White, Whole Wheat, Rye: Jews and Ethnic Categorization in Washington, D.C.

Abstract

White is used to signify, often implicitly, a number of qualitatively different phenomena, thereby masking both different and similar positionalities between and within ethnic groups. In Jewish Washingtonians' talk of Whiteness, the different weights which speakers assign to ethnic culture, marginality, and skin color lead to shifting and contradictory ascriptions of Jews to the category White. These ascriptions complicate the binary discourse of ethnicity found in much recent research and in public discourse in Washington, D.C.