We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
How Race Travels: Navigating Global Blackness in J. Ida Jiggetts's Study of Afro-Asian Israeli Jewry.
- Authors
Roby, Bryan Karle
- Abstract
This article explores the intellectual history of Black scholar (John) Ida Jiggetts in her study of Yemenite Jewish integration efforts in Israel in the 1950s. I begin with a critical look into the scholarship that heavily influenced her: Zionist ethnography and anthropology. Jewish engagement in these fields, then dominated by race scientists, constructed Afro-Asian Jewry as a Black foil meant to highlight the normative whiteness of European Jews. The article then moves on to Jiggetts's travel memoir, Israel to Me, in which she details her observations on intra-Jewish race relations, how she struggled to navigate race in Hebrew, and how her experiences in Israel pushed her to reflect on her own perceptions of race. Enacting a form of racial diplomacy, Jiggetts shaped Black American perspectives on Israel in the twentieth century as one Black community looked to another as a means of understanding the global color line. Navigating shifting interpellations of her own Blackness while observing the racialization of Mizrahi Israelis, her reflections on race in Israel shed light on the transnational process of racecraft for those who share the experience of the color line.
- Subjects
ISRAEL; JEWS; ETHNOLOGY; RACIAL identity of Black people; BLACK people; RACE relations; AFRICAN Americans; ANTHROPOLOGY; ACCULTURATION
- Publication
Jewish Social Studies, 2022, Vol 27, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
0021-6704
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2979/jewisocistud.27.1.01