this issue
previous article in this issuenext article in this issue

Document Details :

Title: The Jewish 'Race' in America
Subtitle: Racial Language in American Jewish Prose, 1890-1933
Author(s): ROSE, A.C.
Journal: Studia Rosenthaliana
Volume: 36    Date: 2002-2003   
Pages: 239-252
DOI: 10.2143/SR.36.0.504925

Abstract :
Altough most Americans, Gentile and Jew, denounced the idea of a Jewish race after 1933, the word did not disappear from ordinary speech. 'Race Jew', 'race integrity', 'race type', these phrases are disturbing coming from Jews. Because we have witnessed the Holocaust, an earlier Jewish impulse to absorb what presented itself as science seems naive and self-destructive. Racial explanations only make sense intellectually if we admit 'we are animals', as Henry Fairchild crudely put it. Did not Jewish writers grasp that when they described Jews physiologically, they risked giving authority to instinct over culture?

Download article