Year: 2022
Type: dissertation
Abstract: especially rare and that almost always speaks from a deeply Ashkenormative position.What's more, as a white Jewish American subject, my taking up of Jewish whiteness is endemically and unavoidably compromised.And yet, as I have and will continue to argue, such reckonings with whiteness are essential to the future of anti-racist scholarship.I do not mean at all to suggest that we should reverse or discontinue the progress that has been made in broadening our gaze to include BIPOC Jewish authors, and, as will hopefully already be clear in the discussion of Ronit Matalon, I have no intention of leaving them out entirely.But we would be leaving the job half done if we did not also cast a critical eye on the racial epistemologies that first relegated non-white, non-Ashkenazi Jewish authors to obscurity.The simple fact is that making good on anti-racist futurities requires a distinct and ongoing change in white behaviors, which demands a deeper and more complete understanding of how whiteness operates locally and globally.I also want to make it clear that I am not claiming, in the manner of a European explorer, to have "discovered" an "unpeopled" territory hitherto unknown.In fact, to be quite frank, I imagine that much of what I have to say will be utterly unsurprising to scholars of color in Jewish studies and beyond.Yet one of the most crucial "realizations" of twenty-first-century anti-racism is that it should not and cannot be incumbent on BIPOC academics to shoulder the burden of pointing to whiteness over and over again in a recursive effort to change white behaviors.In any case, this is a question I will return to at length in the epilogue, which focuses on what Black activist and poet Dionne Brand calls "white people's work."'Working through' whiteness in Jewish culture, even on an individual level, is a fundamental part of breaking destructive disciplinary cycles in Jewish studies and beyond.As
Author: Taub, Naomi S
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7220768148