Jewish Identities in the American West: Relational Perspectives

By Ellen Eisenberg

Jewish Identities in the American West fills a significant gap in racial identity scholarship.
 
Since the onset of New Western History in the 1980s, the complexity of race and ethnicity as it developed in the American West has increasingly been recognized by scholars and the wider public alike. Ethnic studies scholars have developed new perspectives on racial formation in the West that complicate older notions that often relied on binary descriptions, such as Black/white racialization. In the past few decades, these studies have relied on relational approaches that focus on how race is constructed, by both examining interactions with the white dominant group, and by exploring the multiple connections with other racial/ethnic groups in society. Historians are discovering new stories of racial construction, and revising older accounts, to integrate these new perspectives into the formation of racial and ethnic identities. This collection of essays on Jews in the American West advances this field in multiple ways. With essays that cover the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, these authors present a collective portrait of change over time that allows us to view the shifting nature of Jewish identity in the West, as well as the evolving frameworks for racial construction. Thorough and thought-provoking, Jewish Identities in the American West takes readers on a journey of racial and ethnic identity in the American West.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Release date: Nov 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781684581290

Book preview

Introduction

ELLEN EISENBERG

In nineteenth-century Victoria, Jewish merchant Selim Franklin identified with and claimed membership in White settler society; he was even elected to serve in Vancouver Island’s Legislative Assembly in 1860. Yet in British Columbia, where Protestantism was a critical marker of belonging—and where Franklin and other Jewish merchants were notable for their trade with Asian immigrants and Native peoples perceived as problematic or even threatening to White society—Jewish acceptance was conditional. Although generally welcomed into, and emphatic about asserting their membership in, White society, antisemitic incidents reminded even prominent Jews such as Franklin that they were liminal insiders, participants in the settler colonial project whose Whiteness was modified by their religion.¹

Several hundred miles to the south in Oregon, Franklin’s contemporary, Bernard Goldsmith, achieved more secure insider status. After opening trade routes to remote parts of the state, helping to make new towns viable, fighting Indigenous peoples to secure White claims on the land, and winning a place among the business elite, Goldsmith became Portland’s mayor in 1869. For Goldsmith, and for a number of his coreligionists who were recognized as pioneers and achieved prominent public roles in the state, Jewish identity appears to have been a nonissue, usually going unmentioned in press coverage of their careers.²

Similarly, along the US–Mexico border, Jewish entrepreneurs and investors such as Abraham Goldbaum were able to achieve acceptance as full participants in and beneficiaries of nation building and development efforts, and of the policing activities that protected these enterprises, in part by targeting Indigenous people, African Americans, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans.³ Jewish participation in laying the foundations for White settlement and control of land and labor in British Columbia, Oregon, and the southwestern borderlands, their experiences of inclusion in those societies, and their relationships with Peoples of Color were shaped by their backgrounds as mostly Ashkenazi Jews of European descent,⁴ the dynamics of the White settler societies of which they were a part, and the broader demographics of these regions’ non-White populations.⁵

In contrast to this general—if sometimes conditional—acceptance during the period of Anglo American settlement, Western Jews after the turn of the century were far more likely to face marginalization. As urban Jewish communities expanded due to an influx of Eastern European Ashkenazic and Eastern Mediterranean Sephardic immigrants,⁶ they increasingly found themselves viewed as undesirable others and denied access to exclusive White spaces such as professional firms, social clubs, and elite neighborhoods. Settling in working-class communities populated by diverse immigrants, and ethnic and racial minorities, many embraced a minority consciousness, as they came to see their interests as intertwined with those of outsider status. Thus, coming of age in Boyle Heights, American-born communist youth such as Dorothy Healey developed intense ties of solidarity with Mexican, Filipino, African American, and Asian workers in the city’s factories and agricultural hinterland as they decried the region’s expanding racial capitalism. Despite their sublimation of Jewish ethnicity in favor of a universal, class-based identity, Healey and her comrades found that their Jewish identities were used alongside their political activities to cast them as dangerous, foreign outsiders.⁷

