The Line Between Solidarity and Appropriation: Learning from Jewish Blackface in History [Essay]

How, then, does my Grandfather fit into all this? His father Max (my great grandfather) came to the US from Poland in 1900 as a shoemaker because his house in Warsaw was burned down in pogroms. Enjoying his life in the New World, Max didn’t want to send for his wife Cecilia and six year old son (my Grandfather) back in Warsaw, but family pressure intervened. When his family did arrive, Max was embarrassed by his wife’s Old World Yiddish speaking ways and began isolating her. He wouldn’t give Cecilia any money, and he didn’t want her to learn English. He apparently refused to let her eat when she was pregnant. The family story is that he drove her crazy, and then put her into an insane asylum. It’s unclear how much English Cecilia could even speak and how much of her diagnosed “craziness” was a result of being an isolated immigrant with limited language skills. Max then put my Grandfather and his sister into an orphanage until he remarried years later.

During my mom’s childhood, her father Maurice–always quick with a joke–never spoke about his childhood, and told both my mom and my aunt that their grandmother (Cecilia) was dead. As an adult, my mom found out that her father and his sister used to go visit their mother at the asylum–a secret that only came out after Cecilia’s death. As part of his own assimilation, Maurice obscured his own sad family history by refusing to let his children meet their grandmother.

Although I don’t know the circumstances surrounding my Grandfather’s use of blackface, I wonder how or whether his own sadness about the loss of his mother and motherland played into it; was he singing to a “mammy” or was he just trying, like his peers, to become a white American? Given that my Grandfather came to the US as a child on a boat from Poland, he certainly didn’t have a plantation past in the South. Neither did Al Jolson, also an immigrant from Eastern Europe, who was known for performing with and fighting discrimination against African Americans on Broadway and later in Hollywood. Was Maurice taking on white America’s nostalgic imagination for a racist past that Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe had little part in? What is gained and what gets erased by swapping out these histories? Taking on the history of American racism, Jews also lost connections to our own history and culture.

History Lessons for Solidarity Work

The image of Jews doing blackface represents a sad and pivotal moment in Ashkenazi Jewish American identity. At various moments because of historical cycles of anti-Semitism, Jews have been bribed with material privileges and public positions of limited power to appear as the visible face of an oppressive system. What does it mean that this time the face that they put on was blackface? In these exchanges, Jews are often encouraged to take on a middle “buffer” position, and thus get pitted against other oppressed groups. With blackface, Jews occupied the middle ground once again, this time the ground between African Americans and white Christian culture. We both chose and were encouraged to choose whiteness that came at a cost to our relationships with African Americans and disconnected us from our own culture.

As an adult, disconnected from my own family history, I began asking more questions about my Grandfather and learned even more about sadness and loss in his history. Most of his father Max’s siblings stayed in Poland, and most of my Grandfather’s cousins died in Auschwitz, probably around the same time that he was performing in blackface. It’s hard to fathom how both these things could be happening at the same time; in the US, Ashkenazi Jews were being encouraged to assimilate into whiteness, a process they probably accepted, in part, because in Europe they were being killed as a “race.”

The image of my Grandfather doing blackface embodies a moment when Ashkenazi Jews exchanged our deep connection to our cultures, histories and families in order to gain whiteness. While I want to be clear that blackface has obviously been the most damaging to its targets, African Americans, there has also been a cost to Ashkenazi Jews as well. We have inherited the privileges of assimilation—class and race privilege—as well as some incalculable losses–of culture, community and solidarity/connection with other oppressed people.

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