mediate hierarchy based on colour, ethnicity, language and race (1994:83). Despite my pure Coptic origins, each one of my family sports a European name: my father Andrew, my uncles Albert, Maurice, Robert, and my aunts Edna, Margaret, Dora. My generation was defiantly christened with Arabic names, another conqueror, but closer in geography and culture. It is in Egypt where 1 have never properly learned my native tongue that 1 feel like a foreigner ... In Canada 1 am integrated because my survival depends on my being like everybody else" (1994:88).

1 find Richard Rodriguezfs Hunser of Memorv, the most compellingly testimony about cultural loss and alienation from his family, as part of the price of pursuing an academic path in order to ltrnake itulin America:

What preoccupies me is immediate: the separation I endure with my parents in loss. This is what matters to me; the story of the scholarship boy who returns home one summer from college to discover bewildering silence, facing his parents. This is my story. An American [and Canadian] story

In 1999, 1 was introduced by two colleagues, to Adrian Piperts (1991) essay, Vassing for white, passing for blacklV. Piper is an

American artist who cornes from an Arnerican family that identifies as black, but who is able to pass as a white. Indeed, sorne branches of the farnily have gone on to live as white people and hide their black ancestry. Piper describes the shocking and often hostile reactions to her blurring of these imposed racial lines of blackness and whiteness:

For most of my life 1 did not understand that 1 needed to identify my racial identity publicly; and that if 1 did not I would be inevitably mistaken for white. 1 simply didntt think about it. But since 1 made no effort to hide my racial identity, 1 often experiences the shocked and/or hostile reactions of whites who discovered if after the fact (1991:236) .32

This article outlines her struggle to maintain a black identity in racist environments through her childhood and professional and adult life in academia. Her choice to nchooseltblackness £lies in the face of the narrow and confining racist categories placed upon her by those who take her at "facettvalue. Most whites and blacks she encounters have specific and "authentic" notion of blackness and whiteness, and view Piper as a privileged troublemaker of sorts. Piper discusses several racist incidents whereby white, non-

32~have often heard stories of people feeling Itbetrayedttafter finding out someone they thought was heterosexual was lesbian or gay. When these kinds of people are not sure who they are interacting with, that is., if you are black, European, female or gay, they become uneasy because they do not know how to process you in their often stereotypical and oppressive conceptual hierarchies. They cannot "deal" with you until they %nowm who you are wcompletelyw. In my case, people of various backgrounds and ages are not ambivalent about my sexuality or gender, but they are unsure of my ethnicity, (they never think to categorize me as a Jew) . They often ask me, rather aheepishly (for they know this is an inappropriate question to ask a stranger or someone they hardly know) Itwhat are you?" 1 do not tell them, and they immediately start to list countries, and this exchange really fmstrates them (and disgusts me) because their stereotypes are found lacking. Jewish colleagues try to fit her into their category of whiteness, by telling anti-Semitic jokes:

What was even more insulting were the peculiar strategies deployed to make me feel accepted despite the anomalies of my appearance ...the WASP colleague who attempted ta establish rapport with me by making anti-Semitic jokes about the prevalence of Jews in the neighbor- hood of the university (1991:223).

Furthemore :

These incidents and others like them had a peculiar cognitive feel to them, as though the individuals involved felt driven to make special efforts to situate me in their conceptual mapping of the world, by not only naming or indicating the niche in which they felt I belonged, but by seeking my verbal confirmation of it (Ibid.,1991:223).

Piper also discusses the difficulties of choosing passing, ln her case, to overcome anti-Black racial harassrnent and persecution. She speculates thôt:

Your sense of injustice maybe compounded by the daily humiliation you experience as the result of identifying with those African-Americans, who, for demanding their rights, are punished and degraded as a warning to others. In theme caaee, the decision to pari mrybe more that the rejec- tioa of a black ideatity. It maybe the rejection of a blrck idmtification that bringri too much pain to be tolerated (emphasis added, 1991:226)

Piper's analysis in this passage provides yet another facet of passing, that 1 never thought about, or rather, that 1 did not give enough appreciation nor analysis. 1 have discussed North American Jews trying to avoid anti-Jewish harassment, but never the pain that they incur, a pain that 1 acknowledge in myself . 1, rather too simply, affiliated assimilation with upward mobility. 1 did not give enough attention perhaps to the pain that Piper describes from being associated with a persecuted community. Later in the essay, Piper outlines the traditional practice, and the psychological component s of passing in Af rican-American communities in twentieth century United States. Like Rich, she describes a split in the consciousness of black people, but this schism differs slightly from the one that Rich describes. Piper explains:

The oppressive treatment of African-Americans facilitates this distancing response, by requir- ing every African-American to draw a sharp distinction between the person he is and the person society perceives him to be; that is, between who he is as an individual, and he way he is designated and treated by others (1991:221). CHZLPTER FOUR

MOM, DAD AND f -- SELF-HATRBD, "PASSINO" AND IDENTITY AND STRATEOIES OF COPING WITH ANTI-JZWISH P~~ICE~ANTI-ISRAELI SENTIMENT AND THE STIOMA OF BBING AND SOUNDING "WORICING-CIiASSm IN POST WORLD WAR IX TORONTO

"The desire for invisibility, the desire to become "whitew, lies at the center of the Jew's flight from his or her own body. In certain societies at certain times, the Jew desires to transform that difference, heard in the very sound of his or her own voice, into a positive sign. For the Jew, whose own invisibility is more possible in some Western societies than in others, then, the question of visibility is a central oneN

--Sander Gilman, 1991 :235-236

"1 am not speaking here about "realities" but about their representations and the reflection of these representations in the world of those who are stereotypedN

--Sander Gilman, 1991:1

In my literature review above, 1 discussed a collection of poetry and prose by Adrienne Rich, called Blood. Bread. and Poetrv,

Selected Prose 1979-1985. To refresh the reader's memory, in this collection, Rich discusses various themes regarding the interlocking nature of oppression, and her place as a Christian- raised, Jewish woman within it. Her essays that interested me and that addressed the themes in my thesis, dealt with issues of conflictual negotiation of (diasporic Ashkenazic) Jewish identity, under the pressure of ant i-Jewish ideology within her family-lif e and from without, with an extensive discussion of self-hatred and

89 passing. 1 was especially interested in the essay tlSplitat the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identityl in which Rich discussed her Jewish father wrestling with "pride and self -loathingN, and with the aid of her Gentile mother tried to teach her to assimilate and disappear into Anglo-American, middle-clam fabric and become the " right " kind of Jew, in a bid to be properly American in post-war America in the nineteen fifties. To recall, in this essay, Rich discusses how her early Jewish identity was shaped by her parents anti-Jewishness (expressed through denial of being openly Jewish, and assimilating the middle- class Anglo noms), contrasting with the openness of the Jewish women she encountered at Radcliffe college. For these young Jewish women, Rich points out, Ifin the late forties, it was acceptable, perhaps even necessary, to strive to look as Gentile as possible, but they stuck proudly to being Jewish, expected to rnarry a Jew.. . [and] carry on the culture" (1982:108). The theme and inherent tensions in the pride and self -1oathing of North American Jews in post World War is what interests me, especially the way these competing tensions are expressed by Richrs parents, especially her father, as my study focuses on how Jews respond to anti-Jewish prejudice. Like Rich, "1 believe that my father' s [motherts and unclets (to a certain extent) ] Jewishness profoundly shaped my own identity and our family existence. They were shaped both by external anti-Semitism and my fatherfs [and motherrs] self -hatred, and by his Jewish pride. . . [whatever] was unacceptable got left back under the nibric of Jewishness or the

' wrong kind' of Jews" (1982: 112-113) . Richfs discussion of her father s ambivalent relationship to his Jewishness, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitzfs accounts of being embarrassed by Yiddish and growing up working-class and other Ashkenaz culture and Sander Gilmanfs extensive studies on Jewish self-hatred (1986, 1991, 1993) made me think about analyzing my immigrant parents relationship to their Jewishness as well, and the ways in which their relations to Jewishness shaped mine, however, unlike Rich and Gilman, there are other components which 1 must integrate into my analysis of my parentsf Jewish identity -- classism (which Rich addresses in part), coupled with anti-Israeli sentiment on the part of North American born Ashkenaz Jews.