Cross-racial/ethnic ties fostered by a sense of shared marginalization were not limited to radicals; increasingly in the early to mid-twentieth century, Jewish individuals and communal organizations saw antisemitism as tied to other forms of prejudice, and forged alliances with African Americans and, particularly in Southern California, with Latinos, to challenge discriminatory laws and practices. Culminating in the landmark Mendez case, which declared school segregation of Mexican Americans unconstitutional, Jewish attorney David Marcus spent decades representing the Mexican consulate and Mexican Americans in and around Los Angeles, fighting the discrimination they faced despite their legal recognition as Whites.⁸

As Marcus labored to address discrimination born of Mexican racialization in Los Angeles, in Seattle, members of North America’s second largest Sephardic Jewish community wrestled with their own racial identity and liminality. Solomon Calvo, Jacob Policar, and other founders of Seattle’s Sephardic community initially embraced Ottoman identity, seeing themselves as part of a larger community of Ottoman Greeks, Turks, and Armenians. Yet international politics and governmental questioning of their Whiteness—and thus their eligibility for immigration and naturalization—led them to distance themselves from their Oriental origins and instead embrace their more European—and Whiter—Spanish roots as Sephardim.⁹

In the postwar period, even as Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews were increasingly accepted as White and were able to benefit from privileges associated with Whiteness (such as access to suburban housing), minority consciousness persisted and sometime came into direct conflict with White privilege on issues such as busing and affirmative action. For example, Jewish Angelenos, increasingly residing in suburban enclaves in the 1960s and beyond, were pulled in two directions by a school integration plan relying on busing. Even as communal leaders endorsed the desegregation plan, many Jews embraced new, private day-school options, at least in part to escape busing.¹⁰

During the same period, affirmative action and racial balancing programs led some Sephardic Jews to wrestle with their relationship to the emerging Hispanic category, in some cases asserting Hispanic identity and in others unambiguously identifying as White. In contrast to early twentieth-century Ottoman Jews in Seattle who embraced a Hispanic Sephardic identity, at least in part, to assert their Europeanness (and Whiteness), some Sephardic Los Angeles teachers used the same label to claim minority (and thus non-White) status.¹¹ And beyond the usual categories of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, the diversity of the West and its high rates of intermarriage have contributed to a growing population of Jews of Color in the region, raising new questions about Jewish ethnoracial identity.¹²

The variations in Jewish relationships to both the dominant White society and to other ethnic and racial minority groups suggested by these examples illustrate the contingency of Jewish identities from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century in the North American West. Although much of the literature on Jews and race focuses either on the twentieth-century story of becoming White or on the Black-Jewish alliance during the civil rights era, the chapters in this anthology tell a more complicated and less linear story, reflective of diverse and varied Western racial landscapes in which Jews experienced varying degrees of belonging and marginalization.¹³ Through these chapters, we seek to engage with and challenge scholars of American Jewry and of Western ethnicity. For historians of American Jewry, we aim to demonstrate the importance of looking beyond Eastern and Midwestern urban settings—where Jewish ethnoracial formation took place in a world largely defined by the Black-White binary—to the West, where Native Americans, immigrant and ethnic Mexicans, Asians, and Filipinos, as well as African Americans and European immigrants and ethnics were part of a more complex racial and religious landscape that shaped local Jewish identities and alliances.¹⁴

For scholars of race and ethnicity in the West, we endeavor to challenge the tendency to treat Jews as undifferentiated Whites. While acknowledging and exploring Jews’ inclusion as Whites in some contexts—and the implications of that inclusion for settler colonialism and racial politics at key moments in Western history—our work also illuminates Jewish marginality, when experiences and identities set Jewish individuals and communities apart from majority power structures and intersected with those of communities of color. Through a relational approach developed by ethnic studies scholars, we examine the complications of Jewish identities, noting that inclusion and marginalization—Whiteness and non-Whiteness—were strongly shaped by ethnic landscapes that shifted over time and across space and, in some cases, coexisted. Thus, we seek both to complicate narratives of Jewish Whiteness and to engage with ethnic histories as we explore areas of confluence and connection in group experiences and identities between Jews and Peoples of Color in the region.

