ALH Online Review, Series XXII 1 David S. Koffman, the Jews' Indian

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ALH Online Review, Series XXII 1

David S. Koffman, The Jews’ Indian: Colonialism, Pluralism, and Belonging in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019), 276 pp.

Reviewed by Cristina Stanciu, Virginia Commonwealth University

David S. Koffman’s The Jews’ Indian: Colonialism, Pluralism, and Belonging in America is a timely and necessary study about Jewish encounters with Native Americans on various historical and cultural scenes in North America. According to Koffman, although some Jewish immigrants and later generations of Jewish Americans at times identified with Indians, ultimately many distanced themselves from Indians to stake claim to their own (precarious) position in America. In doing so, they became “powerful agents of empire” and beneficiaries of settler colonial privileges (whiteness, citizenship, acquisition of acquisition); as such, Jews imagined themselves between “red” and “white,” both resisting and participating in the colonial project aimed at the elimination of the Native population and the acquisition of lands (7).

The title of Koffman’s book is a nod to Robert F. Berkhofer’s exemplary The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (1979). Koffman’s excellent, ambitious, and ground-breaking study is organized both chronologically and thematically, by juxtaposing Jewish attitudes and behaviors toward Native Americans over 150 years. The first half examines such manifestations during the Indian wars, the Indian Removal, all the way up to the (Dawes) Allotment Act (1887) and the Assimilation Era (1880-1920). The second half considers a different group of American Jews, during the Indian New Deal (1930s) and the Termination Era (1940-1960), who advocated for Native rights and distanced themselves from the colonial project. Showing how Jews generally benefited from whiteness in North America, Koffman offers several distinctive categories of Jewish interaction with Native Americans, both in the US and Canada, setting them apart from other white groups in terms of sex, religion, and land acquisition. Jewish men, Koffman explains, tended not to sexualize Native women; unlike Christian immigrants, Jews did not proselytize to Native communities; most importantly, he finds that Jews had little interest in acquiring rural land. All these (otherwise) important differences aside, American Jews used their whiteness strategically.

The Jews’ Indian begins by clarifying both the rhetorical and practical “uses” Jews made of Native people. They include nineteenth-century affirmations of ancient ties of kinship with Native Americans (“the lost tribes of Israel”), later disavowals of Native people and distancing from what they perceived to be a group of outsiders to the emerging American nation, still later ventriloquism of Native voices in late nineteenth century. Mid-twentieth-century purposes further included renewed affirmations of

Jewish-Native solidarity and cultural pluralism, as well as post-World War II Native- Jewish dialogue on such issues of mutual interest as the environment, religious identity, music, creation stories, and youth education. Despite these points of convergence, we learn that “Indians” remained “precarious outsiders” to Jews and their negotiations of their own positions in relation to the white, Christian, settler US of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and as they worked through “modern, western, masculine, and Jewish anxieties” (4). If Jews viewed Native Americans as impediments to Western settlement in the age of empire, Koffman shows, they turned to Indian alterity and identified with Native concerns by the middle of the twentieth century, replacing previous settler claims with cultural pluralist framings of ethnic identity. Thus, the American Jews who identified with Native Americans criticized US racism and imperialism, and brought concerns of ethnic difference and ethical responsibility to the fore.

In the first chapter of this elegantly written and erudite study, “Inventing Pioneer Jews in the New Nation’s New West,” Koffman sets out to reveal how early Jewish immigrants and American-born Jews construed Indians as they negotiated their own position on the rural borders of America. In this context, “Indians” served as foils to both Jewish and American identity formation; Jews also became “honorary Indians” in their claims to fictional bonds of kinship with Native Americans (including the Lost Tribes claims), which brought them closer to the American self. Unlike Native Americans in the West, Jews enjoyed the material rewards and a sense of social inclusion granted by their whiteness, which also led to their political enfranchisement. The next chapter, “Land and the Violent Expansion of the Immigrants’ Empire,” tellingly reveals Jewish participation in settler forms of domination, which at times included violence against Native Americans. As immigrants, Jews thus participated in the expansion of “an immigrants’ empire” (15). For instance, Koffman explains how the Jewish press criticized US imperialism while framing stories about “Indians” in colonial terms and generally siding with the settlers. Jews thus benefited from “the metaphysical power that came with being a colonizer” (81).

