Black, Jewish, and Interracial: It's Not the Color of Your Skin, But the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity

By Katya Gibel Azoulay and Katya Gibel Mevorach

Book Overview

How do adult children of interracial parents--where one parent is Jewish and one is Black--think about personal identity? This question is at the heart of Katya Gibel Azoulay's Black, Jewish, and Interracial . Motivated by her own experience as the child of a Jewish mother and Jamaican father, Gibel Azoulay blends historical, theoretical, and personal perspectives to explore the possibilities and meanings that arise when Black and Jewish identities merge. As she asks what it means to be Black, Jewish, and interracial, Gibel Azoulay challenges deeply ingrained assumptions about identity and moves toward a consideration of complementary racial identities. Beginning with an examination of the concept of identity as it figures in philosophical and political thought, Gibel Azoulay moves on to consider and compare the politics and traditions of the Black and Jewish experience in America. Her inquiry draws together such diverse subjects as Plessy v. Ferguson , the Leo Frank case, "passing," intermarriage, civil rights, and anti-Semitism. The paradoxical presence of being both Black and Jewish, she argues, leads questions of identity, identity politics, and diversity in a new direction as it challenges distinct notions of whiteness and blackness. Rising above familiar notions of identity crisis and cultural confrontation, she offers new insights into the discourse of race and multiculturalism as she suggests that identity can be a more encompassing concept than is usually thought. Gibel Azoulay adds her own personal history and interviews with eight other Black and Jewish individuals to reveal various ways in which interracial identities are being lived, experienced, and understood in contemporary America.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822319756
• ISBN13: 9780822319757
• Release Date: October 1997
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Length: 232 Pages

Customer Reviews

This is my mom's book

My mother is Dr. Katya Gibel Azoulay and I've read some of her book. I think she is one of the smartest people I know, and if you want to research on interracial families, you need to read this book. Good job Mommy!

A Necessary Disruption Of The Status Quo

Gibel Azoulay enters the discourse on race at a pivotal point in history, when debates over the reconfiguration of census/socio-political categories and developments in the so called "mixed race" literature threaten to turn back the clocks to a sanitized version of Jim Crow. The author's voice is a refreshing and insightful alternative to those who wish to ignore history for the sake of those "mixed race" individuals hoping to 'escape' blackness. Gibel Azoulay's insistence upon maintaining dual cultural identities (Jewish and Black) must make a number of theorists and laymen incredibly uncomfortable. With impeccable scholarship and an original theoretical base she achieves a radical positioning, refusing to the embrace the idealized notions of racelessness put forth by Appiah and others, at the same time resisting the pure essentialization of the Afrocentrists. This is an important, noteworthy contribution. Great Job!