Race And Religion Among the Chosen Peoples of Crown Heights

Description

"Grounded in extended research among both Blacks and Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Goldschmidt challenges the binary, black/white approach to U.S. race relations, brilliantly demonstrating how religious discourses inform and complicate the everyday reckoning of distinctions between Self and Other. Beautifully written, this book is a major contribution."-Steven Gregory, author of Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community "Race and Religion among the Chosen Peoples of Crown Heights is a richly sustained and critically insightful ethnography of the Lubavitch community in Crown Heights. Henry Goldschmidt has done an excellent job of creating an account that reflects the Lubavitchers' worldview and simultaneously gives voice to their neighbors."-Jonathan Boyarin, Distinguished Professor of Modern Jewish Studies, University of Kansas "With great intelligence, compassion, and humor, Henry Goldschmidt moves from the laundromat, to kosher kitchens, to the street to gain understanding about the difficulties that religion and race present to the project of American multiculturalism."-Faye Ginsburg, author of Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community In the first major scholarly work to look beyond the sensationalized violence of August 1991, Henry Goldschmidt explores the everyday realities of Black-Jewish difference in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, he argues that collective identities like Blackness and Jewishness are particularly complex in today's Crown Heights because the neighborhood's Afro-Caribbean, African American, and Lubavitch Hasidic communities understand their differences in dramatically different ways-as a racial divide between Blacks and Whites or a religious divide between Gentiles and Jews. Goldschmidt takes this collision of conceptual categories as an invitation to reimagine both "race" and "religion." By exploring the limits of categorical thought, he works to create space in American society for radical forms of cultural difference. Henry Goldschmidt is an assistant professor of religion and society at Wesleyan University.