Asian American Jews, Race, and Religious Identity | CU Experts

AbstractThis article is an exploration of marriages between white American Jews and non-Christian or Jewish Asian Americans in order to illustrate how Christian roots and biases inherent in the term religion delineate these families’ boundaries around family practice such that such Jewish-Asian American families produce a broader range of cultural mixture than their Jewish-Christian counterparts. It argues that this blending occurs because of the different relationships to the notion of “religion” held by American Jews and non-Christian/Jewish Asian Americans, and their histories in the United States, due to 1) the reality that American Jews have been deeply involved in shaping contemporary understandings of religion in the United States and have spent several generations being formed by those understandings, whereas many Asian Americans have not; 2) the tendency among non-Christian and Jewish Asian Americans to use broader terminology like “tradition” and “culture” to describe various practices because religion is not understood as a separate system, and 3) Jewish involvement in white American appropriation of Asian practices.

VIVO