Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore current white American Jews as antiracism activists with regards to cultural assimilation and identification with / enactment of Whiteness, specifically white privilege.   This paper focuses on scholarship addressing three questions relating to this inquiry:  What is white racial identity and how does it operate in white antiracism activists?  Do Jews function as white people in the United States?  How does social capital and religious ideology inform the potential of white Jews as antiracism activists today? My supposition of the white American Jewish cultural identity, is that we are a people who inhabit contradictory identifiers as both persecuted/more in danger than others as well as chosen/better than others. These seemingly paradoxical yet fully integrated ideologies inform the foundation of the American white Jewish identity, and must be the jumping-off point for civic engagement with constructive social transformation and guarding against the infliction of further harm as complicit participants of American structural racism.


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