‘The Reeducation of Race’ by Sonali Thakkar

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.

As Thakkar writes, “UNESCO’s race project and the race concept it canonized in the 1950s were constitutively shaped by the Holocaust, as well as by long-standing debates in social scientific thought and Jewish politics about race, difference, and assimilation” (6). Thakkar does a remarkable job of retaining and developing her critical thrust while acknowledging the statement as “a document of damaged life” (7), especially the lives of the two anthropologists on the committee, Ashley Montagu and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Montagu and Lévi-Strauss were both Jews. Montagu was born Israel Ehrenberg; Lévi-Strauss was the grandson of the Rabbi of Versailles. Neither had much to say in their scholarly work about Jewish identity or culture. Yet, complex and ambivalent as their attitude toward Jewishness may have been, they could not have approached their postwar work of opposing racism with detachment. 

More generally, Thakkar asserts that situating the emergence of postwar liberal antiracism in a context shaped by both the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust and the continued spirit of colonial paternalism offers “a new frame for theorizing the relationship between Jewishness and postcolonial thought” (10). That new frame is desperately needed, even as it builds on some key existing studies. 

Of the considerable literature on Jewishness and colonialism that Thakkar’s study complicates and enriches, a few references stand out. One is Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009). That book sensitively examined texts from the postwar decades that explicitly drew analogies between the Nazi genocide and continuing colonial repression, but—as Thakkar notes—through the shared theme of politics of memory rather than racialization. Another is Nadia Abu El-Haj’s The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (2012). Abu El-Haj combines a historical review of Zionist Jewish “race science” with rich ethnography of contemporary New Yorkers discovering who they “really are” through genetic testing.

Thakkar’s book offers important nuance to Abu El-Haj’s history, in part by recalling the Brazilian ethnographer Arthur Ramos’s indictment of anthropology as a discipline for its history of promoting racist theories (137-38). More specifically, Thakkar documents Jewish scholars’ anti-racism and the prevalence at UNESCO of “a Diasporist conception of Jewishness as plastic” over “competing Zionist mobilizations” (33), albeit in a story that is anything but triumphalist. To be sure, anthropologists of Jews—almost but not quite always themselves identifying as Jews—may have personally espoused various versions of Zionism and various varieties of diasporism. But since World War II at least, it seems to me that very few if any such anthropologists, including Zionists, have conceived of Jewishness in explicitly racialist terms.^[1]For one anthropologist’s rejection of “the Jews” as constituting a race, see: Raphael Patai, The Myth of the Jewish Race (Scribner’s, 1975).

At the same time, Thakkar’s chapters on Caryl Phillips, Aimé Césaire, and Ama Ata Aidoo add to the critical literatures of Jewishness, race, and colonialism explored in works such as Bryan Cheyette’s Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History (2013).   

Of particular interest for me is Thakkar’s chapter on Fanon (Chapter 2). Fanon famously wrote about the juxtaposition between anti-Black racism and anti-Jewishness both empathetically and, it seems at first blush, dismissively, the latter in his reference to anti-Jewish violence as internecine “little family quarrels” among white Europeans.^[2]Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (Grove Press, 1967), 115. Significant work has already been done to provide a more nuanced account of Fanon’s juxtaposition.^[3]Bryan Cheyette, “Afterword: Little Family Quarrels,” in Caribbean Jewish Crossings, ed. S. Casteel and C. Kaufman (University of Virginia Press); Daniel Boyarin, “The New Jewish Question,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 9, no. 1 (2022), 42-66. Thakkar further develops this line of inquiry by emphasizing Fanon’s appreciation—not to say envy—of the supposed “special claim to genealogical and historical continuity” (68) that Jewishness has. Supposed relative degrees of “plasticity,” particularly as between Jews and Black people especially in the work of Boas are pertinent here, as Thakkar discusses.^[4]And as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has discussed, as long ago as 1987. “Erasing the Subject: Franz Boas and the Anthropological Study of Jews in the America, 1903-1942,” Paper presented at the 19th Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies, Boston, MA, December 14, 1987.  