A relational approach, most fully articulated by Daniel Martinez HoSang and Natalia Molina in Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method, and Practice (2019), strives to consider racialization and formation of subordinated groups in relation to one another.¹⁵ To do so, HoSang and Molina explain, one must conceptualize racialization as a dynamic and interactive process; group-based racial constructions are formed in relation not only to Whiteness but also to other devalued and marginalized groups.¹⁶ This approach breaks with the common practice of placing individual ethnic or racial groups into bilateral comparisons, most frequently between a single non-White group and the dominant White society. In contrast, a relational approach acknowledges that groups are shaped not only by their relationship with the dominant group, but by more complicated, multilateral connections to the various communities around them. Thus, the dynamics faced by Japanese immigrants on the West Coast were impacted not only by their relationships with the White power structure, but also by the presence of Mexicans or South Asians or Chinese in a given place or at a particular point in time. Likewise, as demonstrated in the examples above, Jewish individuals and communities experienced different receptions and forged distinct identities depending not only on their interface with White power structures but also on the presence of and their relationships with other groups. Accordingly, each of the contributors to this volume places their subjects within a specific ethnic landscape, exploring its particularities in an effort to understand the ways in which, in HoSang and Molina’s words, racial meanings, boundaries, and hierarchies are coproduced through dynamic processes that change across time and space.¹⁷

Another advantage of this approach is that, in contrast to bilateral comparisons, which tend to cast each group as preformed and fixed, it recognizes variation and change within groups. Indeed, drawing on Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s theory of racial formation, we approach all groups as social constructions (or racial projects) in which groupness is forged out of the particular social relations, structures, and interactions in a specific context. By recognizing identities as dynamic products of social interactions, this approach frames ethnoracial groups not as discrete and intrinsic but as interactive and evolving. Thus, while Jews, regardless of their particular origins, shared a complex identity that included religious, national (Jewish peoplehood), and, increasingly in the late nineteenth century, racial, elements,¹⁸ their position in the American social order—and the ways in which they saw themselves and others understood them—shifted over time and space, shaped by the characteristics of local ethnoracial landscapes and structures of power. At the same time, as Omi and Winant emphasize, it is critical to remain cognizant of the degree to which society is racially structured from top to bottom, and that race continues to play a fundamental role in structuring and representing the social world.¹⁹

Ethnic Studies and Vanishing Jews

On the face of it, it might seem obvious that place- and time-specific variations in Jewish individual and communal identities should be part of a broader literature on race formation and ethnic identity. Yet, in much of the scholarship on race and ethnicity, both nationally and regionally, Jews disappear into the White majority. Regionally, this erasure is, in part, rooted in the early inclusion of Jews in the West, where tremendous ethnic and religious diversity from the beginnings of Anglo American settlement led to an inclusive, panethnic Whiteness. As Western historian Patricia Limerick explains, The American West was an important meeting ground, the point where Indian America, Latin America, Anglo-America, Afro-America, and Asia intersected. In race relations, the West could make the turn-of-the-century Northeastern urban confrontation between European immigrants and American nativists look like a family reunion.²⁰ Indeed, if, as historians have noted, Jewish immigrants’ status as White on arrival to the United States made them eligible for naturalization and the rights of citizenship, this access to privilege went even farther in the West, enabling them to claim free land. In parts of the West where People of Color outnumbered Whites, panethnic White inclusiveness continued into the early twentieth century. Thus, in Clifton, Arizona, at the turn of the twentieth century, Jews, Italians, and Spaniards were all part of the group of Anglos opposing and forcefully overturning the adoption of Irish American Catholic orphans by Mexican and Mexican American families.²¹

The pattern of Jewish inclusion in the West during the settlement period—and longer in places such as Clifton, where Anglos remained a minority into the twentieth century—is one reason for the tendency of Western ethnic studies to submerge Jews into Whiteness. Yet this pattern is also a product of late twentieth-century understandings of race and ethnicity that shifted questions of Jewish belonging from the center to the periphery and placed the study of American Jewry outside the scope of the emerging field of ethnic studies.

