ABSTRACT
In 1990 I had returned to New York City to do antiracist work with other Jews, when a friend sent me an essay by James Baldwin. “No one was white before he/she came to America,” Baldwin had written:
It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country. … It is probable that it is the Jewish community—or more accurately, perhaps, its remnants—that in America has paid the highest and most extraordinary price for becoming white. For the Jews came here from countries where they were not white, and they came here in part because they were not whit; and incontestably—in the eyes of the Black American (and not only in those eyes] American Jews have opted to become white… . 1