In this chapter 1 wish to explore the complex coupling of pride self -hatred, (periodic) passing and self -denial, of my immigrant parents and how their responses to anti - Jewish pre j udice inf luenced the forging of my Jewish identity. Second, 1 wish to explore how classism and anti-Israeli sentiment also influenced the formation of my diasporic Jewish subjectivity in Toronto. Third, 1 wish to discuss how anti-Jewish prejudice (both interna1 and external to our farnily), classism and anti-Israeli sentiment shaped the relationship dynamics that 1 developed with my parents, that is, how al1 these forces shaped their experiences as Ashkenaz immigrant parents and my experience as a first generation Canadian Jew. In addition, throughout this chapter 1 will explore, and situate historically, the related theme of what I have corne to know as "strategies of sunrivalll - mechanisms by which my mother and 1 hid our Jewishness in order to avoid harassment . Over the years , like other Jews, my mother and 1 employed various tactics in order to protect ourselves from various forms of anti-Jewish harassment. 1 believe the practices of pride and self-hatred and passing or hiding one's Jewishness are interrelated and therefore should be discussed in conjunction. Even though passing is a fom of protection from potential harassment, there is an element of self- loathing in it, but as Adrian Piper points out in her persona1 discussion about light-skinned African Americans deciding to opt for whiteness in IlPaseing for White, Passing for Blackfi

(1991;1996), Ilthe decision to pass may be more that the rejection of a black identity. It maybe the rejection of a black identification that brings too much pain to be toleratedn (226). 1 believe this reason for trying to hide our Jewishness was foremost in the my rnind and my mother's as well. Furthemore, 1 believe it is also necessary to point out the inherent gravity of undertaking passing, as Elaine Ginsberg explains in the 1996 collection she edited, Passins and the Fictions of Identitv, those who attempt to pass, It [cross] or [pass] through a racial line or boundary -- indeed [trespass] - to assume a new identity, escaping the subordination and oppression accompanying one identity and accessing the privileges and status of the otherM (italics in original, 1996:3). The assirnilationinist tactics of passing and self-denial of Rich8s family and my family must be seen in historical context, as the Jewish response to anti-Jewish persecution varies from one generation to the next (Brodkin,1998:2). And, as Sander Gilman explains in his discussion about Jewish identity in conclusion to his book, The Jew' s Body, one aspect the complexity of Jewish identity in diaspora ...may well account for the self-imposed invisibility of Jews as Jews in certain social and political contexts. For visibility brings with it true riskIv (1991:236) .13 Since the Enlightenment, and more so at the end of the nineteenth century -fin de siecle Europe, Jews under Christendom in Europe, especially countries such as Germany, have tried to assimilate, that is seek to become invisible, in a bid to lessen harassrnent and persecution (Gilman, 1985 :153) . As I discussed in the literature review, historically, even before the 1870s with the rise of racialized pseudo-science, Jews employed various strategies to pass unnoticed as Christians, including: hair colouring and straightening, nose reconstruction, conversion to Christianity, changing one's name, elocution lessons, and intermarriage. In his 1991 book on the European racing and gendering of the

3311Andwhat was the threat of being seen.. .as a Jew?" Gilman asks . "Martin Freud, Sigmund Freudts eldest son, remembers "walking with [his aunt Dolfi; his fatherts youngest sister, who died in the Nazi concentration camp at Theres- ienstadt] one day in Vienna when we passed an ordinary kind of man, probably a Gentile, who, as far as 1 knew, had taken no notice of us. 1 put it down to a pathological phobia, of Dolphi's stupidity, when she gripped my am in terror and whispered: 'Did you hear what that man said? He called me a dirty stinking Jewess and said it was time we were al1 killed. l9 There was good reason to desire invisibility in early twentieth-century Vienna. Against this we must pose the Jew's heightened visibility, and very different history, in early twentieth-century New YorkN (Gilman, 1992:236) . Jewish male's body, The Jewrs Bodv, Gilman goes into great detail about the role of the so-called "Jewish noseu and its serious

implications for Jews (and non-Jews who appeared l1 Jewishtt) , because as he argues, ItJewish noses cannot be reformedI1 (Ibid., 179) . In general he argues, "[thel theme of the Jewts immutability was directly tied ta arguments about the permanence of the negative features of the Jewish race" (Ibid., 179). Both Rich's family and mine learned early on of the devices of protection from racial harassment . In our cases it consisted of grooming and behaviour modification. As 1 discussed previously, in "Split at the Roottï, Rich explains the way her father tried to indoctrinate her mother, sister and herself into the rituals of passing as an Anglo-American and/or being the "right kind of Jeww,

We - my sister, mother, and 1 - were constantly urged to speak quietly in public, to dress without ostentation,to repress al1 vividness or spontaneity, to assimilate with a world which might see us as too flamboyant ...The Rich women were always turned down to some WASP level my father believed, surely, would protect us al1 -- maybe also make us unrecognizable to the "real Jewstt who wanted to seize us, drag us back to the shtetl, the ghetto, in its many manifesta- tions (emphasis in original 1982:111).

When 1 entered public school as a sixteen year old, 1 was told in a rather shameful manner by a Jewish colleague and a non- Jewish student that 1 speak tao loudly, according to their

standards, and that they found me embarrassing to be around. In my Jewish school days and at home, my marner of speaking, or rather my tlloudnessnwas not stigmatized. Bias in my private Jewish school centred more around class, and third generation Canadian Jews feeling superior to the Israeli teachers, students and their parents. These students and their parents felt more tlcivilizedM than Israelis, who were generally seen as "wildtfin temperament and uncouth and unable to assimilate, It was in these two environments that I was made ta feel IVdifferentu,but 1 felt more stigmatized and isolated in the public school, despite the presence of Jews from various different background. At the public school 1 encountered Jews, both Canadian and European born, who did not interact with a Jewish Btcommunitynper se, did not keep kosher, and who did not strongly identify themselves as Jewish, In my home, lessons in behaviour modification were not made in the fom of direct criticisms. For example my mother never directly told me to lower my voice or be the "right kindftof Jew. Directions from her were more indirect, more directed at herself and her anxieties about being Jewish and Israeli in Toronto. My mother has not revealed, at least verbally, much about her feelings of self- loathing, except about being perceived as dirty. In the last year, she expressed on two occasions, that she was worried that non-Jews would perceive her or the family as unclean. The first incident happened when she needed to hire someone to clean the house. She was especially worried, because the woman was Polish. In Poland my mother recalls that Poles said, (like other

