Black, Jewish, and Interracial: It's Not the Color of Your Skin, but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity

by Katya Gibel Azoulay and Katya Gibel Mevorach

Book Overview

How do adult children of interracial parents-where one parent is Jewish and one is Black-think about personal identity? This question is at the heart of Katya Gibel Azoulay's Black, Jewish, and Interracial. Motivated by her own experience as the child of a Jewish mother and Jamaican father, Gibel Azoulay blends historical, theoretical, and personal perspectives to explore the possibilities and meanings that arise when Black and Jewish identities...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822319713
• ISBN13: 9780822319719
• Release Date: October 1997
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

This is my mom's book

My mother is Dr. Katya Gibel Azoulay and I've read some of her book. I think she is one of the smartest people I know, and if you want to research on interracial families, you need to read this book. Good job Mommy!

A Necessary Disruption Of The Status Quo

Gibel Azoulay enters the discourse on race at a pivotal point in history, when debates over the reconfiguration of census/socio-political categories and developments in the so called "mixed race" literature threaten to turn back the clocks to a sanitized version of Jim Crow. The author's voice is a refreshing and insightful alternative to those who wish to ignore history for the sake of those "mixed race" individuals hoping to 'escape' blackness. Gibel Azoulay's insistence upon maintaining dual cultural identities (Jewish and Black) must make a number of theorists and laymen incredibly uncomfortable. With impeccable scholarship and an original theoretical base she achieves a radical positioning, refusing to the embrace the idealized notions of racelessness put forth by Appiah and others, at the same time resisting the pure essentialization of the Afrocentrists. This is an important, noteworthy contribution. Great Job!