For the better part of the twentieth century, Jews were central as both scholars and subjects of discussions of diversity in America. As historian David Biale explains, American Jews possessed a double consciousness, retaining their distinctive group identity even as they embraced the United States as a home where they could integrate into mainstream culture and escape their historic destiny as a persecuted, perpetual minority. It was the tension of this double consciousness, according to Biale, that led various Jewish thinkers to develop new theories of America that might accommodate the Jews. It was for this reason that Jews played key roles in developing and popularizing the melting pot and cultural pluralism models, both of which centered Jews as the archetypal minority, wrestling with how they could integrate into the mainstream while retaining their distinctiveness.²²

Although they had been central in early to mid-twentieth-century discussions of American diversity, Jews became marginal to the discourse of multiculturalism that emerged late in the century.²³ With Jews and other European ethnics seen as fully integrated into mainstream society in the post–World War II years, discussions of American diversity turned to issues of race, rather than ethnicity and immigration. It became increasingly clear, especially in the wake of the civil rights movement, that the earlier models’ commitment to—and confidence in—integration was not the reality for African Americans.²⁴ Rather than seeing assimilation as an ideal to strive for, as historian Cheryl Greenberg explains, integration was impossible to achieve given the impenetrable barriers of the American racial state. Thus was multiculturalism born. At its most basic level it was pluralism without the element of public conformity and without pluralism’s optimism of ultimate inclusion for all.²⁵ Abandoning the earlier belief that the abolition of discriminatory legal structures would open the gates to inclusion, emerging ethnic studies programs drew on critical race theory to emphasize the continuing impact of a deeper, structural racism.²⁶

Central to this discourse, according to Greenberg, was the view that, while race is a social construct, it is still an inescapable and hereditary social category that determined access to power and privilege.²⁷ Seeing Jews as a White, Euro-American ethnic group, multiculturalism cast them as racial insiders in America, in contrast to the racial outsiders who became the focus of ethnic studies. Indeed, although historians generally focus on access to postwar suburban housing and other benefits of the liberal state as key factors in Jews (and other ethnics) becoming White, the emergence of multiculturalism was also important in cementing a general understanding of Jews as Whites. Thus, ethnic studies scholars generally have defined Jews as a group outside of their purview. As historian David Hollinger, a noted critic of multiculturalism, explained, Multiculturalism has been organized largely on the basis of the ethnoracial pentagon, our mythical, five-part structure with cultures ascribed to color-coded communities of descent, often in recent years labeled African American, Asian American, European American, Hispanic or Latino, and Indian or Native American. On this map of culture in America, Jews are invisible, except in very detailed versions of it that show the cultures ascribed to subgroups, in which case we find Jews, along with Poles and Irish and Italians, etc., within the part of the map labeled European American.²⁸ Hollinger bemoaned the loss of the potential contributions of historians of American Jewry to scholarly understandings of identity formation, cultural diversity, and group identity. Hollinger was joined in this critique by historians of American Jewry who shared his frustration with the ways in which these lines have been drawn.²⁹

For this reason, despite the similar timing of the emergence of the various ethnic studies programs (configured broadly as ethnic studies or in the form of specific African American, Chicano, Latinx, and Asian American studies programs) and Jewish studies (which includes the study of American Jewry), there has been considerable distance—and at times tension—between them. This tension is evident in the ways in which they fit into curricular and departmental organization. For example, on many campuses, courses in American Jewish history and literature are not a part of—and in some cases are explicitly excluded from—ethnic studies programs, and from the multicultural or diversity general education requirements that grew up alongside them. Inclusion in such programs or requirements of study of a group that is generally understood in mainstream American society as White seems anomalous.³⁰ As one department chair trying to adjudicate whether a course on Jewish American culture would count toward an ethnic studies requirement was told by his colleagues, To be Jewish was to be White; to be ethnic was to be something other, if not Other. A course in Jewish American history was just another course in White American culture—hence, just another way in which the social dominant maintained its hegemony, by appropriating a counter-hegemonic discourse.³¹

