history of American Jews and race has, until recently, inspired a surprisingly limited field of academic inquiry. For the most part, the conversation has been consigned to ongoing and carefully delimited discussions of relations, a field which, particularly in the past thirty years, has seen intense productivity. This work has examined Blacks and Jews as rivals, allies, and doppelgangers, in real-world political conflict (the Leo Frank case, the Civil Rights movement, violence in Crown Heights, etc.) and in richly complicated cultural exchange (most strikingly, the phantasmic blackness that has haunted much Jewish-produced popular culture), and much of it has been groundbreaking and invaluable. But as the essays collected in this special issue begin to demonstrate, the narrow focus on and within Black-Jewish is curious, especially given both the ongoing, meaningful, and productive interchanges that have occurred between Jews and many other ethno-racial groups, and the endlessly complicated relationship Jews have had more generally to racial matters. This special issue of Shofar works to open up the field, both from within the discourse of relations and from without. Despite its often painfully meticulous attention to the details of intergroup dynamics, writing on Black-Jewish has been marked by a pervasive and surprising lack of self-consciousness about its own limitations. These limitations fall into three major categories. First, the conversation about Blacks and Jews has for the most part taken place between men, which should in itself give pause, but which is especially suggestive given the complex gender and sexual politics attached to both groups. In addition, the vast majority of participants in these discussions have been Jewish, a fact which should lead us to ask how the prevalence of Jewish perspectives, and the absence of others, have shaped the conversation. And finally, the ongoing engagement with the specifics of interactions has often seemed to stand in for, and in the process elide, other conversations about race and Jews. One can sense here a more general reluctance to think beyond the black-white racial binary -- the binary that Michael Rogin, in his groundbreaking work on Jewish blackface performers, finds Jews of the early twentieth century working hard to reinforce.(1) essays collected here explore these limitations in ways that fundamentally shift the terms of the conversation. But opening up the discussion about Jews and race in these ways also invites a new awareness of a very different type of concern, one that ultimately moves beyond race to a more general consideration of the relationship of Jewishness to American categories of identity. It is by now of course a truism to observe the constructedness of race. But insofar as Jewishness fundamentally troubles the boundaries of numerous, ostensibly discreet, categories of identity (so every claim that the Jews are a race, for instance, is matched by claims that religion, or nation, best describes what Jews are) it has, more than any other American identity, come to stand in itself as an overt and fundamental challenge to the category of race; this despite the frequent attempts, especially in the early decades of the twentieth century, to understand Jews in the seemingly stable terms provided by American race politics.(2) newish Latino/Jewish band Hip Hop Hoodios seem to understand this when they de-center and then politicize the expression of their own Jewishness in their recent EP, the title of which -- Raza Hoodio -- plays directly on the language of Jose Vasconcelos' 1925 essay La Raza Cosmica. Vasconcelos concocted his theory of la raza cosmica as an antidote to the racist ascendance of white culture. Soon, Vasconcelos famously predicted, Hispanic culture would be ruled by a universal race, la raza cosmica, in which all other races would be diffused: The days of pure whites, the victors of today, are as numbered as were the days of their predecessors. …