Traditionalist Jews and the Question of Whiteness

Abstract: This article has two main purposes. First, it aims to unpack the question "Are Jews white?" by insisting that the assignment of even ambiguous racial identities to "Jews" as an undifferentiated collective is a categorical mistake. It argues instead for a highly contextualized approach to the racialization of certain Jews or groups of Jews in certain times and places for certain purposes and from certain perspectives—which need not imply any lessening of the import of such racialization. Second, and more specifically, it aims to provoke a careful discussion of the racialization of traditionalist Jews in the particular context of growing and recently established residential enclaves in the suburbs of New York City, and suggests that legal or scholarly understanding of their difference as primarily "religious" is also mistaken.