Seeing Ourselves in Books: A Children's Book about Transracial Adoption and the Common Sense of Jewish Family and Identity in the United States

Abstract

AbstractIn the children's book Rebecca's Journey Home, an American family's experience adopting a baby from Vietnam and navigating issues of race, religion, and nationality illuminates each of those modes of identity, as well as Jewish identity's distinctive relationship to them. Highlighting the parent-child dialogues within the book and among its readers, this article foregrounds the social processes involved in identity construction that are obscured by the view of identity as simply inhering in bodies. Although the book's portrayal of Jewish identity remains within the confines of American racial logic, it also points to the potential of Jewish tradition as a basis for reimagining belonging in ways that transcend the limitations of that approach to communal identity so that any body can be seen, without qualification, as a Jewish body.