Vol. 1, No. 1, Fall 2002

[page 12]

Davida Bloom

White, But Not Quite:
The Jewish Character and Anti-Semitism - Negotiating a Location in the Gray Zone Between Other and Not

It is hard to describe the feeling -- the haunting quality -- the degree of its intensity, somewhere between a deja-vue and a possible connection with a collective consciousness; it is even difficult to pinpoint when in the discussion I became aware of the feeling. I only know it was there and it stayed with me. A feeling of being erased, and yet not feeling entitled to halt the process of erasure. The discussion revolved around a 1994 production in Chicago of The Merchant of Venice, directed by Peter Sellars. Sellars set the production in present day Venice, California and cast Antonio and the Venetians as Latinos, Portia and her retinue as Asians, and Shylock and the Jews as African-Americans. I did not understand why I felt usurped when the location of the Jew was replaced by the African-American. David Richards writes in his review of the production for the New York Times, "Mr. Sellars argues in a director's note that such innovations extend 'the metaphor and the reality of anti-Semitism' to include 'parallel struggles and their related issues' ".(1) Why should this directorial choice trouble me? As words were circulating in my mind, words that might begin to express to my colleagues my troubled feeling, the subtext implied in the intonation of the comment that the Goodman Theatre's subscription base was outraged by the production, stopped the words from forming in my mouth.

I am after all a privileged middle-class Jewish woman. I have only a few times in my life felt the effects of anti-Semitism, and then only in its mildest forms. My experiences of discrimination pale in comparison to those of these other Others. My place in that location of the Other as a Jew, not as a woman, slipped away. I did not feel entitled to claim a location, not even share the space, with the Asian, the Latino, and the African-American from the Goodman Theatre production. In her book, Black, Jewish, and Interracial: It's Not the Color of Your Skin, but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity, Katya Gibel Azoulay writes, "Identities take [page 13] shape or surface at the moment when their potentiality are denied".(2) I think perhaps the troubled feeling stems from the sense that this production in Chicago denied the potential of my Jewish identity.

In this paper I will attempt to analyze the roots of this feeling: the ambiguous location of the Jewish character in mid- to late twentieth century theatre, and the ambiguous location of anti-Semitism at the end of this century. I maintain that this location lies somewhere between the Other and the Not, a location that marks Jews as white, but not quite.

Jewish Identity as Not White

In a very literal sense, all Jews are not white. Ilsa M. Glazer reminds us in her article "A Cloak of Many Colors: Jewish Feminism and Feminist Jews in America," that people of different global locations see Jews as a people who are not necessarily white. "Jews who migrated to America came mostly from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East and therefore tend to be Caucasian. Those who migrated to the modern state of Israel from sub-Saharan Africa, India, and elsewhere have made that country a multiracial and multicultural mosaic united by religion".(3) News reports in 1996 of Ethiopian Jews living in Israel who were outraged upon learning that their donated blood had been discarded due to what was perceived as a unacceptably high risk of possible HIV transmission, brought the literal multi-colored dimension of the Jewish people to the headlines.(4)

Historically however, the identification of Jews as not white has not been a factor of their skin color. Azoulay notes that in "Virginia's laws pertaining to miscegenation, one finds evidence that Jews were not conceptualized as merely a religious group, but were specifically marked as a nonwhite race".(5) The American theatre followed this trend of viewing Jews as non- [page 14] white. Ellen Schiff describes the typical (stereotypical) characters found in the popular comedies and vaudeville acts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when she writes that "The era's dramatized personae included a whole variety of ethnic caricatures which exploited the traits familiarly associated within the Irish, Germans, French, Swedes, and that irresponsible burlesque concoction, the stage Negro. The Jew[ish character] figured as an ethnic among ethnics".(6) Even the Jewish entertainers during that time claimed their place next to other "non-white" immigrants. Schiff continues:

The Jews as non-white also permeate Christian history. Sander Gilman when discussing the Otherness that has marked Jews as racially different throughout Christian societies in his book Jewish Self-Hatred, argues:

This phenomenon of what I call racialized ethnicity is by no means unique to the Jewish (and other) immigrants to America. Richard Ned Lebow's book White Britain and Black Ireland: [page 15] The Influence of Stereotypes on Colonial Policy, documents the ways in which the Irish native was racialized to be Black by Imperial Britain. And, on a more private/domestic front, Anne McClintock, in her book Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, details the fascination aristocrat Arthur J. Munby held for working women in the late nineteenth century. "Munby refers frequently to the 'racial' otherness of working-class women".(9) His drawings of Caucasian working-class women with blackened skin are yet another example of the degree to which the Other's racial identity is not dependent on their literal skin color.