These tensions are not simply battles over academic turf. Rather, Jewish studies and ethnic studies, despite their emergence during the same era, had quite different relationships to the mainstream. Jewish studies emerged as Jews attained an unprecedented degree of inclusion in American society—an achievement that many Jews saw at the time as the triumph of a racially and ethnically blind meritocracy, or at least as a refutation of multiculturalism’s insistence on the permanence of barriers to full integration.³² In contrast, ethnic studies and multiculturalism were outgrowths of the later phases of the civil rights movement, emerging from the tension between the demand for race blindness and the simultaneous recognition that race hatred would necessarily prevent realization of that goal.³³ While Jewish studies sought to make a place for itself in the western canon, the multicultural analysis at the base of ethnic studies challenged the canon as exclusionary and elitist, and rejected the integrationist commitment to assimilation as a shared norm.³⁴ The challenges posed by ethnic studies reinforced the kinds of ambivalence among Jews that had driven early to mid-twentieth-century debates over the melting pot and cultural pluralism. Still expressing a minority consciousness even as they achieved insider status, many Jews struggled with their identification in this schema as just White. As Greenberg explains, Just as Jews moved from a minority to part of the majority—that is, from outsider to insider status—insider lost its moral legitimacy.³⁵

Most critical here is the reality that unambiguous placement of Jews on the White side of the racial divide obscures variations in American Jewish experiences across time and space, and discourages potentially fruitful explorations of their intersections with communities regarded as Peoples of Color. Despite their legal Whiteness and early status as insiders in the White power structures of frontier communities, Jews did not (and do not) always fit easily into White spaces. Although early Jewish settlers in the West, overwhelmingly Ashkenazi Jews from German lands, who were frequently positioned as merchants supplying necessities to farming and mining populations, had little difficulty establishing themselves as Whites deserving of pioneer status; later arriving Eastern European Ashkenazim and Sephardim from the Eastern Mediterranean faced a variety of restrictions and prejudices. Viewed as backward, overly religious, and uncivilized by their German American coreligionists and by other Whites, Eastern European Jews were targeted, along with other Southern and Eastern Europeans, for immigration restrictions based on hierarchies derived from racial science that categorized them as biologically inferior stock. The same theories—and other antisemitic tropes—justified exclusion of Jews from elite neighborhoods, clubs, and professional firms. Similarly, although Sephardicness had been a marker of elite status in early American Jewish communities, Sephardim arriving from the Ottoman Empire just after the turn of the century were maligned for their swarthy appearance and their concentration in lowly occupations such as bootblacking and selling fish or fruit. For these Sephardim, and for Jewish immigrants from the Middle East more broadly,³⁶ legal Whiteness was, at times, contested. As was the case more generally for immigrants from what was then called the Near East, racial status, and thus eligibility for naturalization, had to be adjudicated by the courts. And, although the majority of American Jews—both Ashkenazim and Sephardim—reaped the benefits delivered to Whites by New Deal and postwar liberalism, moving in large numbers into the professions and the suburbs, the quick assumption of Jewish identity as White today is belied by the growing number of Jews of Color.³⁷ More broadly, as historical demographer Bruce Phillips has demonstrated, despite their acceptance as Whites in mainstream society, Jews continue to defy residential patterns typical of other White Americans. In a study of Los Angeles, he finds Jewish clustering in ethnoburbs and returning to older Jewish neighborhoods, patterns similar to those of Asian Americans and Chicanos.³⁸

As these examples suggest, despite their early acceptance as pioneers, Jews in the West sometimes occupied liminal spaces between White majorities and diverse communities of color. And these liminal spaces were shared by others who are now seen and identify as communities of color. For example, Mexicans and Mexican Americans have long been categorized in American law as White, despite the history of exclusions and discrimination they have been subject to. Even today, the majority of Latinx peoples in the United States define themselves as White when asked to check a racial box—although there is an emerging generational split, with increasing numbers of younger Latinx identifying as People of Color (POC).³⁹ Likewise, Americans of Middle Eastern descent increasingly identify as non-White, despite their grandparents’ successful fight to gain White status under American law.⁴⁰ These examples make clear the potential intersections and resonances that can result from placing the experiences of Jews in conversation with those of Peoples of Color who are the focus of ethnic studies scholars.

