Shelly Tenenbaum

IT'S IN MY GENES: Biological Discourse and Essentialist Views of Identity among Contemporary American Jews

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, an era when immigrant groups were seen as divisible into races with distinct physical and mental traits, American Jews thought of themselves as a race. In the post-Holocaust era, however, racial language was eschewed, and American Jews instead adapted terms such as “community” and “ethnicity.” Our research on unsynagogued Jews and adult children of Jewish intermarriage, however, revealed that many contemporary Jews actually continue to employ an essentialist understanding of Jewishness that emphasizes the biological, genetic basis of their identities. Their reliance on ascribed characteristics as central to their identities in an era when the idea of a Jewish race has been debunked, and when most scholars eschew racial categorizations, is surprising and constitutes the analytic focus of this article.