How Jewish Immigrants from Eastern Europe Were Introduced to Whiteness

In 1959, American businesswoman Ruth Handler, along with her husband, Elliot, the cofounder of Mattel, invented the Barbie Doll. Barbie—blond and white and with proportions that made her more all-American than any living American woman could naturally be—was named for Ruth’s daughter, Barbara Handler. The story goes that Ruth noticed Barbara was playing with paper dolls as though the dolls were not babies but adult women in some future time and place. Their paper clothes and paper form were not up to the task.

There is a certain irony in a Jewish woman inventing this icon of white America. Legally, Jews of European descent have always been considered white in the United States. But culturally, this status has been more in flux. Before World War II, Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish, struggled with where to pin Jews in America’s racial hierarchy. In the years from 1945 through the 1960s, many American Jews moved more comfortably into and up in the world of white America. Some Jews were ambivalent about whiteness; others actively tried to position themselves as white, and specifically as white in the context of the Cold War—and in opposition to Black Americans.

Barbie’s Dream House first came out in 1962. In real life, the American Jewish dream house was defined not only by those whom it ostensibly sheltered but also by those who were kept from living under its fantasy roof.

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The whiteness of Jews in the United States has been taken as obvious, then questioned, then reasserted over the decades.

Before the mid-nineteenth century, European immigrants who came over generally assimilated into white America. This was no small thing. In the American context, to be white was to be in the part of society that traded and owned and profited from enslaved people, and not the part that was enslaved. That included European Jews, who were broadly thought of as white.

Elsewhere in the Atlantic world this was untrue. There were other parts of the western hemisphere where Jews were not predominantly white. There was, for example, Suriname, where Portuguese Jews and their descendants had autonomy within a slave society. Those Jewish men who came over from Europe to live and work in Suriname raped the women they enslaved and then had their children converted to Judaism. In this way, the “Eurafrican” Jewish population likely came to surpass the “white” Jewish population there by the early 1800s.

But the United States was not Suriname. And in the United States, Jewish whiteness allowed some Jews to play an active role in upholding America’s racist, slave-based society. In chapter one, we learned of Judah P. Benjamin, but he was hardly alone. The first Jewish member of Congress, Lewis Charles Levin, elected in 1845, founded the American Republic Party, later known as the Native American Party—and informally known as the nativist Know Nothing Party.

Other American Jews also fought on the side of the Confederacy during the Civil War, making arguments that Judaism and slave ownership were coherent. That many Jews fought on the side of the Union and made the opposite case arguably had less to do with some inherent Jewish value and more to do with the fact that more Jews lived in the North.

Jews in the United States before the mass Jewish migration also spoke about themselves as members of a religion, not as a distinct people or a race: consider, again, the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, which said explicitly that to be Jewish was to belong to a faith, not a nation.

But as more Jews came to America, Jews of European descent were to be seen as something other than white. After 1880, immigration shifted to become primarily from southern and eastern Europe and from less wealthy communities, changing the makeup of cities. Immigrants and their children made up 70 percent of America’s largest cities, which in turn assumed a southern and eastern European character. Immigrants were not just disappearing into white American culture; they were changing what it looked like. This caused consternation for those white Americans who were already here who did not want the portrait of white America to change.

There are several theories as to why Jewish racial status was thrown into question in the late 1800s. Karen Brodkin, in her How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America, writes of how Jews were concentrated in the garment industry in part because they were frozen out of printing, carpentry, painting, building, and highly unionized fields like transportation and communication. The American Federation of Labor was, at the time, adamant that the “privileged labor class” that needed to be protected was white America of German, British, and Irish descent.

“In sum, the temporary darkening of Jews and other European immigrants during the period when they formed the core of the industrial working class clearly illustrates the linkages between degraded and driven jobs and nonwhite racial status,” Brodkin writes. Brodkin was referring to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, linking American Jews’ working-class status to their status as “lesser than” in the eyes of some of their countrymen—though the fact that Jews were considered to be less desirable Europeans did not actually change their racial legal status in the United States.

Further, while many Jews worked in what were viewed as lower laboring classes, which Brodkin argues changed the perception of Jews for the worse, white America was also uncomfortable with how many Jews were coming into positions of status. Jews, who treated universities not as clubs for privileged play but opportunities for self-advancement, did so well in the highest echelons of American education that quotas were imposed at many of the most prestigious universities because these institutions were first and foremost places where white Americans could secure positions of prestige and power in white America.

This is what works like The Melting Pot missed. It was not only that newer Jewish immigrants were resistant to let go of their culture or to see themselves as just another set of white Americans, and it wasn’t just that Jews insisted that intermarriage was a problem for the continuation of Jews and Judaism. America demanded assimilation, but, as more southern and eastern European immigrants arrived, Americans decided that they also had strong beliefs about what sorts of people were capable of assimilating.

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In fairness to mainstream white America, newer, less acculturated immigrants were also unsure that they wanted to be a part of mainstream white America, at least upon arrival.

Jews who had been in the United States for longer, or whose families had long been in the United States, understood very clearly that whiteness was power and safety.

More recent eastern European Jewish immigrants felt differently about all of this than their more established peers. Freshly arrived and coming from a place with its own violent set of prejudices, they felt less of a need to self-define in a way that met white America’s expectations. They had their own sense of what it meant to be Jewish, and it wasn’t just “people who prayed differently.”

In fact, even the concept of race-based divisions didn’t quite fit in the eastern European Jewish mindset: a survey of Yiddish press and popular culture suggests that they spoke of dos yidishe folk, or Jewish people, and not di yidishe rase, or Jewish race, as Eric L. Goldstein writes in The Price of Whiteness. In the United States, race was the organizing principle, but that hadn’t been the case in eastern Europe, where Jews thought of themselves as a people or ethnicity, but not a race, apart. Was the question of racial sameness or distinctiveness, some wondered, even relevant to them?

There were whole communities that revolved around the Yiddish language and Yiddish culture, some of which, like the Workmen’s Circle, were also Socialist. These pockets were insular but not isolated. For one thing, over time the prevalence and power of Socialist Jews—or of Socialism in Yiddishkeit—decreased. According to Arthur Liebman, in his Jews and the Left, it was because these groups tried to work with other (non-leftist) Jewish organizations and communal structures. They could not afford not to do so.

But in doing so, he argues, they became more Jewish—or, rather, more of a different kind of Jewish—and less leftist. But there was another dynamic at play, too: even Yiddish-language newspapers could not keep Jewish communities away forever from the predominant way of thinking of hierarchy in the United States, which was, from its founding, along lines of Black and white.

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From Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities by Emily Tamkin, available via Harper.