JCD5135H: Race, Politics and Jewishness

This course will trace the complicated history of Jewish racialization from the Spanish conception of limpieza de sangre ("the cleanness of blood") to the "whitening" of (some) Jewish Americans and Jewish racial positioning today; we will also follow the tensions and coalitions of Jews and other racialized others, including Indigenous peoples, Palestinians, and Black, paying particular attention to Jewish-Black relations from the slave trade to the labour movement, the Women's March, and Black Lives Matter. Alongside these historical studies, we will collaboratively build a theoretical apparatus for understanding the often-charged nexus between Jewish Studies and Critical Race Theory, reading Max Weinreich's mobilization of the W.E.B. Du Bois's "double consciousness," Frantz Fanon's dialogue with Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew, the controversy around Nadia Abu El-Haj's The Genealogical Science, and Jewish responses to Frank Wilderson III's Afropessimism. We will watch Al Jolson's 1927 The Jazz Singer and Anna Deveare Smith's 1992 Fires in the Mirror, and read early-twentieth-century Yiddish anti-lynching poetry, Toni Morrison's 1977 Song of Solomon, and Philip Roth's 2000 The Human Stain.

0.50
St. George
In Class