Rafael Monkarsh
Laura Leibman
ENG 303
1 April 2021

Gordon, Lewis R. “Rarely Kosher: Studying Jews of Color in North America.” American Jewish History 100, no. 1 (2016): 105–16. https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2016.0006.

            Gordon’s article begins by acknowledging the relatively recent racializing of Jews as one people, as white in most instances, despite all observable and concrete evidence to the contrary. In the eyes of the general public, Jews went from being an entirely non-white people to, somehow, a mostly-white people excepting  “Jews of color.” Jews who were not white “simply disappeared, or at least disappeared as Jews” (106). Reiterating W.E.B. DuBois, Gordon establishes that racism often treats minority groups as a collective problem rather than a group of human beings facing problems. He extends that to the Jews: as they become more racialized, they are seen more as problems than as people. Gordon asserts that people generally miss the “possibility of blacks who are Jews or Jews who are blacks” (108). After reviewing the history that led to each country/nation/empire’s conception of “the Jews” rather than just “Jews,” Gordon argues that the “Afro-Jewish question” is, when viewing Judaism through a religions perspective rather than a racial one, oxymoronic (110). Gordon points out the racist double standard between Russian Jews (or even Christians) facing little to no obstacles when claiming their right to return to Israel and Afro-Jews facing intense scrutiny even when they can trace their Jewishness back many generations. All of this, Gordon argues, is complicated by the various conceptions of who is Jewish being governed by who appears to be Jewish. Ultimately, Gordon urges Jewish scholars to advance research “that facilitate the appearance of communities,” including “learning about Jewish communities beyond their own” (115). Jews seem to be distributed across the globe, so one should not hesitate to learn about those who lay beyond one’s initial communal boundaries.

            Gordon’s article is well-written and includes ample data from the past as well as the present. His argument benefits greatly from his attention to history, even if those sections can seem dense and divergent from the article’s main focus. Although he confines his focus to North American and Caribbean Jews, a deficit he acknowledges, he dives deep into those areas and presents a comprehensive analysis of the issues that come with racializing those Jewish communities and failing to gather data from a sufficient number of global populations. He does state his article’s purpose at the outset, but he doesn’t present a concrete thesis until nearing the end of the article, making a second read imperative for anyone who would like to read it all with the thesis in mind. More attention to the thesis throughout would help ground some of the paragraphs that are somewhat free-floating, but I don’t view that as a necessary alteration. At its strongest, Gordon’s paper is profoundly educational and contains more than a few insightful observations and compelling arguments relating to the discussed content. One would be hard-pressed to read this article and not find oneself better-educated after, unless you were Gordon himself.