Deborah Anne Cohen

Who Was Who? Race and Jews in Turn-of-the-Century Britain

Race—as a category—has commonly been understood as a response to difference. In the first instance, race offered a means of ordering unfamiliar peoples, whether encountered in the empire or at home. In the European historiography, the notion of “biological” race, defined by an inherited set of characteristics passed through the blood, possesses a particular genealogy: its roots can be found in the eighteenth century, its fullest articulation came in the late nineteenth century, and its twentieth-century decline was hastened by the Holocaust. This article sets out a different, if not completely incompatible, thesis. It takes the case of British Jews to argue that racial categories could arise as a response to the apparent similarities, as well as the perceived differences, between Jews and other Britons. Put differently, in the late nineteenth century, Jews came increasingly to be identified as a race precisely because they were difficult to differentiate from their fellow citizens. Class proved a critical determinant. Jews became ever more invisible as they scaled the social ladder. “East End” Jews—poor and newly immigrated—might be readily detectable, but their middle- and upper-middle-class “West End” counterparts confounded observers. Notions of race, I will argue, emerged in part as a consequence of assimilation, delimiting difference in a nation where formal legal barriers to Jewish integration had been eliminated and social obstacles largely overcome. Race was a staple term of the late nineteenth century. It proliferated throughout the language of the time.

Introduction Love-In, Love-Out: Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in ’68

Nineteen sixty-eight was a pivotal year on a global scale. In cities throughout the globe, young people took over streets. They blockaded buildings, verbally and symbolically attacked state political apparatuses and projects, and challenged conventional imperialist world orderings. Patriarchal states made investments in youthful masculinities, and representations of youthful male martyrs took on symbolic importance that crossed national borders. Some movements embraced an incommensurable politics of desire, and organic relationships sprung up between movements usually thought of as disparate. Above all, the possibilities and limitations for political agency were intrinsically gendered. Yet despite the role of gender and sexuality in political agency in 68, the growing scholarship on the period still underestimates their importance.

Talking Back to’ 68: Gendered Narratives, Participatory Spaces, and Political Cultures

In 2001, we attended a Mexico City conference on twentieth-century student activism, featuring four prominent leaders from the 1968 movement.1 Student movements, they claimed, were central to Mexico’s push toward democracy, a centrality linked to the university as a particular kind of civic space and bringing together those who are—in their words—“informed,” “intelligent,” and trained to make decisions based on “reason”—all traits commonly associated with middle-class masculinity. We listened, struck by how different these men’s narratives were from the stories told to us by women participating in the movement, which we would present later at the same conference.

Afterword Michele Zancarini-Fournel (Translated by Deborah Cohen and Lessie Jo Frazier)

I thank the editors for inviting me to comment. I see this as a transcontinental exchange in the spirit of reciprocal dialogue and knowledge. Lately I have been calling for a sociopolitical history—rather than the French form of cultural history where studies of gender and sexuality are usually situated—to foreground the force of events, engagements, and political ruptures called 68. Explaining this call to unite the two strains requires a brief synopsis of French interpretations of 68 with attention to what can be obscured by apparently similar terms in their uses on both sides of the Atlantic given serious disjunctures between the two continents in ways of thinking about questions of sexualities, race, and class.