Judging Jewish Identity in the United States

This book focuses on the first case to provide Jewish Americans with race-based civil rights to highlight the complexity of White-perceived Jewish racialization in the United States. In 1982, vandals defaced Shaare Tefila Congregation with Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi images and slogans. In the subsequent court case, the congregation’s lawyers were required to invoke “race”-based statutes since no “religion”-based laws applied to the desecration. Annalise Glauz-Todrank offers a nuanced analysis of the ways in which the members of the congregation themselves, their lawyers, and the vandals’ lawyers used the concepts of race and religion to argue their case. Judging Jewish Identity in the United States understands “race” and “religion” as White, Christian categories and illustrates how they have been accepted and internalized in the American environment. Focusing on the 1987 case Shaare Tefila Congregation v. Cobb, Glauz-Todrank examines how the judges, in each of the three courts, viewed the White-perceived Jewish congregants as well as how the congregants responded to the vandalism, felt relief by the cleanup day that incorporated their neighbors, and pursued the case in the context of their embodied Jewish American experiences.