European Christians) that Jews were dirty. My mother' s concerns made me recall a scene from Claude Lanzmannts documentary Shoah. When Polish villagers were asked why Jews were taken away to be murdered, they replied that Jews smell (a combination of racisrn and classism ahared by other stigmatized Others. Historically and globally, rniddle-class people of ten remark that poor people, especially non-whites, are dirty and like to live in squalor) . What will she think, my mother asked, "she will see how dirty we are". "She will Say that Jews are dirty and make lots of garbage". I tried to allay my motherts concerns by saying that any bigoted thoughts were the problem of the cleaner, and should not be a concern of hem. Easier for me to Say, 1 did not grow up in war- time Poland; where anti-Jewish prejudice was rife; where next door neighbours would take my mother as a child to church hoping to convert her and "saveM her soul. I was unsuccessful at comforting my mother, moreover 1 was not going to dismiss her anxiety about

Polish anti-Jewish prejudice. A few months later, a similar incident occurred. We had put lots of garbage out one day and my mother quipped, "they [Gentiles] will see how dirty we are". My mother failed to notice that the other neighbours had also put out lots of garbage. These comments sadden me, and 1 have and will continue to try to understand how they colour my identity. They speak to me of a powerful, internalized anti-Jewish narrative and outsider status. My mother has been wrestling with the stigma of East European Jew- hatin$', while 1 have struggled more with the dominance of Anglo

"~lease see my discussion of the historical meaning of the construction of the "East hiropean Jew/ Ostj udemtas unclean middle-class culture, (both us however have been the focus of anti- Jewish comments and durs throughout our lives in Toronto, especially at our places of work) . As Bonnie Burstow explains, [the] oppression of having VmdesirableU characteristics pro j ected upon us and/or exaggerated is joined with the oppression inherent in being judged by Anglo-saxon upper-class noms and found wanting. . . (1992: 17) . Like her f ather, Richfs mother expressed her anti-Jewishness by monitoring the friends that she had at college. Rich explains,

my mother once wrote me, criticizing my largely Jewish choices of friends in college ...that to identify with them is to court downward mobility, loee the pracioue chance of paeeing, of token sxietence. There was always within this sense of Jewish identity a strong class discrimination (emphasis in original, 1982 :111) .

From my earliest recollections of my father, he embodied pride and self-loathing in being Jewish. Like Richts father, he was not happy about being Jewish and he was not interested in its religious or cultural aspects like my mother and felt he was better than the "goyimN; unlike Rich though he never talked about not associating with certain Jews based on class, it was based on racism. Like other Ashkenazi Jews, my father felt superior to Sephardic Jews because of their Arabic customs, and a feeling that we were somehow

in my literature review, based on Sander GilmanJs research, to better appreciate the historical Christian roots of my motherrs anxiety about cleanliness. separated by skin colour (despite evidence to the contrary in terms of the diversity of skin colour and hair texture in both communities) . in private he would express feelings of being better than his gentile customers, especially the customers that indulged in liquor excessively at his variety store in Çcarborough and he never told me to assimilate or change myself the way Adrienne Richfs parents did. I learned by example. My father introduced me and my siblings to non-kosher food, especially Chinese food, and he was not too enthusiastic about attending synagogue and keeping Jewish holidays. My mother was the one who orchestrated everything Jewish, But, as an openly Jewish merchant in a hostile part of

Scarborough from the late 1950~~1 believe my father and uncle had to strategize on a daily basis, in order to make a living fairly unscathed. The customers focused much of their anti-Jewish thoughts on my uncle, that is, they created a Jewish mystique of sorts, which my uncle quite enjoyed. The customers called him the V30dfathert1- a powerful, godless Jew with a natural barn talent for rnoney-making and lending to be admired but watched like a hawk, less he cheat you, Even though they were only the owners of a variety store, they let people buy on credit. The more credit they gave, the more the customers hated and resented them. One drink too many led to anti-Jewish slurs. In the eyes of the customers, they had to be rich, as al1 Jews have money, a classic circular false argument, despite evidence to the contrary, We were a working-class family at times reaching a lower midàle-class lifestyle, but money was a constant worry for my parents. My unclefs relation to the non-Jews of Morningside was very different than my fatherfs, in that, it extended beyond business. My uncle went as far as ttadoptinglla Christian, working-class white gentile family, which he lavished with gifts. For him, it was a Itpower-tripH,he said that he could do whatever he wanted to them, because they would corne to him for money. My uncle liked having this kind of power over people. He even became their confessor and confidante, a priest of sorts. 1 know very little about the manner in which anti-Jewish myths and sentiments played into the relationship, but he was a man with money to give. Perhaps, it might have been significant for hirn to have such power over a

Gentile f arnily. My uncle puzzled me, rather his relationship to Jewish holidays and customs. He never attended one of our family Jewish gatherings, not even a seder, yet he attended Christmas dinner with his adopted family. His only links to Jewish culture were gastronomie and linguistic. He only spoke in Yiddish to my father. He thought our attending a private Jewish school was a "waste of moneyt8.Yet, like my father he despised the gentiles he served at the variety store, referring to them as %hi-ke-re goyim" - drunk gentiles. 1 do not know if he was concerned about looking Jewish, only one possible incident springs to mind. As a teen I recall my uncle asking my mother if something can be done about my younger brotherrs '

Like my uncle, he too was not interested in Jewish celebrations. Yet, he preferred Ashkenazi food and listened to Yiddish music, his whole life, even though he was fluent in Russian and Polish. When new customers would inquire about his "backgroundI1 (a life-long annoyance and control that 1 live with) he would not corne forth about his Jewishness, knowing there was a good chance it would elicit an anti-Jewish response. Not answering such an unnecessary question is perhaps also an attempt to wrestle back some semblance of control over unequal social encounters whereby the dominant insider person dictates the power to define who the subordinate person is and something that 1 have tried to employ to challenge unnecessarily ficuriousll people. Sometimes , my father would answer, Ilnone of your businessM, or "I'm a person just like youN, or NIrm a HeebI1. Then, like in medieval times, a lttheologicalNdiscussion would ensue, which was really a fom of anti-Jewish harassment, ending with the white Gentile saying that

Jews do not go to heaven. These attacks were constant, and 1 recall them frorn my early childhood. Indeed, af ter 1 turned sixteen, I never returned to the store. I believe my fatherts lack of interest in participating in more Jewish culture and community did influence my lack of enthusiasm as a teenager. I did attend a Jewish school, and we did celebrate Jewish holidays, but not as full participants. There was always something missing and soon apathy set in, on al1 our parts. Eventually we stopped attending synagogue, which as 1 mentioned earlier, my father always dreaded. My relationship to Jewishness was not as estranged as other

Jews that 1 have met in Toronto, and this 1 write with extreme relief. 1 will never forget what 1 witnessed when 1 worked in the Christmas shop at Eaton's. A young man, perhaps in his early thirties, bought a little Christmas tree and decided to expiain why and what he was doing. 1 was confused. As he pulled out his money to pay for it, he quietly and embarrassingly said to me, I1I*rn picking up a little tree.. .you know, a chanukah bush.. .IN. I answered, "1 do not know why you are telling my this, do what you want, it has got nothing to do with mem. He wrapped it tightly, and sheepishly left. 1 always remember, that could have been me, but later as a twenty-four year old, 1 would begin to reintroduce Jewish cul tue Fnto my life and consciously build what is not t ermed by some a secular and/or ethnic identity. Perhaps he sensed that 1 felt sorry for him. He was one of many Jews who are negatively affected by Christmas, and as Ivan Kalmar argues,

the reason many of us Jews do not like Christ- mas is that we are jealous. Worse yet, we fear that our children will be jealous, that the presents their Gentile classrnates receive will make them want to become Christian..,So what do we do? We came up with a Jewish version of Christmas: Hanukkah ...probably traditionally the least significant of Jewish festivals ...[Many] Jewish children get [a present] every night for the duration of the eight-day festival (1995:181) .