American Jewish History: Beyond Black and White

Just as ethnic studies scholars have tended to subsume Jewish experiences into Whiteness, scholars of American Jewish history have often ignored potential convergences and resonances with ethnic studies. A relational approach should seem natural to scholars of American Jewish history, a field that has long triangulated Jewish identities with those of Whites and African Americans. Yet the Black-White binary has dominated this discussion to the exclusion of other groups. Much of the literature about Jews and Whiteness parallels that on other supposedly undesirable nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European immigrants who became White. All of these groups were White on arrival,⁴¹ meaning that they were able to immigrate and naturalize as American citizens, but still were in-betweens, not-quite-Whites or off-Whites, because they were subject to an array of prejudices and restrictions on their residential, educational, occupational, and social opportunities. The Whiteness literature charts their transition from this not-quite-White status to the attainment of full access and privileges, including the benefits of New Deal and postwar housing, educational, and occupational programs and opportunities. In this literature, European ethnics’ attainment of full inclusion and access to White privilege is generally contrasted with the experiences of African Americans, who were excluded from these opportunities, benefits, and privileges. Potential connections with groups such as Mexican Americans and other Latinx peoples and Asian Americans are often neglected.

The volume of literature on Jews and African Americans is impressive; studies tend to cast Jewish Whiteness (or Jews becoming White) in relationship to African American non-Whiteness. Yet, rather than describing an unproblematic path, what emerges is a more conflicted, even tortured, journey. As historian Eric Goldstein argues, because Jews had a commitment to a self-conception as a people (or even, at times, as a race) as well as a religious group, becoming White came at a psychic cost, which Goldstein calls the price of Whiteness.⁴² Moreover, for many, White identity chafed because the long history of antisemitism and Jewish marginalization fostered minority consciousness. Historians have pointed to minority consciousness to explain distinctive Jewish voting patterns (as a mid-twentieth-century commentator explained, Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans⁴³) and the disproportionate involvement of Jews in the civil rights movement. Indeed, many scholars of American Jewry have explored the notion of a special relationship between Jews and African Americans.

This focus has produced a rich (if largely unrequited) literature on Jews and African Americans,⁴⁴ but there has been relatively little engagement of the larger, more multilateral context of racial and ethnic complexity that has long been present in the West—and is increasingly so in many regions of twenty-first-century America. In addition, as the scholarship on relational formation of race suggests, the focus on bilateral relationships within an implicit racial binary is also problematic in its tendency to cast the groups in question as fixed bodies. As Jonathan Freedman explains, It is one thing to think about Jewishness-as-Whiteness in the context of the Black-White binary. . . . It is another thing to think about Jewishness in the context of Asian American or Latino or even Native American identities and experiences; in all these cases, relations between Jewish and other forms of ethnic belonging become more complicated.⁴⁵

