black white and jewish autobiography of a shifting self

He was a man who embarked with Alice Walker on an experiment during the 1960's, an experiment of doing away with conventional notions of identity. Her father, although not famous in a conventional sense, began his career at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Her mother is the famous author of The Color Purple, namely Alice Walker. Rebecca Walker admits she is not simply the child of an African-American woman and a Jewish father. It should be noted, however, Walker is no ordinary young writer.

The book does on to describe, with great poignancy, the author's perceived difficulty of living with a dual, often uncomfortable identity of whiteness and blackness, of Jewishness and 'gentileness.'

Rebecca Walker's memoir Black, White, and Jewish, is subtitled 'Autobiography of a Shifting Self.' Walker states that is a woman who is most comfortable 'in airports' because they are 'limbo spaces - blank, undemanding, neutral.' (3) In contrast, because of her multi-racial and multi-ethnic identity, she is both never 'neutral' and also never quite 'of a color.' Only in airports to the rules of the world completely apply to her as well as to the rest of the world, Walker states - and even then, this statement has an irony, given the recent events and controversies over airport racial profiling that occurred after the book's publication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.īoth comments and pings are currently closed.Black, White, and Jewish - the Source of All Rebecca Walker's Angst? This entry was posted on Sunday, May 27th, 2012 at 22:06Z and is filed under Autobiography, Books, Media Archive, Monographs, Religion. Tags: Penguin Press, Rebecca Walker, Riverhead Press In this book, Rebecca Leventhal Walker attempts to define herself as a soul instead of a symbol-and offers a new look at the challenge of personal identity, in a story at once strikingly unique and truly universal. But after her parents divorced, leaving her a lonely only child ferrying between two worlds that only seemed to grow further apart, Rebecca was no longer sure what she represented. Some saw this unusual copper-colored girl as an outrage or an oddity others viewed her as a symbol of harmony, a triumph of love over hate.

The Civil Rights movement brought author Alice Walker and lawyer Mel Leventhal together, and in 1969 their daughter, Rebecca, was born. Riverhead Press (an imprint of Penguin Press) Black White & Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self

Black white and jewish autobiography of a shifting self