Perhaps by chance, or a secure and consistent Jewish background that stressed the celebration of Jewish holidays and that did not christianize Hanukah, 1 never longed for anything that was connected to Christmas. Christian iconography, especially about their messiah, always filled with me dread and horror. 1 could not shake off bloody images of his torso and tortured body, therefore

1 saw no reasons to celebrate. Also, our Hanukah celebrations were not as materialistic like those of middle-class Canadian and

American Jews, it was Israeli in style, that is, we were blessed, given Hanukah gelt (chocolate money) , we ate homemade latkas and soofganeeot (Israeli jelly donuta) , sang songs, and lit the hanukiah (candlholder for Hanuka) . As a family we only spent one Christmas with my unclers adopted family, which was quite forgettable.

In childhood, 1 did not worry about being perceived as a dfrty Jew like nry mother. But, 1 did believe that there must be a reason 102 for hating us (Jews as a whole). 1 believed that we must be doing something bad, and that we bring the hatred upon ourselves, and that if only we were better people that perhaps somehow we would not be hated; these sentiments were once echoed by my mother. As 1 mentioned earlier, my feelings of Jewish inadequacy arose in public school and later at two place of work. Students pointed out that 1 spoke too loudly. At both places of work, the white

Gentile workers would ask me to Say certain words, so they could laugh at my pronunciations. Not knowing that 1 was the butt of a joke, 1 obliged like a parrot. Words that ended with the suffix

II er II sent them reeling with laughter. IlSay singer, theytd Say. 1 did not hear what they heard, therefore, 1 did not know why they were laughing at me. 1 could not hear the Yiddish inf lections, real of exaggerated in their minds. One office "friendlv said, Itcan't you hear? you sound like an old Jewish womann. 1 have heard similar stories from other immigrants of colour in Toronto. Their accents are alao ridiculed. In their case they were treated as if they were stupid. My allegedly "differentw accent was ridiculed because it was considered funny and ugly. Even though 1 was born in Toronto and despite my skin colour, I have felt and have been treated like an undesirable immigrant, even by tourists £rom as far away as New

Zealand. 1 constantly have to deal with the dominant anglo-middle- class noms and such stupid questions like, "what do you do on christ ma^?^^ and "what are you?". To the first question 1 answer back with the question, "what do you do on Passover?". Regarding the second question, 1 have developed several responses, from am a human beingtl,or "why do you have to know?", or "none of your business. .because 1 do not know you well enough to answer such a

Af ter the ridicule began, 1 became very embarrassed and self - conscious. When 1 spoke, more of the same harassment followed at my retail job at Eaton's. Two CO-workers from New Zealand, whom I thought were my friends, asked me to repeat certain words and 1 was told that 1 sound inescapably Jewish (Ashkenaz) and that 1 was unable to speak English llproperlyfl. FWY, before they learned 1 was Jewish, they never comrnented on my accent, as Sander Gilman explains in the preface to The Jewts Body, [in] myths about the "hidden languageI1 of the Jews, even those Jews who do not speak differently, whose language is identical to that of the reference group, are "heardIt as speaking differentlyI1 (1991: 2) .

As discussed previously in this thesis, in her essay IITo Be a Radical Jew in the late Twentieth CentuxylI,Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz writes about her similar feelings of shame about Yiddish and changing the way she speaka,

words like ihtetrapped me--no matter who said them--marked, stripped and revealed me. I came from people who talked like that. 1 came from them and would be stuck with their lives. In case 1 needed proof of the connection between their lives and that accent, 1 had only to attend C.U.N.Y. and discover that in order to graduate, 1 had to learn NOT to talk like th+ (emphasis in original, 1992 :82) . Like Kaye/Kantrowit z, the mprobleml for me was "eounding JewishI1 and nworking-classw. For most of my life my nose has not been too suspect. That is, 1 have been told it is big, but not in a Jewish way. Indeed, 1 can only recall one person saying it was big, and therefore he I1knewM1 was Jewish. One student at York University told me that I have "Jewish hairI1, because my hair is thick and that al1 Jews have thick hair. 1 have also been told that al1 Jews have brown eyes, but in my family, in the last four generations (1 can only trace family as far back as the 1920s because of the Shoah), al1 of us have either blue or green eyes.

1 have always had more to draw upon frorn the Jewish ~lclosetH,

in order to hide my Jewishness and try to pretend to be Anglo or rniddle-class, or not to appear to be a lfloudllJew with a Yiddish working-class accent. I was already white looking (historically white Jews have not been classified as white by white Christians, even upon immigration to the United States in the seventeenth and twent ieth centuries. Jews were bel ieved to have swarthy complexions

(Gibel Azoulay, 1997:63; Gilman, 1986, 1991, 1993) , presumed straight, and hardly perceived as a Jew based on appearance. My accent and MloudnessN gave me away. 1 was nervous about being

perceived as being It loudtlbecause of its negative association with being working-class and Jewish, eapecially as it pertains to Jewish women (as 1 discussed in the literature review) . In Hunaer Of Memonr, Richard Rodriguez addresses the acute situation of the anxieties of working-class students like himself

and me, about how we try to assume our teacherfs personas (1983 :55) . He explains,

Not for the working-class child alone is adjust- to the classroom difficult. Good schooling required that any student alter early childhood habits. But the working class child is usually pre- pared for the change. And, unlike many middle-class children, [they] go home and seen in [their] parents a way of life not different but starkly opposed to that of the classroom. [They] [enter] the house and hear [their] parents talking in ways [their] teachers discourage. Without extraordinary de- termination and the great assistance of others-- at home and at school--there is little chance for success. ...Sornehow they learn to live in two very different worlds of their daytf (Hoggart, 1957; Rodriguez, 1983: 47-48) .

