Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

ABSTRACT:

This paper seeks to understand why American Jews in the postwar period have come to look to the genome as a definitive historical record. I argue that studies of Jewish genetics, and their popular dissemination in life writing and the press, have become sites where the powers of fact and affect are negotiated as they relate to Jewish oral tradition and formal Jewish historiography. I situate this argument in the context of American Jews becoming white in postwar American society and the community’s anxiety about their own distinctiveness. It may seem that studies of Jewish genetics are designed to reaffirm socially and politically accepted knowledge about Ashkenazi Jews. However, genetic history also has the power to challenge both Jewish oral tradition and formal Jewish historiography. Jewish genetics thus emerges as a new form of Jewish communal narrative.