Chapter 3, “Jewish Middlemen Merchants, Indian Curios, and the Extensions of American Capitalism,” examines economic encounters between Native Americans and Jews through the case study of the Jewish dealers in Indian “curios,” revealing the economic ambitions of Western Jews on the American frontier and how they profited from their use of Native alliances. These Jews, Koffman avers, helped to advance mercantile capitalism and the commodification of Native cultures. In the process, they also “helped invent a new heritage industry” on which Americans still thrive (111). In Koffman’s particularly relevant and well-written fourth chapter, “Nativist Anxieties Twinned: Jewish Rhetorical Uses of Indians in an Era of Anti-Immigration Sentiment,”

© The Author 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected] ALH Online Review, Series XXII 3 he moves from the West to the East Coast and explores how Jews aimed to rectify some of the damage of the previous century’s colonial encounters. As nativist anxieties targeted immigrant groups and the country moved toward the moment of a first major immigration legislation in 1924 (the National Origins Act), Jewish responses to xenophobia used Indians rhetorically to build alliances against Anglo-Saxon threats of cultural obliteration.

Chapters 5 and 6 (“Jewish Advocacy for Native Americans on and off Capitol Hill” and “Anthropological Ventriloquism and Dovetailing Intellectual and Political Advancements”) concentrate on two forms of Jewish advocacy on behalf of Native Americans during the Indian New Deal, a federal program meant to revitalize Native cultures and to invigorate Native political autonomy. Koffman reveals how a group of Jewish bureaucrats, lawyers, and philanthropists—including William Zimmerman, Nathan Margold, and Felix Cohen—worked tirelessly on behalf of Native American nations by building the infrastructure and intellectual groundwork for the Red Power movement, which flourished after World War II (under Native leadership). Jewish activism on behalf of minority rights and cultural autonomy, Koffman argues, was simply put, “good for the Jews” (18). Besides bureaucrats and lawyers, Jewish anthropologists also took an interest in Native communities and contributed to major shifts in race thinking, advancing cultural pluralism and relativism. From German Jewish father of anthropology, Franz Boas, to Edward Sapir, Paul Radin, and Ruth Leah Bunzel, Jewish anthropologists tried to salvage, collect, and preserve Indigenous cultures. In their effort, these scholars acted as cultural mediators between Indians and whites. Throughout the 1930s to the 1950s, according to Koffman, these concerns had a double focus: progressive advocacy for other disenfranchised groups and advocacy for Jewish enfranchisement.

The Jews’s Indian concludes with an inspiring section, “Paths of Persecution, Stakes of Colonial Modernity.” Here Koffman provides a timely framework for assessing late twentieth-century encounters between Native Americans and American Jews, which necessarily entails examining both the continuities (mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century) and discontinuities (post-World War II, post-Holocaust, and after the formation of the State of Israel) of Native-Jewish encounters. This gesture “highlights the tensions and ambivalence at the heart of discussions about Jews as the victims of colonialism in European modernity, as the perpetrators of colonialism [in America], and eventually, as seekers of redress for America’s colonial sins” (18). Among the merits of this short chapter is its description of the most common threads Jews have identified and used in relation to Native Americans: genocide and sovereignty, a focus that reveals not only tensions and disagreements over comparative genocide debates but also productive articulations of “shared parallel histories of persecution, resistance, and

© The Author 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected] 4 ALH Online Review, Series XXII renaissance” (215). This is a particularly powerful chapter of the book as it points to contemporary and future scholarly directions in examining difficult topics—genocide, language revitalization, cultural survival, trauma and recovery, along with self- determination.

Among its many merits is the book’s ambitious scope of reading Native-white relations though a Jewish lens, a strategy that leads to rethinking the history of White-Indian relations, and American Western history. Although there have been several recent scholarly attempts in Jewish American Studies to expand our understanding of Jewish and Native representations, the encounters between Jews and Native Americans— especially in the American West—remain largely unexamined. Previous studies have attempted to bridge this scholarly gap—Jonathan Boyarin’s The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identities of Christian Europe (2009), Steven Katz, Red, Black, and Jew: New Frontiers in Hebrew Literature (2009), Alan Trachtenberg’s Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880-1930 (2004), and Rachel Rubinstein’s Members of the Tribe: Native Americans in the Jewish Imagination (2010).

To add to these conversations and to historicize Jewish (liberal) work on behalf of Native Americans, Koffman draws on an impressive number of US and Canadian archives (in English, German, and Yiddish), as well as a range of photographs of Jews and Indians/Indians, which emphasize both differences and alliances between the groups. His study persuasively bridges this scholarly gap by bringing a sharp understanding of Indigenous history and methods to bear on his study of Jewish encounters with Native Americans. This welcome intervention in Jewish studies, Native American studies, immigration studies, and studies of the American West yields a well- argued interdisciplinary, interethnic monograph, and models an original perspective on race, racialization, and racism in America over the last two centuries. The Jews’ Indian will help American Studies scholars rethink American Jewish history (and modern Jewish history more broadly) as part of colonial history and open future conversations with Indigenous studies. We might be on the brink of anticipating its counterpart in Indigenous studies, perhaps The Indians’ Jew.