Hoggart's analysis exactly describes my shift in behaviour and attitude towards my parents and family members. Indeed, 1 became distant, looked dom upon them and led two separate lives, as Rodriguez explains, [the] docile, obedient student [cornes] home a shrill and precocious [son or daughter] who [insistsl on correcting and teaching [their] parents with the remark: 'My

teacher told us. . .' " (1983: 50) . 1 (and my younger brother especially) ridiculed my mother's use of English; I had internalized the dominant Anglo, middle-class narratives of superiority . 1 knew 1 was Msuccessfulffin hiding my Jewish and working- class roots as an undergraduate at York, when one professor paid me a ilcomplimentN,by assuming that 1 was not a first generation Canadian like the other students in the seminar. She was shocked

when 1 told her that that was not the case. She was surprised that 1 spoke English so well, that is in a controlled marner, with extensive vocabulary and with a "non-accent" accent. The stigma of sounding and having working class origins was worsened by being told that 1 sound llJewishn.There has been much discussion in various discourses and popular mediurns about various Jewish assimilation strategies, but not as much discussion about how Jews have agonized about the way they sound, nor of the possibility of their parents ambivalence in the face of oppression, inf luencing their own feelings about being Jewish. I have been focusing the lens on the anxiety that many Jews have had about sounding Jewish and working-class, with my persona1 story as an entry point, in an attempt to compare and contrast it with my motherrs strategy of self-denial or hiding her Jewishness. My mother also never had to worry about looking "JewishVt.Her anxiety in Toronto centred around having a Hebrew name and trying to hide her Jewishness by not I1outingttherself in new or public settings. When people ask her where she was born, or her background, she answers "east EuropeanN. She fears that if she initially reveals that she is a Jew, they will make an anti-Jewish slur, which has often been the case, especially in the workpla~e.~~

asIn 1986, at my motherrs first paying job in a cafeteria at an Eatonrs department store, a fellow employee (who owned two houses) asked my mother why she, a Jewish woman, had to work. She told her she was taking jobs away from other women. At my mother's second job for the North York Board of Education, af ter some of the gavernment workers found out she was Jewish, they told her she had to decorate the cafeteria Christmas tree. When she refused, two male workers approached her with hostility and asked her why she refused to decorated the tree. She told them that she was Jewish and did feel like decorating the tree, especially being singled out as a Jew to decorate it. This incident was clearly anti-Jewish. My mother practices what 1 call a %electiven disclosure. Later in this chapter I shall discuss the implications of such a strategy of survival. 1 too did not disclose my Jewish identity, but 1 also tried to change the way 1 sound. Ten yeara ago 1 decided to attempt to alter the way 1 speak in order to avoid more harassrnent where X worked. Linguistically, 1 was between the llnon-accentaccentM ideal and the degenerate I1accentedl1person. I fantasized and indeed tried to sound "white1<,Anglo and middle-class. as Sander Gilman explains so eloquently, " [the] Other comprises precisely those who are not permitted to share power within the society. Thus outsiders hear an answer from their fantasy: Become like us--abandon your difference- -and you may be one of usn (Gilman, 1986:2). 1 did not think about the political implications of this attempt, more precisely, they way it oppressed other women who did not have access to what I had, my initial smooth semblance and/or possibility of a Christian (Protestant) whiteness and the ability to alter their accents and white skin colour (skin bleaching being a dangerous alternative) . I began to understand and theorize about the oppressive nature of my linguistic flight from degeneracy. In order to sourid more ~respectablefl,I needed a degenerate Other to make it possible. My attempts to gain what Fellows and Razack call a lltoehold on respectabilityI1 was an oppressive act on women dif ferently positioned on the margins . They argue, l1 [the] political lesson to be drawn from the idea of a toehold on respectability is that a claim for justice cannot be transfomative if it depends for its success on marking the distinction between ourselves and other women who can then be labelled degeneratev (1998:26). in Im~erial fieather, scholar Anne McClintock outlines the history and content of the meaning of respectability in nineteenth century colonial discourse:

By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the analogy between race and gender degeneration came to serve a specifically modem fom of social dominance as an intricate dialectic ernerged -- between the domestication of the colonies and the racializing of the metropolis. In the Metropolis, the idea of racial deviance was evoked to police the Ifdegeneratet1 classes -- the militant working class, the Irish, Jews, feminists, gays and lesbians, prostitutes, criminals, alcoholics and the insane -- who were collectively figured as racial deviants, atavistic throwbacks, to a primitive moment in human prehistory, surviving ominously in the heart of the modern, imperial metropolis (1995:43, Fellows and Razack, 1998 :21) .

The ideological seeds of my attempts to change my manner of speech and my motherrs concerns about cleanliness can be txaced in the nineteenth century middle-class power that has in the twentieth century "vanished into the comrnon sense noms of self and identitym

(Levy, 1991 :5 ; Fellows and Razack, 1998 :25), Teeping in mind that [although] the goal of identifying hierarchies remains a constant across time and location. the arrangement that marks the distinction between respectability and degeneracy thus maintaining the dominant group -- change fsom one period to the next and from one locality to anotherI1 (Ibid., 1998 :25) . Before 1 continue, 1 must address two things. First, what it socially means to sound "Jewish1I and "working-~lass~~,and the historical association with shame and oppression and Jewish self- hatred. Second, 1 must explain what the act of speaking is an area worthy of intellectual investigation and the role is hae historically played in building bourgeois subjectivities and nation building, in interlocking systems of oppression,

Historically, sounding Jewish is multilayered. First and foremost, the accent is Yiddish (once again, a Jewish characteristic is synonymous with being Ashkenaz and not Sephardic or Mizrahi, despite deeply-rooted, common notions about al1 Jews being seen as exotic ilOrientalstl.In this case, the East European Jew and the mythical Oriental past merge. Therefore Jewish languages like Ladino do not enter the imagination of mainstream thought) , subtle or strong. Second, it is suppose to have a Itsing- songw (read foreign and ferninine) quality. Third, f rom as early as the seventeenth century, Gennans have considered it a degenerate language and way of sounding that was innately Jewish and therefore unalterable (Gilman, 1986:139) . An offshoot of the harassrnent Jews have received for sounding Jewish has been Jews policing other Jews (which is what happened to me in school and what 1 saw on television comedies) , that is, policing Jews who draw too much attention to themselves by sticking out.

Jewish comedians like Americzri Jackie Mason have been policed and stigmatized by Jews because of the way they talk and gesture. Invisibility is sought by persecuted commities like the Jews and leads to the phenomenon of %urplus visibility*, Irthe feeling among oppressed members and others that whatever members of the group Say or do, it is too much, and moreover, they are being too conspicuous about itll (Patai, 1991; Kray, 1993 :352) . The Jewish case is reinforced by centuries of practice, because of millennia-long llChristianobsession with Jewsw (Eckhardt, 1989) which historically resulted in super-scrutinyl of Jewish populations. This is a long standing Jewish sumival strategy and therefore leads to control over women and women's images" (Ibid.,

Kray, 19 93 :3 52) . Cornedian Jackie Mason and Sander Gilman comment about this backlash in the following passage,

' lVJewish people took me for granted, the young people saw me as an anachronism, then 1 went to broadway where 1 never ever thought IOd succeedI1.And the reason for his invisibility was his Mauscheln: Teople said 1 was too Jew- ish--and 1 even suffered frorn anti-Jewish prejudice from Jews themselves. There was a profound rejection problem: the reverse discimina- tion of Jews against Jews who talk like me in show business. 1 think they were ashamed and embarrassed about my accent, that I was somehow symbolic of the whole fear that Jews would be discriminated against again" (Gilman,1991 :27)

Mason1s daim of his manner of speaking causing ernbarrassment and shame has been true for me and family members, especially my mother. 1 can recall on several occasions al1 of us cringing when hearing Jews who sound like him on television or other public forums. We would ask, "do Jews really speak that way?I1

