Al Jolson from “The Jazz Singer” (1927) Last Purim, Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind “blacked up” in an incredible display of bad taste. Jews in particular were appalled, but there’s a subgroup of Jewish professors who may have felt vindicated. Practitioners of “the whiteness school”—prominent names include the late Michael Paul Rogin, Edward L. Goldstein, Jeffrey Melnick, and Karen Brodkin—argue that for performers like Al Jolson applying burnt cork was a strategy of ethnic assimilation. Not only Jewish performers but their first- and second-generation Jewish audiences are supposed to have derived a sense of belonging to the superior white American majority by application of burnt cork that heightened the contrasting white skin color beneath the black mask. Of course, the Jewish practitioners of “whiteness studies” are highly critical of the prejudice and conformism of other, lessened enlightened Jews, then and now. Yet while they may reject the Jewish version of what H. L. Mencken in the 1920’s called “boobus Americanus,” the whiteness profs are very much conforming to an American tradition that goes back at least as far as Herman Melville who made Captain Ahab’s pursuit of the White Whale a metaphor for the sickness of the American soul. Unfortunately, Melville may be a bit of an embarrassing model for the “whiteness profs.” For while critiquing the national obsession with whiteness, Melville personally combined a stereotypical infatuation with lithesome Polynesian girls he visited as a sailor with a classic loathing of old world, crooked-nosed Jews he described in his European travel memoir. What unites the Jewish profs with Melville is their “outsider stance.” After all, the narrator of Moby Dick is named not Isaac nor Jacob nor Joseph—but Ishmael, the outcast from Abraham’s family. The practitioners of “whiteness studies”—some of whom flirt with the hyperbolic self-designation “race traitor” (the name of a journal founded by Noel Ignatiev, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants)—have voluntarily exiled themselves from identification with American Jews whom they claim that, historically, have almost made a religion of racial prejudice. I believe their indictments are mostly misplaced, but let me admit that there’s at least a kernel of embarrassing truth. Whiteness indeed long remained synonymous with the good and pure in American culture. I’m old enough to remember Hollywood B movies with dialogue like: “That’s white of you, partner,” and “Honey, now you’re free, white, and twenty-one.” There is some truth to the broader argument that European immigrant groups—particularly, the Irish, who were violently anti-black during the nineteenth century—moved up the social ladder in America by self-consciously “becoming white folks” including by performing cruel minstrel caricatures of African Americans. The problem is that the “whiteness school” reads racist motives into Jewish behavior and attitudes when the evidence, beyond possible naivety, is sorely lacking. It may make sense to us to think that performers like Jolson as well as his Jewish fans were mocking black people. Yet Jolson never used racist slurs, maintained life-long friendships with black performers, and was singled out for praised by black newspapers like New York’s Amsterdam News as a friend of the race. Historian Hasiah Diner showed decades ago that the Yiddish papers were uniformly respectful and empathetic toward African Americans whose ordeal in America they typically described as at least as bad as, and maybe worse than, the persecution of European Jews. Now, it’s true as the twentieth century unfolded, American Jews were not unhappy when anthropologists like Columbia University’s Franz Boas—who was also a leading Jewish critic of anti-black racism—reclassified Jews from being members of a distinctive “race” to being “Caucasians” just like white Gentiles. Yet the question is: was this reclassification—in either its motives or its effects—racist? (In Brazil, where the two category “white or black” racial classification system never fully took hold, it’s been harder—not easier—for Blacks to forge a civil rights coalition than in the U.S.) The “whiteness school” profs just assume that as Jews were increasingly accepted by others and themselves as “white,” that trend was associated with persistent or increasing Jewish racism. If the public opinion polls are to be believed, Jews, nationally and even in the South, became relatively and absolutely less racist—and more supportive of African American civil rights—as decades passed. It was the Jews—or at least authoritative Jewish institutions as well as the Jewish “man in the street”— increasingly embracing the civil rights crusade during the same decades that, according to the whiteness profs, “Jews were becoming white folks.” On the surface, this looks like a paradox, but maybe it isn’t. First, as Jews became “more white”—or, to put it accurately, more accepted as assimilated American success stories—they were in a stronger position, in terms of both resources and psychology, to make a controversial investments in the civil rights movement like no other white immigrant group made. To put it more provocatively, it was the Jewish mainstream that, before some of the current crop of “whiteness school” profs were born, became “race traitors” by rejecting Jim Crow. Disloyalty of the white race was indeed the traditional charge hurled against Jews by the Ku Klux Klan. The ultimate irony is that “the whiteness school” has come into vogue precisely during the last twenty years when indicators—from the heightened acceptance of African American Jews, to increasingly visible Black-Jewish intermarriage, to the “White Negro” self-identification by Jewish rap musicians—suggest that American Jewish identity may be beginning to shift in a multicultural, even “post-white” direction. (To give credit where it is due, Eric Goldstein hints at this in the last pages of his book, The Price of Whiteness.) If so, the joke may be on Dov Hikind—and some of the “whiteness school” professors. Let’s stop trying to circumcise Moby Dick. Melville’s Ishmael survived to tell the tale, but this time our professorial Ishmaels risk going down with a leaky ship.