1. Cress Welsing, Frances, author of The his (Yssis) Papers: Keys to Colors(Chicago: Third World Press, 1991) and proponent of the melanin theory of black superiorityGoogle Scholar

2. For the new “white studies” movement seeking to deconstruct white privilege, see the journal Race Traitor,edited by Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, and Joe L. Kincheloe, Shirley R. Steinberg, Nelson M. Rodriguez, and Ronald E. Chennault, eds., White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998).

3. Irving Howe with the assistance of Libo, Kenneth, World of Our Fathers(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), p. 561.Google Scholar

4. For example, “the fetish condenses the unanalyzed magical significance assigned to blacks, functioning like the substitute phallus in Freud's analysis and like the commodity in Marx's. Signifying transvestite masquerade and expropriation of black labor, burnt cork fetishized not only blackness but sexual difference and the commodity form as well. But though blackface is detachable and reattachable–like Freud's fetish–making visible the pleasure of putting on and taking off burnt cook may seem to violate the Marxian/Freudian rule that demystifying the fetish interferes with its work" (pp. 182–183).

5. Neal Gabler in the Forward,May 24, 1996; Lany May in American Jewish History85 (March 1997): 115–119; Hasia Diner in Commonquest,Summer 1997, pp. 40–43; Thomas Cripps in Journal of American History83 (March 1997): 1462–1463.Google Scholar

6. Lott, Eric, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); William J. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).Google Scholar

7. Maria Damon, “Jazz-Jews, Jive and Gender: The Ethnic Politics of Jazz Argot,” in Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies,ed. Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 150–175.

8. Douglas, Ann, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), p. 359; also Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin' Out: New York Night Life and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 176–205.Google Scholar

9. Douglas, Terrible Honesty,p. 358; Moses, Wilson J., Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 10–11, 206, 235.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Gerald Home, “Black, White, and Red: Jewish and African Americans in the Communist Party,” in The Narrow Bridge: Jewish Views on Multicultwalism,ed. Maria Brettschneider (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996), pp. 123–135.

11. Lipsitz, George, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 194–200.Google Scholar

12. Ann Pelligrini, “Whiteface Performances: ‘Race,’ Gender and Jewish Bodies,” in Jews and Other Differences,pp. 108–149.

13. Shipler, David K., A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), p. 467.Google Scholar

14. Quoted in Hasia Diner, In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915–1935(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995 [1977]), p. 69.

15. Harap, Louis, Dramatic Encounters: The Jewish Presence in Twentieth-Century American Drama, Poetry, and Humor and the Black-Jewish Literary Relationship(New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), pp. 116–117.Google Scholar

16. Friedman, Lester D., Hollywood's Image of the Jew(New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982), pp. 1–55; Stuart Svonkin, Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties(New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 12.Google Scholar

17. Diner, In the Almost Promised Land,p. 134.

18. Close readers of Abraham Cahan's novel The Rise of David Levinskyhave always known that shtetl culture, even before its transit to America, was in process of dissolution. See David Singer, “David Levinsky's Fall: A Note on the Liebman Thesis,” American Quarterly

19. (Winter 1967): 697–706.

19. My view of Brodkin's romanticism has been reinforced by reading Seth Foreman's Blacks in the Jewish Mind(New York: New York University Press, 1998), especially chap. 4, “The Unbearable ‘Whiteness’ of Being Jewish."

20. Glenn C. Loury, “The End of an Illusion: Black-Jewish Relations in the Nineties,” in Loury, One by One from the Inside: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America(New York: Free Press, 1995), pp. 83–92.

21. Levy, Eugene, ‘"Is the Jew a White Man?’: Press Reaction to the Leo Frank Case, 1913–1915,” Phylon 35 (Summer 1974): 212–222; Richard M. Dorson, American Negro Folktales(Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, 1967), pp. 171–175.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. Singerman, Robert, “The Jews as Racial Alien: The Genetic Component of American Anti-Semitism,” in Anti-Semitism in American History,ed. David A. Gerber (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), pp. 103–128; Edward S. Shapiro, “Anti-Semitism Mississippi Style,” in Anti-Semitism in American History,pp. 129–151; Marc Dollinger, “‘Haitians’ and ‘Torquemadas’: Southern and Northern Jewish Responses to the Civil Rights Movement, 1945–1965,” in The Quiet Voices: Southern Rabbis and Black Civil Rights, 1880s to 1990s,ed. Mark K. Bauman and Berkley Kalin (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), pp. 67–94.Google Scholar

23. Hayim Yerushalmi, Yosef, Assimilation and Racial Anti-Semitism: The Iberian and the German Models(New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1982); Jerome Friedman, “Jewish Conversion, the Spanish Pure Blood Laws and Reformation: A Revisionist View of Religious and Racial Anti-Semitism,” Sixteenth Century18 (1987): 3–29; Marc Shell, “Marranos (Pigs); or, From Coexistence to Toleration,” Critical Inquiry17 (Winter 1991): 306–336.Google Scholar

24. Glanz, Rudolph, The Jew in Old American Folklore(New York: Alexander Kohut Memorial Foundation, 1961), p. 7.Google Scholar

25. Dinnerstein, Leonard, Anti-Semitism in America(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 105–149.Google Scholar

26. Daniel Itzkovitz, “Secret Temples,” in Jews and Other Differences,pp. 176–202.

27. For David A. Hollinger's observations on the current racial classification system, which he calls “the enthno-racial Pentagon,” see Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism(New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp. 19–50.

28. On the perception of the Jew as black in European antisemitism–and the substrate of reality for it in the historic ethno-racial diversity of the Jewish people–see Sander Gilman, The Jew's Body(New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 99–101, 172–179, 198–199, 234–243; Paul Wexler, The Non-Jewish Origins of the Sephardic Jews(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 45–46.

29. See, for example, David Brion Davis, “Jews in the Slave Trade,” Cultunfront1 (Fall 1992): 42–45; Davis, “The Slave Trade and the Jews,” New York Review of Books41 (December 22, 1994): 14–16; Seymour Drescher, “The Role of Jews in the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” Immigrants and Minorities12 (1993): 113–125; Harold Brackman, Ministry of Lies: The Truth Behind The Nation of Islam's “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews “(New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994); Saul S. Friedman, Jews and the American Slave Trade(New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1998).