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Friday October 26, 2007

Professor embraces ‘diasporism,’ diversity

by dan pine
staff writer

Filling out a personal information form, most Jews probably check the little box marked “white.”

Not so fast, says Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz. When it comes to race, according to the professor and author, Jews make up a rainbow coalition all their own.

In her newest book, “The Colors of Jews,” Kaye/Kantrowitz interviews scores of Jews from diverse backgrounds: Mizrahi, Sephardic, Latino, Ethiopian, even Ugandan. The author contends that Jews are moving inexorably toward a multiracial peoplehood.

This from a nice Ashkenazi woman from Brooklyn.

“People would ask me, ‘Are Jews white?’” she recounted. “I started looking at that question. What I came up with is that there is large number of Jews who were by nobody’s definition white.”

Kaye/Kantrowitz pioneered the field of women’s studies, going back to her days at U.C. Berkeley in the 1960s. Although that remains her chief academic focus, the gravitational pull of her Jewish heritage always remained strong. She founded Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and has written extensively on the topics of Jews, race and racism.

In her book, Kaye/Kantrowitz embraces “diasporism,” a concept she serves up as a kind of opposition to Zionism. No friend of Israel or Israeli policies, she nevertheless views diasporism in neutral terms. Living outside Israel is obviously the choice of a vast majority of Jews — of every color.

“Some of us like being in the diaspora,” she noted. “We’re not nationalists. We’re internationalists. We like encountering. We live in a state of tension between home and not home.”

These days, Kaye/Kantrowitz serves as an adjunct professor in comparative literature at Queens College in New York. She is planning to launch a new class exploring secular Judaism, a topic she thinks has gotten short shrift in academia.

“People see secularism as an absence of being Jewish,” she said. “I’m a secular Jew, and as a secularist I think it’s important that people broaden what it means to be Jewish.”

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz will speak 12:45 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 4, at the JCCSF. Admission is free. Information: (415) 292-1233 or online at www.jccsf.org.

“The Colors of Jews”by Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz ($24.95, Indiana University Press, 296 pages)

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