"why such a thick accent?" Whereas it is acceptable for working-class and middle-class African Americans and Italian Americans to speak in their own vernacular in television dramas and cornedies, Jewish cornedians, writera and producers still fil1 embarrassed, whether real or imagined, to not write shows about Jewish ident if ied characters , that are not based on stereotypes. Furthemore, some Jewish actors feel compelled to keep their Jewish identity a secret, until they have reached some modicum of success, such as Jason Alexander of Seinfeld. Like the Jewish CO-creator of the show, Alexander dropped his Jewish sumarne, but after the show became a success he began

"outingu hirnself on talkshows like the O~rahWinfrev Show, by continuously mentioning (with stereotypical zeal) that he was a "white, Jewish b~yl~.'~ The stigma of sounding Jewish and accompanying oppression has historical roots in Europe, f rom as early as the Thirty Years War, and began with the coining of a new language attributed by Gentiles to Jews - mauscheln. Sander Gilman explains,

Within a generation of the granting of civil emancipation to the Jew, German society had created a new language that it attributed to the Jew, Neither Hebrew nor Yiddish, not even

am currently working on a book in which 1 argue that contemporary famous Jewsf public lives (as in the past) are constricted because of anti -Jewish pre judice . Therefore, in public fo~mssuch as talk shows, they feel pressured to either play-dom their Jewishness and/or present themselves in stereotypical ways, ItJewish facem, in order not to lralienatelB(code for a warning not being "too JewishIV (too dif ferent) or discussing anti - Jewish prej udice) their mostly white, gentile, middle-class audience, by being self - deprecat ing . Hence , the Jewish boy1' comment from Jason Alexander and the behaviour of comedian Joan River s that 1 discuss in the introduction. the fantastic Hebrew-German mixture in which the Jewstoaths were written, it was called mauscheln. The early nineteenth century Ger- mans used mauscheln (sometimes called Judeln, "to Jewu')to characterize the rnanner in which they heard Jews speaking with a Yiddish accent. Mauscheln is a German word based on the proper name Moishe. It appeared as early as ..A622. In its first use ...this word referred specifically to the actions of Jews. Christian coi- ners were said to speak in mauscheln when they took bills of exchange. Here [the word] clearly means to extort usurious interest in the manner of the Jew. By the beginning of the nineteenth century its meaning had shifted and referred to the discourse as well as the actions of the Jew. The Jews' language, which became symbolic for their perceived essence as liars, falsifiers, and merchants, was captured in mauscheln (italics in original, 1986:139).

The present-day low-Status of the Jewish accent also has origins in Europe frorn the 1870s to the late 1930s.

The period in which being Jewish meant being marked as different ...Older theological models that described and explained the difference between Jews and Christians came to be secularized in terms of the biology of race... Anci the language of Freud's Vienna..incorporated the notion of the special status of the Jews [an innate biological and psychological dif fexence] . For Jews, it was an age of intense insecurity, of anxiety about themselves and their world that was a responËe to the level of public defamation (Gilrnan, 1993 :12) .

Acculturated Jews like Freud internalized the pseudo- biological view of the eastern Jewish degenerate, but constructed himself as a lfWesterntr(German) Jew despite being born in eastern Europe, and despite the myth that these degenerate traits were attributed to Jews of central hiropean ancestry as well (Gilman, 113 1993:13). To aspire to %ormalcyN (another way of saying respectability), he needed to separate himself from the Ostjude - the Eastern Jew, the real Jewish degenerate who cannot master the German and other European languages, because of his defective tongue (Ibid., 1993 :13 ) . Freud never learned or spoke Yiddish, but was certainly aware of the implications of the traces of that tongue in the image of the Eastern European Jew (Ibid., 1993:15). (The alleged degeneracy of the Eastern male Jew was so rampant in England in the nineteenth century that Jack the Ripper was suspected of being an Eastern Jew (Gilman, 1991:112-124)).

Historically Jewish women have been branded with the same mark of degeneracy . However, as Bonnie Burstow explains, It [more] generally, the negativity toward Jewish men triples when it cornes to Jewish women, for IBwe fit mainstream noms far less and sexism adds a new dimension. What is so very wrong with us? We are loud, [and therefore perceived as] ' Itaggressivettt. . . Itpushylt... *we have no manners at alltl(1992:21). In other words, we are not respectable. This stereotype has had much currency in daily life and in the media over the past f ifty years .37 With the resurgence of public racist and sexist comments in the guise of transgressive l~political incorrectnesstl, this image has become popular once again, and in

37~leasesee Letty Cottin Pogrebin (1991), Tram Marjorie Momingstar to Dirty Dancing Finding Myself at the Moviesm in Deborah Golda and Me Beins Fernale and Jewish in America (Doubleday: New York) 256-271 and Riv-Ellen Prell (1996), I1Why Jewish Princesses Donft Sweat: Desire and Consumption in Postwar American Jewish Culture" in (ed.) Norman L. Kleeblatt Too Jewish? Challencrincr Traditional Identities (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey) 74 - 92. some cases, even more vicious. It can be see on the American sit- corn "The NannyIt, Canadian comedian Mike Myers ' Linda RichmanI1, whom he claims is real and not a caricature of his Jewish mother- in-law, and British comedian Tracy Ullmants "Ferri Rosenthaltl,the cruelest of the bunch. These stereot-ypes are so powerful, that they actually marginalize Jews who do not "fitN them. Jews like me who do not embody them are constantly told that we are not ltreallyllJewish by Jews and Gentiles, thereby adding to our invisibility and feelings of alienation. Ten years ago, these types of negative essentialist caricatures os Ashkenaz Jewish women, made me curb characteristics such as theirs that may render me suspect, in order to avoid ridicule. After the final teasing about my speaking style, I vowed to try to unlearn my accent in arder to avoid more harassment. Little did 1 realize that 1 entered the Jewish closet like Jews before me.

At the time, 1 did not realize that many Jews had applied the same strategy in the past. I knew nothing of the historical significance of this strategy, nor of its roots. Furthermore, 1 thought nothing of the political implication of the decision. 1 knew it was an act of self -hatred, but 1 did not contemplate how if affected other women on the margins with me. Reaching for "respectabilityIt involved stepping on someone elsers back, that is, other women had to embody degeneracy in order for me to achieve a wtoeholdlton respectability. 1 was involving myself and other women in what Bellows and Razack cal1 "competing parallel narrativesw thereby [ignoring] the interdependent nature of the systems of domination and the complex ways in which they simultaneously secure relationships and sites of dominationt1 (Fellows and Razack, 1998:8). I and my mother, saw our lives, our actions as separate from other women. 1 now understand what happens to wornen who cannot draw on what my mother and I can in tems of privilege, in my case, altering the way 1 speak. In 1991, as an undergraduate in women's studies at the University of Toronto, the teaching assistant (La.) in my introductory course was a black woman who was born in Africa. One day, during a lesson she was teaching, one of the white (majority) women stood up . In a loud and accusatory voice, she said, "we canlt understand a word you are sayingtt. The t .a. nicely of fered to mite the words in question on the chalk board, but that did not satisfy the student and her supporters. 1 was able to understand most of what the t.a. said, except for the odd word. Furthemore, 1 put the onus on myself to become a better and more sophisticated listener. 1 had heard of similar incidents happening to other non-white women from countries in the Caribbean, This tea. did not have access to whiteness (in terms of skin col~ur)~~nor to changing her accent within days or weeks. She was