That is—and though the phraseology here may not have been recognized in the mid-twentieth century—at least in the United States where both Boas and W. E. B. Du Bois worked, Jews were considered capable of “whitening”. Black people were not.^[5]For classic studies, see anthropologist Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (Rutgers University Press, 1998) and historian Eric Goldstein’s The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton University Press, 2006). It may at first seem “ironic” that while Fanon was mindful of Jews’ continuity, Jewish anthropologists were distancing themselves from that continuity and arguing, in effect, that through “plasticity” they need neither be bound to continue nor constrained by their inherited tradition. But there are in fact no ironies in history, and the contrasting themes of what we might call Jewish “deep time” and Jewish potential for what was once called “assimilation” are indicia of both millennial stubbornness and structural pressure. 

Thakkar argues that putative “Jewish plasticity offers a model trajectory that Boas will urge on others” (82), and overall, I think this is correct. Curiously, however, it seems that Boas at times was not always enthusiastic about what we might call “Westernization,” but could at least see what he perceived as the anomie of, for example, urban First Peoples as a kind of degeneration. In a (granted, very early in his career) report to the Geographical Society of Berlin, he noted that the city of Victoria on Vancouver Island “is not the place to learn much about the Indian,” even though there were a “great number of Indians living in this town.” Presumably the reason there was little to learn about them in town was due to their European-style dress, an index of their deculturation.^[6]See the quotations from Boas’s report cited by Christopher Bracken in The Potlatch Papers: A Colonial Case History (University of Chicago Press, 1997), 7-9.

Despite brief references to E. Franklin Frazier and Du Bois, Thakkar is focused on Black thinkers and writers located outside the US. Given her detailed history of debates at UNESCO and in the UN more generally in the early 1950s, a document presented to the UN that focused not on “race” but rather “genocide” seems salient here. The document is titled “We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People.”^[7]Introduction to We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People, ed. William L. Patterson (Civil Rights Congress, 1951). Alluding to the statement on genocide that the UN had quite recently adopted in the wake of the Holocaust and that Thakkar analyzes in detail, “We Charge Genocide” was presented to the United Nations in New York by none other than the celebrated actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson. The petition cited the UN’s definition of genocide—“Any intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, or religious group is genocide”—and concluded that “the oppressed Negro citizens of the United States, segregated, discriminated against, and long the target of violence, suffer from genocide as the result of the consistent, conscious, unified policies of every branch of government. If the General Assembly acts as the conscience of mankind and therefore acts favorably on our petition, it will have served the cause of peace.”^[8]“Dec. 17, 1951: ‘We Charge Genocide’ Petition Submitted to United Nations,” Zinn Education Project (accessed December 11, 2025).

Bringing the analysis of the postwar discourse about how to prevent things like what the Nazis had done to the Jews “back home” to the United States (where the UN, whatever its status in global affairs today, remains located) would be an eminently worthwhile continuation of the investigation.^[9]Pertinent background for such a study could be found in the new volume edited by Elissa Sampson and Robert Zecker, From Popular Front to Cold War: The Interracial Left and the International Workers Order, 1930-1954 (Cornell University Press, 2026).

Overall, The Reeducation of Race invites us to continue studying the critical limitations of nation-statist liberalism, the archaeology of anti-racism, and particularly the links between discourses on Jews alongside Black and colonized peoples, if only to spite the forces that work powerfully to discourage such critical investigation. This account of postwar efforts to “solve” racism while retaining the structures of colonialism suggests that those earlier attempts might be relevant to understanding debates over the link between anti-Jewishness and the contemporary association of Israel with settler colonialism. The difficulty of untangling those debates is tied to the way the critique of anti-Jewishness remains largely stuck in the postwar liberal paradigm of tolerance, the struggle against prejudice, and education—the postwar liberal paradigm that Thakkar documents. By the same token, this aspect of critique has not been well integrated into the structural critique of domination that informs postcolonial thought.

Consequently and concomitantly, concern with histories of anti-Jewishness somehow still seem to be, to paraphrase Fanon, an inter-European “family” affair.^[10]Ethnographies of Jews living in late colonialism are therefore especially significant sources. One excellent starting point would be Joëlle Bahloul’s The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 1937-1962 (Cambridge University Press, 1962). Accordingly, even for many scholars, it seems impossible to simultaneously bear in mind Palestinians’ legitimate claims and grievances, and the historical predicament that produced Zionism. But that is a much longer conversation.  

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