Indeed, in contrast to the well-integrated and geographically dispersed pioneer Jews of the mid-nineteenth century, later arriving Eastern Europeans and Sephardim often lived in concentrated settlements where they shared space with other immigrants, ethnics, and racial others. In Seattle’s Central District, San Francisco’s Fillmore, and Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights, as well as in smaller pockets in other Western cities, immigrant Jewish families, excluded from more elite White residential areas, inhabited the same neighborhoods as Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, African Americans, and other marginalized groups. In such neighborhoods, parallels and intersections among these groups are clear. For example, historian Allison Varzally points out the particular connections between Jews and Mexicans as groups closest to a still developing color line . . . Classified by state and federal officials as ‘White,’ they enjoyed legal freedoms of which Asian, Native, and African Americans could only dream.⁴⁶ The ability of Jews and Mexicans to naturalize, to marry European ethnics, to serve in regular units of the armed forces, to call themselves ‘White,’ built tensions into their relations with other minorities. The everyday prejudices that Jews, and especially Mexican Americans, encountered in housing, education, and employment were sometimes not enough to convince other minorities that they had reason to associate or collaborate.⁴⁷ Still, in her work on California, Varzally documents the mingling and mixing among minorities, particularly minority youth, in the streets and schools of neighborhood such as Boyle Heights, tracing the ways in which non-Whites judiciously constructed their own panethnic links in diverse spaces.⁴⁸ Similarly, Mark Wild’s work on Los Angeles explores the development of intense multiethnic social networks that fostered everyday social relations, including friendships, romantic relationships, and political alliances.⁴⁹ Not surprisingly, these diverse residential districts fostered deep connections, just as the more generalized experience of exclusion and prejudice engendered a strong sense of marginality and outsider identity among Jews.

That historians of race and ethnicity in Southern California—and particularly in Los Angeles—have led the way in exploring the intersections and alliances that emerged from these neighborhoods is not surprising; Los Angeles, home to North America’s second largest Jewish community after New York City, is a city whose diversity has never been containable in a racial dichotomy. As historian Mark Brilliant points out, as far back as the 1940s, when Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal was penning An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), based largely on research in the American South, Californian Carey McWilliams was describing a far more complicated set of racial challenges in Brothers Under the Skin (1943). McWilliams argued that we have . . . overemphasized the Negro and failed to correlate the Negro problem . . . with the Chinese problem, the Mexican problem, the Filipino problem. Thus, according to Brilliant, McWilliams described "a very different picture than An American Dilemma: a country crisscrossed by color lines, riven with multiple ‘race problems,’ rather than bisected by the lone color line of the ‘Negro problem.’"⁵⁰ Notably, in the 1964 edition of Brothers Under the Skin, McWilliams added a chapter on the Jewish minority and antisemitism, explaining that, despite his earlier decision to omit them because it is difficult to relate the problems of the Jewish minority to those, say, of certain racial minorities, by 1964 he had concluded that the new chapter was called for, as it can be used to throw an interesting light on important phases of minority status.⁵¹

Following in McWilliams’s footsteps, the work of a small group of twenty-first-century scholars provides notable exceptions to the general erasure of Jews in ethnic histories and demonstrates the potential of exploration of multilateral connections in American Jewish history. Among these scholars are historians who have focused particularly on Boyle Heights as a diverse, multiethnic neighborhood that emerged as a by-product of segregationist policies and restrictive racial covenants⁵² in the early to mid-twentieth century. One product of this work was the Japanese American National Museum’s Boyle Heights Project, which included an oral history initiative, an exhibit, and an array of public programming.⁵³ George Sánchez, a leading historian of the Mexican American experience and scholarly advisor to the JANM project, frames Boyle Heights as a corrective to the common image of racially exclusive communities best characterized as ghettoes or barrios. Rather, Sánchez explains, neighborhoods such as Boyle Heights were racially mixed areas in which the dynamics and hierarchies of racial power and differentiation were played out in the neighborhood politics and personal relations, as well as being sites of interaction.⁵⁴ Sánchez has been emphatic in his inclusion of Jews in his ethnic histories of the neighborhood, writing, for example, about a group of Jews who remained in—or moved into—Boyle Heights in the 1940s and 1950s, when many of their coethnics were leaving, in order to participate in building a new multiracial community in Boyle Heights, while Southern California as a whole was becoming more suburban and conservative.⁵⁵ Sánchez also edited Beyond Alliances: The Jewish Role in Reshaping the Racial Landscape in Southern California (2012), a volume whose four case studies highlight Jewish activism and engagement with Mexican Americans and which argues that Jews had a unique and special role . . . in reshaping the ethnic/racial landscape of Southern California in the mid-twentieth century.⁵⁶ Most recently, Sánchez’s 2021 monograph on Boyle Heights focuses on the intense interethnic/interracial ties fostered by the neighborhood and the political alliances that grew out of