"For example, As Sherene Razack points out, people of colour can whiten themselves by nat discussing (or fighting against) racism (Clarence Thomas being a good example. Please see A. Leon Higginbotham, jr. (1992). I1An Open Letter to Justice Clarence Thomas from a Federal Judicial Colleaguettin (ed. Toni Morrison) Raceina. Justice, Enaenderina Power: Essavs on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Realitv (Pantheon, New York) 3-39,) multiply marked as a primitive, savage, black woman with an accent too ltdifficultuto decipher, or rather not worthy of being deciphered. In this context , my accent was considered dif ferent and cornical, but not as primitive or as foreign as hers. Furthermore, despite possessing a Yiddish accent, I had possesaed the qualities of the unmarked "non-accentN accent, the kind of accent that one learns in Toronto and other North American urban centres. This accent, not marked as an accent in the same manner that males, whiteness, and heterosexuality are unmarked as invisible, or natural parts of what Audrey Lorde calls the "mythical nom".

For example, as recently as 1999, the local news show, CITY- PULSE, used to describe suspected nonwhite criminals from the West Indies as having Itaccentsttor Vamaican accentsu. Two years ago a

South Asian man who was suspected of raping East Asian women and each news report included that he spoke with an tlaccentll.A black West-Indian friend told me that she has to make phone calls for her aunt when she goes searching for an apartment, because when her aunt phones, the apartment is often taken. Attaining the "non- accentu accents is important, in order to seern less dif f erent, less foreign and less stupid, overall it is also crucial for one's life chances for meeting basic needs of sustenance.

My mother is well aware that nonwhite people camot hide their ethnicity, and what systems of oppression she reinforces when she hides her Jewish or Israeli identity. Yet, in Toronto, and abroad, she employs it as a form of protection, a strategy of survival, and

Ir [nor] is the pass always permanent; it may be brief, situational, or intermittentn (Ginsberg, 1996:3) . For example, in 1974, our f amily moved into a predominant ly Ashkenaz , middle-class neighbourhood at Bayview and Steeles. In the spring, about twelve of the local Jewish neighbourhood children and teenagers, ranging for age ten to sixteen, surrounded my mother as she began to water the lawn. 1 watched from the bay window. They taunted and teased my mother, about being Israeli, and made fun of the way she speaks and told her that she is not welcome ($0 much for notions of ftcommunitytt). By the tirne my brother and I ran out to disperse the crowd, the damage had been done. My mother was scared, disoriented and almost speechless. Çhe was unable to challenge them. 1 was shocked, even though Israelis and Sephardics were snubbed in the past by Canadian Jewish organizations . These days, rny mother and I are sometimes wrestle with bouts of self-hatred and issues of disclosure. In this way, 1 believe that we both live as immigrants wrestling with the dominant Anglo, middle -class cultural noms and expectat ions, never quite measuring up . Indeed, these narrow parameters have shaped our relat ionship as Jewish mother and daughter, despite living much of our lives here in insulated Jewish communities. But, a lot has changed in the ten years 1 spent reinventing myself. 1 have changed my feelings about being ashamed of sounding Jewish and working-class and so has the reception of Yiddish in North America and England. The currency of Yiddish has improved, perhaps due in part to the new and young non- Jewish speakers, and Yiddish words having entered the everyday verbal exchanges, as well as acadernic courses etc. Many non-Jews use Yiddish words like shlep, shmuck, spiel; perhaps as non-Jewish speakers it does not carry the same taint for them. As members of the dominant group, they are allowed to transgress the boundaries, therefore, throwing in the odd Yiddish word is quite safe, and not VOOJewishbl. In Hollywood, it appears that white Gentiles can be more Vewishw than their Jewish brothers and sisters- How else can one explain the continuous Jewish invisibility and stereotypes that still exist in television shows like Jewish comedian Paul Reiser's Mad About You? In this show, surnames are ambiguous, Jewish holidays are not mentioned or celebrated. Thanksgiving becomes the holiday of choice, it being a safe, non-religious and tBneutraltt choice, as many American Jews celebrate it . Young Jews do not have Jewish spouses (whereas blacks and latinos do, a measure of Ashkênaz Jewish assimilation and attempting to pass into white invisibility, in the U.S.) whereas their parents do, and old identifiable Jews like comedian Me1 Brooks are brought out of the closet on rare "guest spotN occasions to be laughed at, to show what an old Jew is suppose to look like- Jewishness, mostly stereotypical, is sprinkled ever so carefully like black pepper on bland food; it appears that a little too much can burrr and "alienateW the gentile audience and make some Jews uncomfortable because of the visibility. 1 believe that Jews in Hollywood, (and elsewhere) still seek to avoid attention or unwarranted scrut iny, perhaps for fear of low-ratings or persecution. Perhaps the hiding stems from reasons pointed out by Canadian Jewish activist Susan Nosov. She write~,~[we]know that a period of relatively few incidents of racism towards us Jews does not mean an end to oppression, but perhaps a slight remission"

(1992: 108) . This discussion of Jewish self-denial and passing in my life, that of my parents, and Jews in Hollywood is intended to encourage a discussion a more crit ical and complex analysis of %hitenessm and "blacknessN within discourses of anti-racisrn and identity politics, towards learning and understanding the history and sociological implications of the inherent tensions and complexities of Jewish self-hatred and passing. The absence or perhaps disinterest in discussing these dynamics in reference to Jewish lives fias led to the proposition that Jewish self-hatred and passing is not as serious or injuriaus as other foms of passing. But, as Susan Nosov states about passing, Itto me, [it] is one of the forms of racisrn imposed on me. Vassing is not a positive thing to do; it is self-denying and very painful and not something 1 take upon myself (1992: 107) . CHAPTER FIVE Conclusion

"hrerywhere the overriding message seems to be: Forget about anti-Semitism. Or if you do see it, ignore it. This attitude prevails even in some parts of the Jew- ish comunity,-particularly among those Jews who are the most politically conservative and feel they have the most to loseN - -Evelyn Torton Beck (1989:xxiv)

Recentiy 1 watched an epic, British, 1937 film, which starred a ravishing Laurence Olivier, called Fire Over England. It was a period piece about the famous sea battles between the Spanish Armada and the British navy under the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First. Towards the end of the film a rather touching exchange takes place between a husband and wife, two members of Spanish royalty. In this scene, the husband dispenses pragmatic advice to hie young and unworldly wife about the successful practice of war between enemies, after she erroneously helps an enemy of Spain (Laurence

Olivier) safely escape to England. IlMy dearM, he explains, "One cannot treat enemies as human beings", for if we do, Itwe have no Patriotism, and no warn. She nods in agreement and tells her husband that he is right, and their lips meet in a tender kiss. The husbandts lesson is straightforward - in order to oppress someone successfully, one must begin by dehumanizing them. Like al1 other forms of oppression, anti-Jewish prejudice strips Jews of their humanity , and like others vict imized by oppressive ideologies 121 and practices, Jews internalize age-old anti-Jewish sentiment and invoke various responses such as self -hatred, passing, seeking relief from being visible and as someone different from rnainstream culture, as Fanon explains, [in] order to react against anti-

