Reviewed by: Unsettling: Jews, Whiteness, and Incest in American Popular Culture by Eli Bromberg Golan Moskowitz Eli Bromberg. Unsettling: Jews, Whiteness, and Incest in American Popular Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020. 206 pp. White and conditionally white American Jews have long straddled conflicting and uneven associations with white privilege and with victimhood predicated on antisemitic accusations, including the accusation of sexual perversity. Addressing this precarious position, Eli Bromberg's Unsettling is, in the best possible way, what its title suggests. Moving from Sigmund Freud to Ruth McBride Jordan, it is indeed unsettling to revisit public associations of Jews with incest, but it is also enlightening, as the author convincingly argues. More specifically, it is enlightening to consider the stakes that some have held and continue to hold in maintaining a particular collective image of American Jews vis-à-vis such accusations. These stakes, Bromberg demonstrates, are predicated on a harmful and outdated racial logic. Driving his study is the claim that premodern stereotypes about Jewish incest persist in postmodern American culture yet actual cases or accusations of Jewish incest have been rendered publicly unspeakable. This unspeakableness is due, on the one hand, to the accusers' fear of being deemed antisemitic, as well as due to the efforts of white Jews invested in maintaining social privileges by working against ongoing stereotypes of Jewish perversity. Through incisive, deeply researched case studies considered from multiple perspectives, Bromberg skillfully aligns this ongoing dynamic with discourses on sexual assault, patriarchy, racism, and white supremacists' unfounded characterizations of Jews as sexual deviants. Unsettling suggests sinister implications about dominant American cultural attitudes toward "off-white" minorities, the latter compelled to pursue impossibly spotless collective images as requisites for basic social dignities afforded to whiteness. Bromberg repeatedly addresses this latter point, emphasizing the ways in which incest reads as "not white," despite its appearance across all communities, and thus how it becomes a locus of anxiety and projection for those competing for social resources historically reserved for whites. In Jewish incest allegations, Jewishness may be a crucial factor to consider, this book asserts, not because of [End Page 198] any existing link between Jewishness and incest, but because the invocation of such a link promotes anxiety-driven behavior that carries potential harm in the name of securing white privileges. Such behavior includes the projection of sexualized prejudice onto others and the enabling or downplaying of misconduct within those Jewish contexts in which incest has in fact occurred but may not be recognized. Bromberg uncovers Henry Roth's editorial correspondence and unpublished drafts, for example, to show how the latter uses the invented figures of a Black prostitute and a group of young Black rapists to deflect from his own incest confessions in Mercy of a Rude Stream (chapter 5). To mobilize his argument, Bromberg introduces the useful concept of "Jewish community protective politics," a phenomenon described as "collective mainstream social anxiety about white Jewish male vulnerability to antisemitism" (2). This phenomenon results either in the public defense of accused white Jewish men, or in their "secular excommunication" (5), the disassociation of those men from authentic Jewish identity, as observed in second-wave feminist writings on Freud as a universal Victorian patriarch, rather than as a Jewish one, contrasting, on the other hand, harmful Jewish feminist depictions of Black masculinity (chapter 1). Some may leave this study with questions about its characterization of Jewish community protective politics. How, more precisely, is this phenomenon structured? Is it a Foucauldian politics of collective self-policing through the diffusion of self-consciousness and unspoken codes of conduct? Is it an explicitly organized set of agents coordinated in relation to the dominant culture? Is it something else entirely? Regardless of this potential ambiguity, Bromberg's examples convincingly connect the attainment of successful white masculinity with the likelihood of absolution from sexual misconduct accusations. Freud's status as a universal patriarch oriented toward white society, for example, facilitated the reframing of white Jewish male sexual misconduct cases into cases focused instead on the "hysteria" of their victims, some of whom were Jewish women without access to the same social protections available to their male counterparts. Similarly and more recently, while Woody Allen...
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Nov 5, 2022
Saida Grundy 
Open Access