"Beyond Whiteness: Revisiting Jews in Ethnic America"

The concept of ethnicity, once in vogue, has largely gone out of fashion among twenty-first-century social scientists, now replaced by models of assimilation defined in terms of the construction of whiteness and white supremacy. This panel discussion, featuring contributing authors of Volume 21 of the Casden Annual Review, eponymously titled Beyond Whiteness: Revisiting Jews in Ethnic America (Purdue University Press, 2023) explores the benefits of reconfiguring the ethnic concept as a tool to analyze the experiences of twentieth-century American Jews—not only in relation to other “white” groups of European descent, but also African Americans and Asian Americans, among others. This discussion will further demonstrate that expanding ethnicity beyond the traditional Eurocentric frame can yield fresh insights into the character of Jewish life in the modern United States.

Panelists:

Jonathan Karp (moderator and guest-editor of Beyond Whiteness: Revisiting Jews in Ethnic America), Professor of Judaic Studies and History, Binghamton University, State University of New York

Jarrod Tanny, Professor of History and the Charles and Hannah Block Distinguished Scholar in Jewish History at the University of North Carolina Wilmington

Hana Wirth-Nesher, Professor of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University

Julian Levinson, Associate Director, Frankel Center for Judaic Studies and Samuel Shetzer Professor of American Jewish Studies, University of Michigan

This is a virtual event. Please use the zoom webinar link below to log on:  

https://usc.zoom.us/j/94017293907