Not in My Front Yard: Privacy, Whiteness, and Liberal Subjectivity in Global Anglophone Jewish Literature

• In Event: The “Hidden” Jewish Presence in 20th-Century Fiction

Abstract

As scholars across a number of fields have demonstrated, whiteness and liberal subjectivity in the postwar period were deeply tied into the possession of private space. Unlike urban environments, in which most spaces were and are at least partially public, with permeable boundaries and inevitable intimacies, the suburbs, which were designed as spaces of white racial manufacture, offered private spaces and through them the privilege of hiddenness. As Jews all over the world retreated from the city to the suburbs during these years, they embraced a material culture that opened hitherto sealed off entry points to whiteness. While Jewish studies has certainly attended to the relationship between suburbanization and Jewish whiteness in certain national contexts, however, this topic has not been explored as the global phenomenon it truly was and continues to be. In this paper, I will give an overview of mid-to-late twentieth century Jewish texts from multiple countries, focusing primarily on the US and South Africa, to demonstrate how the global materiality of suburban whiteness and, in particular, its promise of privacy and hiddenness, impacted how Jewish authors throughout the Anglosphere constructed Jewishness in relation to whiteness and postwar liberalism.

Author

• Naomi Taub, UCLA Leve Center for Jewish Studies