Jewishness after Mount Sinai: Jews, Blacks and the (multi)racial category

The absence of attention to Black-Jewish identities in the discourse of mul tiracialism results from exaggerated attention to Black-Jewish relations, a s well as a conceptual slippage between Jewishness and whiteness. This essa y proposes that identities in the public arena are always political, and th at racial binaries continue in spite of the authorization of multiple-box c hecking in the U.S. Census. When Jewish parents in the U.S. identify themse lves as white, they reproduce race thinking in their children, which, in tu rn, reinforces, rather than undermines racial hierarchies. This surfaces wi th particular saliency in the proposal for a multiracial category.