- So, it is my pleasure to introduce the first speaker, Professor Eric Goldstein, who is the Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, where he's also professor of history and Jewish studies. He's the author of a book called "The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity," which came out through Princeton University Press and won the Saul Viener Prize from the American Jewish Historical Society. It also won the Theodore Saloutos Prize from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and the very prestigious Sami Rohr Lore Literary Prize from the Jewish Book Council. A very, very highly acclaimed study. His most recent book is called "On Middle Ground: A History of the Jews of Baltimore," which is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins, and he's currently working on a book on the history of reading and reading culture among Yiddish-speaking immigrants in America in the 19th and 20th century. So please join me in welcoming Eric Goldstein.   (applause)    - What I'm going to speak about today is, as Tony told you, is drawn from my larger study about race and Jewish identity in America called "The Price of Whiteness." I became interested in this topic as a graduate student because I was in a program that was largely framed around US history, and I was also studying modern Jewish history. And it was quite evident that race, discussions about race was at the very center of scholarship on US history. And so, as someone interested in Jews in the US, I felt that this was a topic that historians absolutely had to tackle to understand the impact of American society on Jews. And there had been studies, for example, of African American Jewish relations, but there had been a more recent scholarly trend to think about racial identity and how people, you know, came to think of themselves in racial terms. And there had particularly been some work on immigrants because immigrants usually came from societies where the categories relevant in America, the categories of black and white, were not part of their experience. And then, coming to the United States, they had to adapt to thinking of themselves within this new system. And so I got to think about this process for Jews, and it ended up being very fruitful not only because it's an interesting topic but also it provided a new way of thinking about the American Jewish experience. Traditionally, American Jewish history has been written in a very celebratory tone. We like to think of it as a success story, a story in which Jewish immigrants came to America and they found a place where they could neatly synthesize their Jewish commitments and their desire to be part of American society and that those things did not conflict with one another as Jews had experienced in other less tolerant settings. But when you view the American experience through race, you find an aspect of American culture that was much more problematic for Jews for several reasons. First of all, Jews were ambivalent in their developing relationships with African Americans. On the one hand, they found that to be accepted in American society they had, to some extent, tow the American racial line on African Americans. In other words, they had to adapt, adopt many of the racial mores and support the system of racial segregation, particularly in areas like the south or the western United States where they were an essential part of the local white, middle class culture. And yet, at the same time, there were aspects of the Jewish historical experience of oppression, of being the victims of pogroms, of being the victims of segregation that provided a context for Jews to identify, on some level, with the African American experience. So this was a constant, you know, source of tension and confusion for Jews, and it really depended on their geographical location, their level of acculturation, how they responded to this question over the years. The other related question that I explored was how the terms that Jews use to describe themselves, and I found that that's somet  Another issue was the problem of intermarriage. There was a lot of, especially around immigration, there was a lot of discussion of what would happen to the immigrants eventually. Would they become part of the melting pot? Would they eventually lose their distinctiveness, marry into, the larger white population and basically disappear? And this was generally the vision of most leaders of white middle class society. This was kind of actually at the time considered a very liberal, progressive idea that, you know, Jews and other immigrants would be able to enter the mainstream through intermarriage. Of course, most Jewish leaders chaffed at the suggestion. They did not necessarily support intermarriage because they saw it as spelling the end of Jewish group existence. And yet, publicly, they found it very hard to defend their position because in doing so it seemed to suggest that Jews did not want to merge with the larger population. So, in other words, you had a different definition among Jews of what was required to become a solid part of American culture than you had among the larger native-born population. And so on all these issues Jews tried to navigate these issues as best as possible, trying to satisfy the demands of the larger society, but often they had contrary views and they had to navigate these as best as possible. An even more serious issue came with the topic of the government's desire to classify immigrants according to race. And this, again, shows the desire of the larger society to create a more hierarchical system in which they felt they could gain control over understanding their population and to make social policies which would be based on this new data. So that first appeared in the statistics kept by the US Immigration Commission. In other words, I don't know if any of you have ever done genealogy, for example, and looked up your ancestors' ships' passenger list, but if you have, you might notice on there in a certain period one of the things that they recorded about each immigrant was their race. And they used this kind of European system of racial designation. So for, say, a Jew from the Russian empire, it would asked nationality in which it would say Russian, but then it would say race, and it would say Hebrew. So they were keeping track of what they called race as well as the country that the person came from. And the Jewish community grew worried about this because they felt that if the government was collecting this kind of statistics on them, it could only be used for negative purposes.  