The Shift from Non-White to Not-Quite

It appears, from a sociological and historical perspective, that we can verify the Otherness of the Jew. This is especially true before World War II, but the landscape for the American Jew shifted dramatically after the War - after accurate events of the Jewish Holocaust were revealed. Karen Brodkin Sacks' article "How Did Jews Become White Folks?" details this shift in status, from non-white to white, among the Jewish immigrant population. She points out the fallacy of the claims of her parents' generation that "Jews overcame anti-Semitic barriers because Jews are special".(10) She does not credit the Jew's ability to 'pull themselves up by their bootstraps' as the sole reason for their change in status; rather she gives credit to "the post war boom, the decline of systematic public anti-immigrant racism and anti-Semitism, and governmental affirmative action extended to white males".(11) She notes as well the degree to which African-Americans were excluded from this process. "Like most chicken and egg problems," Sacks ponders, "it's hard to know which came first. Did Jews and other Euroethnics become white because they became middle class? That is, did money whiten? Or did being incorporated into an expanded version of whiteness open up the economic doors to a middle class status?".(12) This process of whitening went hand in hand with the willingness of Jews to be assimilated into the mainstream American/Christian middle-class.

[page 16] Yet, assimilation is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it brings the opportunity for upward mobility and the privileged status Sacks depicts. On the other it carries with it, as Azoulay describes, "the terror of being swallowed. . . . There is an unavoidable parallel to be drawn between Jews seeking entry into circles that exclude Jews, and African Americans who were light enough to pass as white. In both cases, all links to one's kin and history had to be carefully concealed".(13) David Theo Goldberg in his book Racial Subjects describes the paradoxical impact of assimilation. "As Jews become less Jewish by becoming more assimilated, more embedded in capitalist social formation, they are reified as more Jewish, as white capitalists--gold digging, conniving, self-and group-promoting, representative of and foreign to the American way".(14) In other words, at the same time that Jewish immigrants are freed from pre-World War II class constraints, the Jew is once again subject to discrimination, as his/her new image is viewed through the lens of the negative stereotype. White, but not quite.

The Location of Jewish Characters in Two Twentieth-Century Plays

How does this location between the Other and the Not manifest itself in dramatic text? Two twentieth-century plays depict the ambiguous location of Jewish soldiers in a military context, Home of the Brave(15) by Arthur Laurents and Somewhere on the Border(16) by South African playwright Anthony Akerman.

Home of the Brave tells the story of Private First Class Peter Coen (Coney) whose encounters with anti-Semitism within his barracks and the Japanese forces in the Pacific lead to a mental breakdown. The play takes the form of a medical detective story, as Army Doctor, Captain Bitterger, tries to discover the cause of PFC Coen's emotional and physical trauma. The play begins in the Army hospital, and goes back and forth between flashback scenes of Coney's unit at their base in the Pacific and on a Japanese-occupied island the Pacific. The soldiers were asked to volunteer for this dangerous mission in order to create a map of the Japanese-occupied island for a future American invasion.

[page 17] Coney's simultaneous otherness and whiteness, Jewish and assimilated identities, are revealed early in the play during a brief interchange he has with Private Finch. The two plan to open a bar/restaurant in Kansas when they get out of the Army.

What is interesting about this interchange is that Coney self-inscribes his not-whiteness, and Finch defines him as white. Coney's self definition as the Other reveals Jewish anti-Semitism, although in this case, it is a small example. Sander Gilman explains this phenomenon and notes that it is common to many non-privileged peoples:

Coney's self-inscription as Other shows the degree to which he accepts the image of himself put forth by the majority non-Jewish (white) community.

Davida Bloom is part of the Theatre Department at SUNY Brockport. Her research interests include feminism and theatre, religion and theatre, and metaphoric usage of playwrights in the depiction of rape in drama.