Did British Jews Become ‘White Folks’ in Post-War Britain?

• In Event: Jewish Identity, Internationalism and Perceptions of Jews in France and Britain

Abstract

Karen Brodkin’s popular 1999 Book discusses ‘How Jews Became White Folks’ in the United States in the post WW2 era, through a range of legal, geographic and cultural phenomena. Did such a shift happen in Britain? And if so, how? Was it a shift that British Jews welcomed or opposed? And which Jews might have been excluded from this process? This paper will begin with an overview on the literature on Jews and whiteness, considering when it has been applied in countries outside the United States. It will examine developments in the 1950s and 1960s through which racialisation of British Jews declined and something approximating the status of ‘whiteness’ was obtained in political, social and cultural terms. It will discuss how different groups of Jews approached this state of affairs: integrationists, liberals, Zionists and anti-fascists. It will also examine situations where whiteness had a social cost as well as benefit. Finally, it will consider contemporary rejections of Jewish whiteness in Britain and frame them as a product of the post-2000 era, a period with a radically different political and social culture to the immediate postwar decades.

Author

• Joseph Finlay