As JFREJ members seek to educate ourselves about the multiraciality and multiculturality of “the” Jewish people, here are some resources; not at all an exhaustive list, just some of the more interesting and useful readings I’ve come across.

--Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

Ammiel Alcalay. After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture. Minneapolis: Univ of Minnesota, 1993.

Azoulay, Katya Gibel. Black, Jewish, and Interracial: It’s Not the Color of Your Skin, but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997.

Ben-Ur, Aviva. Where Diasporas Met: Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews in the City of New York. A Study in Intra-Ethnic Relations, 1880-1950 (Dissertation, Brandeis University, 1998).

Bridges: Sephardi and Mizrahi Women Write About Their Lives (vol 7 no 1, 1997-98).

Bridges: Writing and Art by Jewish Women of Color (vol.9, no.1, 2001).

Kahm, Vineberg, and Swartz, eds. Jewish Women From Muslim Societies Speak. American Sephardi Federation and Hadassah International Research Institution on Women at Brandeis University, 2003.

Khazzoom, Loolwa, ed. The Flying Camel and Other Essays on Identity by Women of Middle Eastern and North African Jewish Heritage. Seattle: Seal Press, 2003.

Matza, Diane, ed.  Sephardic-American Voices: Two Hundred Years of a Literary Legacy.  Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 1999.

Tessman, Lisa and Bat-Ami Bar On, eds. Jewish Locations: Traversing Racialized Landscapes. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.

(and the invaluable, should be read by anyone interested in racism):

Mosse, George. Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism. New York: Fertig, 1985.