First-Year Seminar: Topics in Interdisciplinary Studies: Jewish and Black-ish: US Diasporic Cultures

Judaism may be the only religion that takes an "-ish" in its adjectival form, but it's certainly not the only identity in US culture to consider its particularity through language. As the 2014 sit-com black-ish showed through its very title, mixed-race African diasporic identity haunted the Obama-era cultural imagination. But how does "Jew-ish-ness" differ from "Black-ish-ness"? Certainly all "ishs" aren't the same. We will engage with texts, films, and recordings from across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, from The Jazz Singer to black-ish, to ask how cultural production inflects narratives of affiliation between Black, Jewish, and Black-Jewish people. How are cross-diasporic relationships depicted? How is historical trauma, specifically the Holocaust and the African slave trade, made sense of in artistic representation? What happens to these communities as identities become more mixed, more "-ish"? How do these diasporic affinities complicate national modes of belonging, or speak to other notions of diasporic identity in US culture and abroad? What are the perils and potentials of engaging with comparative diasporic study?