And they became even more alarmed in 1909 when there was a suggestion that the Commerce Department, which was in charge of the census, was going to adopt the same racial designation. So previously in all censuses they recorded people according to race, but using the more traditional American system of black, white, and a few other designations based on color. But now the proposal was, well, look, we have all these people coming in from Europe, we have to have a more complex understanding of the population, so the census will now record people as Hebrew, etc., etc., all the different European racial designations. The Jewish community came out in force. The American Jewish Committee, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, and they successfully lobbied not to have the census bureau adopt this kind of practice. There was also a brief concern that in some courts in the United States Syrian immigrants were denied naturalization based on the understanding that they were not white because in the naturalization law from 1790 it limited naturalization to free white people. And Jews became alarmed because they felt that if Syrian immigrants who were of Middle Eastern origin were being judged non-white in the courts that it was only a matter of time before someone decided the Jews were of similar origin as Syrians and Jews would  have the same problem. So all of these things were mounting concerns in the early 20th century. So this brings me finally to science, which is our topic for today. Science was one of the arenas in which this battle was fought in a very important way.  And I want to, first of all, I just want to take a moment to just show you for example. This is a cover of a joke book that was published in 1902 of Hebrew jokes. It just shows you just a little taste of some of the images of Jews that circulated in popular culture at the time, which show the Jew to be, you know, different physically, different racially, and you can perceive in this particular image a tendency to draw features of Jew that also are reminiscent of some stereotypes against African Americans. The way that this hair is, the lips. This is just part of why Jews were very aware during this period of the dangers of their changing racial image in American society. Okay, so back to science. Science was a very important arena. And before I tell you kind of the story about how this battle was fought in the scientific community, I want to say few words just about studying Jews in the context of science. Science is kind of an important entryway into Jewish history. For one, the Jewish group produced a disproportionate number of scientists. And I can speak mainly about the United States, but of all the immigrant groups, Jews were the most upwardly mobile. Of the southern and eastern European immigrants, they were the ones who entered higher education the earliest, often because they came to this country as skilled workers with experience living in urban areas. And they advanced on the social and economic ladder more quickly than a lot of other immigrants who had been laborers or agricultural workers in Europe. So at the time that these issues were being fought out in academia and the scientific community, Jews were one of the only immigrant groups that were already beginning to be represented in the academy. So there were some Jewish individuals who were well-placed to contest some of the conclusions that were coming out of the scientific community regarding the racial difference of Jews and other immigrants. So that's kind of an important aspect in which the history of science is, you know, Jews played an important role in that regard in contesting some of the conclusions of science and anthropology and social science and other areas. Another thing to mention is science was a particularly attractive avenue for Jews in this kind of defense work because of the authority of modern science. In other words, science was understood as a value-neutral universal field of inquiry in which just facts existed. But, you know, opinion and bias didn't enter into the situation. This was the way science was understood. As I'll explain in a minute. That's not exactly the way it works. But because of that, first of all, that ease the entry of Jews into science. Jews sometimes had trouble in academia getting positions as literature professors, for example. Ludwig Lewisohn, the German Jewish writer, for example, if you've ever read his autobiography, he had an awful time getting a position teaching English literature because the assumption was how can a Jew understand the culture and pathos of people of, you know, native-born and English background. But in science, background was thought to be less important because of the notion that science was a kind of universal, value-free field. And so, many of the Jews who first got involved in academia, the scientific fields were often the first area. As a matter of fact, the first Jewish professor in the United States in the 19th century was Professor Sylvester. I think it was John James Sylvester, at the University of Virginia, and he was a mathematician. And if you look at the history of Jews in higher education, you'll find that they were often in the sciences, in mathematics. Sometimes languages was a vehicle. Also, especially the field of, as we'll see in a minute, of Semitic languages because Jews were thought to have a kind of natural understanding of that field. So, anyway, science was a very important avenue for Jews looking to break into the intellectual community. And the other thing I want to say is that a starting point for understanding this whole discussion is to understand that