
Sonali Thakkar
The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought
Stanford University Press
288 pages, notes, bibliography, index
As a title, The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Racism in Postcolonial Thought is refreshing, in that it identifies as a keyword not a supposed religion (“Judaism”) nor yet an ascription to a certain set of humans (“Jews”), but rather a powerful cultural construction that is the shared product of those who identify with “Jewishness” and those who do not. Thakkar’s study is grounded in a critical study of UNESCO’s 1950 Statement on Race. As she documents, that statement and the anthropological and other scholarly discourses connected with it understood race as “plastic,” meaning that the apparent inferiority of certain races—immigrant Jews were an example for Franz Boas—was largely the effect of environmental factors and was therefore subject to amelioration under the right conditions. The further assertion was that anti-racist education was the best response to racism and its then recent genocidal consequences. The postcolonial critique of such a position is, in essence, that these interventions left in place structures of racism and the forms of domination that emerged from them.
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