Judaism, Race, and Ethics by Jonathan K. Crane

Author:Jonathan K. Crane
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Penn State University Press

Conclusion

This chapter has attempted to elucidate a “Yiddish gaze” on black bodies that is implicated within a practice of white gazing that involuntarily assigns meanings to black bodies as objects but does so with a sympathetic stance. The Yiddish texts analyzed in this chapter, insofar as they are addressed to a Yiddish reading audience, are uniquely positioned in their act of interpreting black bodies in the intimacy of an imagined community separate from a potential black readership. They effectively translate American blackness, in its otherness and its victimhood, for a Yiddish-reading audience, attempting to make sense of American racism in terms that will be familiar to Yiddish readers in America and abroad. They also attempt to delineate the category of “Jew” in an American context as one who is able to read black bodies through a moral lens, thus inscribing the act of looking, of interpreting, of reading, as an essentially Yiddish/Jewish way of being. In this way, Yiddish writers claim authority to interpret the experiences of black people in their absence, gazing upon an individual who does not have the possibility of speaking (in Yiddish) and asserting their own practices of seeing as a moral stance that involves knowing the meaning and experiences of black bodies. Writing for Yiddish-reading communities also gave these Yiddish writers a space in which to fully express their outrage about white American racism and about a community (white America) to which its readers might actually aspire to belong, and might in other contexts be more hesitant to critique. In this private sphere of Yiddish writing, the foreignness of a Yiddish perspective could be emphasized without fear of compromising the possibilities for Jewish integration, both individual and communal, into white America. The particularities of the off-white positioning of the early twentieth-century Yiddish-speaking Jewish community in America, and the particularities of writing in Yiddish for a Yiddish-reading audience, created the circumstances for a separate sphere of “Yiddish gazing” practices that share in, but also depart from, the “white gaze.”

The work performed by this “gaze” is manifold. A “Yiddish gaze” is one that both participates in the language and images of racism, seeing difference in skin color and placing moral value on it, and resists the totalizing power of that gaze by situating “the Jew” as neither black nor white but as off-white, decentering the racial dichotomy upon which the “white gaze” is predicated. This “gaze” makes use of foreignness and victimhood as lenses through which to aspire to a more ethical way of seeing racial difference. By relying on sound in addition to sight, by pointing at what is shared in divergent experiences of suffering, and by framing antiblack violence in religious terms that valorize suffering, the “Yiddish gaze” resists inclinations to view blackness as its own opposite, as evil or criminal, even though this resistance is incomplete, enmeshed in white gazing practices.

An analysis of the “Yiddish gaze” in dialogue with Yancy invites us not only to characterize the “gaze” in terms of the meanings placed

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.