Citizenship confers “the right to have rights,” philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in 1951. “Remove that priceless possession, and there remains a stateless person, disgraced and degraded in the eyes of his countrymen.”
In Who Is American? Belonging and the Question of Jewish Citizenship, Prof. Lila Corwin Berman (professor of American Jewish history at New York University), author of Metropolitan Jews, challenges the widely held assumption that, in contrast to Europe, Jews in the United States were granted citizenship routinely and without controversy.
Amid periodic “stress tests” of “legal belonging,” Berman demonstrates that judges, legislators, and litigants often revisited classifications of Jews as “a race,” “nationality,” and “religion,” to determine their status and the status of other groups. And the founding of the State of Israel informed the adoption of dual citizenship.
Immensely informative, Who Is American? provides a timely reminder that, perhaps inevitably, legal definitions of citizenship are contested and often unsettling works in progress.
Throughout the 19th century, Berman indicates, Jews cited George Washington’s complimentary 1790 letter to a Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, as evidence that they had been – and should be – accepted as citizens of the US.
But as pressure to restrict immigration mounted in the early 20th century, lawyers representing the American Jewish Committee lobbied a congressional committee to remove “Hebrew” from the racial classifications in the reporting of immigration statistics. Since Jewishness indicated a religious identity, they argued, Jews should not be separated from annual summaries of the numbers of emigrants from the nations in which they had resided.
Jews granted 'extraordinary exception' for citizenship
In 1909, after the Federal Naturalization Service denied citizenship to four Armenians because they were not “free white persons,” a federal judge opined that in this respect the Armenians did not differ from Jews, “a true race,” whose “origins were Asiatic.” After noting as well that the Christian religion was “born in Palestine,” and that recently, Hebrews had “suffered most cruelly among all men on Earth from European hatred and contempt,” Judge Francis Cabot Lowell determined that until Congress clarified its definition of “whiteness,” the “extraordinary exception” of citizenship for Jews should become the rule.
Between 1924 and 1965, the federal government set nationality quotas for admission of immigrants to the US and grants of citizenship. Many legislators and judges doubted whether Jews had developed an allegiance to the country from which they had emigrated.
The Jewish nationalism, Zionism, and the establishment of the State of Israel, Berman writes, fed suspicions “that Jews constituted a separate nationality dedicated exclusively to their own political ideologies and inherently incapable of loyalty to another nation.”
Such concerns contributed to the enactment of laws defining behavior that could trigger a loss of citizenship: residence in an immigrant’s native country for two years; a woman’s marriage to a foreigner; oaths of fealty to, serving in the army of, or voting in a foreign nation. Jewish organizations declared that this legislation relegated naturalized citizens “to the status of second-class citizens.”
At the end of the 1970s, the Supreme Court affirmed that only citizens had the power to declare themselves expatriates.
Orthodox Jews, Berman reminds us, were among several religious groups that challenged laws requiring businesses to close on Sunday. Forced to lose revenue or give up their own belief in Shabbat, they implied that laws reflecting Christian values hindered them from exercising their rights as citizens.
In 1961, however, the Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of Sunday closing laws.
Nonetheless, antisemites declared the litigation had been driven by money, not religious conviction. Even justice Felix Frankfurter, a Jew, asked, presumably tongue-in-cheek, whether Orthodox Jewish shops marked their telegraph paper as kosher.
By contrast, efforts to persuade the Supreme Court to outlaw prayer in public schools were successful, though they contributed to the growth of a narrative of Christian victimhood, accompanied by anti-Jewish sentiment, that has recently resulted in a restoration of Bible readings and postings of the Ten Commandments in classrooms in some states.
Who is American? details intertwined issues surrounding Jewish citizenship
Who is American? concludes with a detailed analysis of debates surrounding a series of intertwined, controversial issues:
Are Jews among the “protected classes” covered by Title VI of the Civil Rights of 1964, which addresses discrimination in public accommodations, voting, and employment based on “race, color, or national origin,” but does not mention religion”?
Should Jews (who suffered from quotas in the past) join white and Asian applicants to college, claiming to be victims of illegitimate uses of Title VI, including affirmative action?
Should Jews accept race as a legitimate legal definition of Jewishness because Jews had been and continued to be discriminated against as if they were a separate race? Or should race – which US Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts deemed “an artificial category,” prone to manipulation, in a Supreme Court decision declaring affirmative action unconstitutional – no longer provide a foundation for any laws or policies?
As the 20th century ended, racial identity was increasingly regarded as “constructed,” Berman suggests, and legal categories affecting citizenship are now more “malleable” than ever.
In the 21st century, and more aggressively when US President Donald Trump was president in his first term, the Office of Civil Rights declared some speech or action related to Zionism and Israel a unique form of discrimination and intervened to protect Jewish students from rhetoric and behavior deemed antisemitic.
Once resistant to classifying Jews as a “protected class,” most Jewish organizations in the United States have accepted what, for the moment, seems popular and perhaps inevitable.
That said, Berman warns of the danger inherent in “moving law from principle to weapon,” operating, however well-intentioned, “as a targeted strike, advancing just one group, one political ideology, one right.”■
The reviewer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin emeritus professor of American studies at Cornell University.
WHO IS AN AMERICAN? BELONGING AND THE QUESTION OF JEWISH CITIZENSHIP
By Lila Corwin Berman
Princeton University Press
258 pages; $32