Semitisrn, the Jew turns himself into an anti-Semite" (1967:182-

183). What makes the Jewish case so acute, especially for light- skinned Jews, is the current stereotype of universal Jewish wealth, barring Jews from daims of various foms of oppression. In addition, there is a new stereotype about Jews not being politically progressive or politically active, as I have been told as both an undergraduate and graduate in seminar discussions (once again a product of being erroneously painted as a homogeneous groupl .. Misrepresentation and subsequent invisibility are the result of these simplistic discussions and conceptions of whiteness and blackness being seen as two separate, analytical categories; there is a slippage between the two categories that is not being addressed and the fact that Jews have historically represented the blurring of these lines and falling in between the two of them, has also not been addressed. Indeed Jews are rarely (almost never) imagined as having any historical relationship to blackness, despite historical evidence to the contrary, which f have discussed in this thesis with the aid of Gilrnan's various publications. Indeed many Jews, like myself describe themselves as living "in betweenm and on the "bordersIl of blackness and "whitenes~~~. Furthermore, there are Jews, like American cornedian Sandra Bernhard, who do not identify with being white at all, associating whiteness with Christianity (Pellegrini, 1997: 58-59). In general, Ashkenaz (and various Sephardic) light-skinned Jews, do not simply identify as "whitett,(indeed there is nothing "simpleH about analyzing whiteness at all). Various scholars have shown that the idea of Jews (like other east Europeans and Southern Italians) being categorized and/or identifying as white is new and a product of the latter half of the twentieth century (Britzman, 1997; Daniels, 1997; Gibel-Azoulay, 1997; Pellegrhi, 1997; Rose, Lewontin, Kamin, 1984). Why is it that so many non-Jews and Jews ignore the fact that Jews are targeted Dy hate groups, where " [within] [their] extremist literature, Jews are most certainly not seen as white; they are designated as racial Othersnt (Daniels, 1997 :132) . Unfortunately, "there is an ongoing debate within the social science literature about the level and relative significance of anti-Semitism in the

United States today" (Daniels, 1997 :132) . Part of the cause of this debate is what Kaye/Kantrowitz explains, as the "difficulty some people have in grasping anti-Semitism as a serious concern and as a form of racism is that it hasn't kept Jews poortl (1991: 142).

Furthermore, some Jews can pass as gentiles and Jewish American

Ashkenaz Jews, whose grandparents came through Ellis 1sland at the beginning of the twentieth century, are often depicted as mode1 immigrants who achievedunassisted, rapid financial success, unlike African-Americans (Brodkin, 1998) . Daniels goes on to make a rather problematic statement, to the extent that Jews may appropriate "whiteness," that is, see themselves and have others view them as "white," anti-Semi tism decreases and is generally less threatening. However, when Jews become racialized, that is, when they more away from or out of the racially unmarked category that is "whiteness "...into the space of racial Other, they become targets of anti-Semitism and the same discourse that targets Blacks (1997:132).

Despite describing anti-Semitism as "generally less threateningu in the United States, Daniels implies that there is clear distinction between Jewish Americans ident ifying as either white or Jewish, implying that those who openly identify as white and non-Jewish, will somehow not "generallyw be affected or endangered by antidewish acts of violence. However, as Fanon states to the contrary, " [the] Jew, authentic or inauthentic, is struck dom by the fist.. .His [sic] situation is such that everything he [sic] does is bound to turn against him (1967:182) . Despite the fact that he is speaking in a dif ferent historical period and geographical location, this threat of violent anti- Jewishness is in the back of the mind of many Ashkenaz Jews. As

Katya Gibel Azoulay explains,

[It] is the possibili ty of violent anti- Semitism that, in varying degrees, Jews keep in the back of their minds, and it is this fear that grounds being Jewish to a political identity regardless, and especially in the absence of, religious or cultural feelings of affiliation. In this respect, Fanon's reminder that the anti-Semite is also a racist can never be overstated (italics in original, 1997 :65-66) . The continuum Daniels describes is not that cut and dry, indeed, people who hate Jews often ignore the fact that a Jew they are targeting considers themself white, Historically, assimilated

Jews have been targeted by anti-Jewish attacks (pogroms, theft of property, and genocide) , despite religious conversion, integration and other forms of acculturation; the Jews of Russia and Germany, prime examples of assimilation, were seen as traitors and diseased members of these countries by the end of nineteenth century, bringing violence against Jews (and others) to a whole new level.

A better and more nuanced comparism of anti-Jewish experiences and anti-black racism, and white Jewish privilege over non-whites cornes £rom Fanon,

the Jew can be unknown in his [sic] Jewishness. He is not wholly what he is ...He is a white man, and, apart from some rather debatable characteristics, he can sometimes go unnoticed ...Granted, the Jews are harassed--what am I thinking of? They are hun- ted dom, exterminated, cremated. But these are little family quarrels. The Jew ie dialiked from the anomeat he ie tracked dowa. But in nry case.,. 1 am given no chaace. 1 am overdetermined from without. 1 am the slave not of the 'IideaI1 that others have of me but of my own appearance (emphasis added, 1967 :115-116) .

Unlike Daniels, Fanon does not stress the importance of whether Jews identify as exclusively white or Jewish, because once

the Jew is "tracked domN, how she or he identifies is irrelevant. In the forward to his 1991 book, The Jewrs Bodv, Sander Gilman argues, there is a Itneed [for Jews] to respond, either directly or s~blirninally~~(1991:6). He says, "the Jew. ..in the Western Diaspora does respond, must respond, to the image of the Jew in such culturesf1(1991 : 3 -4). 1 must respond, because as Torton Beck says, "most non-Jews know virtually nothing about Jewish history, culture or religionB1(198 9 :xlix). Furthermore, these same people know very little about Jewish self-hatred and passing, and often downplay them, saying ttsurely,its not so bad for youu or Itthat's al1 over nowUt(~aye/~antrowitz, 1992:97) . 1 cannot stress enough that,

the point is not for us, Jews, to escape the category I1whitefl,to evade confronting our own racism, nor is it to insert ourselves arti- ficially into a category of oppression, as sometimes happens in our movements where oppression in some puy paradoxical way confers privilege. It is to recognize a continuum where we are the closest of the coloreds to white, or the closest of the whites to colored (Kaye/Kantrowitz, 1992 :145) .

This thesis is not meant to provide "final answersM, but rather to "raise the question of the study of the images of the Jews as a means of comprehending the status as well a the representation of the Jews in the Christian DiasporaM and to "present the complexity of the idea of the Jew and of the Jewish response to this projection of differencetl (Gilman, 199k3). Furthermore, as Gilman explains, "Anti-Semitism is a real and ongoing category in Western culture which is transmuted from age ta age and from location to locationu (ï991:4-5) . At the end of Weing Ethnic/Doing EthnicityI1, Roger Simon mentions that his wife Wendy Simon tells him that tis essay, in which he discusses his status as a Jewish tcOthertlin Toronto, is 126 too sad because he has not talked about the "strength, the joy, the sense of social connection that is part of the lived culture of the Other. The value of knowing that there actually is a time/space where one can be at home" (1987:42). 1 worry about this thesis being too sad, negative, rnisunderstood, and dismissed. But, like

Simon, Dthe...experience of Otherness is real enough for mew

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