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Morning, #VandyJudaismMed! This week we start Unit II, "Jewish Bodies in History and Literature." 1/
Your reading for this week was ch. 7 of Sander Gilman's "The Jew's Body." You're also watching S4E25 of #StarTrekDS9 
, "Body Parts," either on your own on Netflix or over Zoom Thursday. 2/ #VandyJudaismMed 2/
, "Body Parts," either on your own on Netflix or over Zoom Thursday. 2/ #VandyJudaismMed 2/
Now, some context on this book and this unit more generally before we get started: I'm going to tell you right out--this book is DATED. 3/ #VandyJudaismMed
The questions Gilman asks about the conditional whiteness of Jews, and the ways he frames the issues, are frankly inadequate in the context of how race works in the US. 4/
#VandyJudaismMed
#VandyJudaismMed
So please, please, PLEASE don't read this in terms of present-day US racial politics, even and ESPECIALLY in re: where Jews fit in. 5/
#VandyJudaismMed
#VandyJudaismMed
Better sources for this include Katya Gibel Mevorach's "Black, Jewish, and Interracial,"
https://www.dukeupress.edu/black-jewish-and-interracial, Bruce Haynes' "The Soul of Judaism..."
https://nyupress.org/9781479811236/the-soul-of-judaism/
6/ #VandyJudaismMed
https://www.dukeupress.edu/black-jewish-and-interracial, Bruce Haynes' "The Soul of Judaism..."
https://nyupress.org/9781479811236/the-soul-of-judaism/
6/ #VandyJudaismMed
...and literally anything @temasmith or @aptly_engineerd write on the subject (among others). 7/ #VandyJudaismMed
For an historical treatment of how white Jews have navigated race in the US, Eric Goldstein's "The Price of Whiteness" is quite good. 8/ #VandyJudaismMed https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691136318/the-price-of-whiteness
Where Gilman REMAINS useful--& the reason he remains on the syllabus for now--is in re: the ways Jews' ASSUMED characteristic bodily features played into the development of modern racial science IN EUROPE in the 19th and 1st half of the 20th centuries...9/ #VandyJudaismMed
...in thinking through some of the ways stereotypical Jewish bodies are depicted in literature and other forms of media throughout the modern period (boundaries of this are fuzzy, but loosely starting in the 15th C-ish) through the present day...10/ #VandyJudaismMed
...AND, perhaps most importantly for our purposes, in juxtaposing all this quite closely with the history of medicine, especially in Europe. 11/ #VandyJudaismMed
So, for example, what Gilman says about "the 'Jewish' nose" is going to be useful to keep in mind when you watch the Star Trek episode and think about some of the ways Quark, and the Ferengi in general, are coded. 12/ #VandyJudaismMed
You MUST remember, however, the ways in which Gilman is limited. (Transparency: I intend to rework the readings for this unit in future versions of this course). 13/
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#VandyJudaismMed
SO. About race: as we think about it now, it's a modern cultural category rather than an immutable, biological one. 14/ #VandyJudaismMed
While genotypic and phenotypic differences between individual humans may indeed be expressed according to a pattern that roughly correlates with the geographic distribution of our ancestors...15/ #VandyJudaismMed
...the categories into which we sort people culturally and socially are, biologically speaking, nowhere near as coherent or as discrete as we treat them to be. 16/ #VandyJudaismMed
Even though the systems we live in treat these contingent categories as durable and immutable--BECAUSE doing so reentrenches power dynamics that are to their advantage--even a cursory look at the history of racial rhetoric powerfully refutes that notion. 17/ #VandyJudaismMed
And in the 18th and especially the 19th and early 20th C's, this reification tended to take the form of "sciences" of race. 18/ #VandyJudaismMed
This was, by the way, a significant part of the eugenics movement, which was especially popular in the U.S. In fact, Nazi Germany looked on the U.S.’s eugenics programs with approval and borrowed from them a great deal. 19/ #VandyJudaismMed
This REMAINS topically relevant, most recently given the news that ICE has been carrying out forcible hysterectomies on people it's detained. See this thread:
https://twitter.com/jewishaction/status/1305641182173814785
20/ #VandyJudaismMed
https://twitter.com/jewishaction/status/1305641182173814785
20/ #VandyJudaismMed
Anyway, the boundaries of racial categories have shifted and blurred depending on shifts in political power and influence--who's colonizing whom, when, who's at war with whom, etc. 21/ #VandyJudaismMed
