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This chapter presents a number of essays which look at the issue of the ethnicity of Jewish people. The first essay compares the historical experiences of Jewish communities in different countries and different periods. The second one examines the divisive role of ethnicity among the Jewish people in the 1920s through analysis of the case of Russian-born writer Moissaye Olgin's step towards communism. The third looks at the analytic value of ethnicity focusing on intermarriage, group blending and ethnic group strength in immigrant Jewish societies in the U.S. The next describes verbal communication of American Jews based on the result of a 2008 sociolinguistic survey. The following essay examines the relationship between identity and ethnicity as phenomena and concepts, focusing on the experiences of Jews in the U.S. Another examines a plural dimensional aspect of ethnic research on Jews. The seventh essay examines the usefulness of the ethnicity concept in studying Jews. The last one presents research concerning Jewish ethnicity and the application of the concept of ethnicity in the study of the Jewish experience.

This chapter presents some of the ways that Brazilian Jews intertwine their multiple sources of identity. The “Brazilification” of the Jewish community is evidenced through their embrace of Brazilian racial and ethnic constructs to explain their acceptance within the nation (the myth of Brazil as a “racial democracy”) and Ashkenazi-Sephardi relations (employing interracial metaphors of “mixed” marriages and institutions). The incorporation of Brazilian foodways, including where these appear to contradict Jewish practices, reveals some of the tensions inherent in navigating these contradictory identities that are also evidenced through the particular use of language employed by this community.

The epilogue summarizes how the phenomenon of Russian Jewish conversion, though marginal in number, left an outsized imprint on the cultural map of East European Jews who grappled with questions of Jewish identity and the role of religion in the increasingly powerful Jewish secular nationalist ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The epilogue explores evolving Jewish attitudes towards baptism, interfaith sociability, and cultural mobility in the late-imperial period, and it puts conversions from Judaism in imperial Russia in conversation with conversions from Judaism in the modern period more broadly. Finally, the epilogue looks ahead to the inter-revolutionary period (1906-1917) and the Soviet period when conversions from Judaism accelerated, accompanied by a growing ethnic conception of Jewish identity whereby national Jewishness found explicit harmony with Christian religious adherence.

The concluding chapter discusses how this exploration of Jewish Brazilian experience is important for understanding both Jewish ethnicity and Brazilian national identity, and the relationship between national and ethnic identity. An examination of Jewish Brazilian identity further illuminates the complex ways that Brazilianness is a nexus of race, class, and culture. While Jews in São Paulo construct their communities and identities in ways that are consistent with local culture, their condition as transnationals limits the extent to which they can be fully national while maintaining ethnic distinction. Each aspect of their identity informs the other: as Jews and as Brazilians they have a dual identity that cannot be separated.

This chapter focuses on Moshe Greenberg, who modeled himself after Yehezkel Kaufmann and elevated biblical discussion above ecclesiastical dogma into the realm of the eternally significant ideas. Greenberg appreciated Kaufmann's role as a Jewish nationalist who emphasized the crucial nature of Jewish religion as defining Jewish ethnicity. He often writes from the double perspective of a university biblical scholar and a practicing Jew—unafraid to speak of God as a contemporary deity. Greenberg's model for how the Hebrew Bible should be read in a Jewish and critical context has influenced both Jewish and non-Jewish scholars. Despite some misgivings, Greenberg's model is compelling, arguing strongly for an image of the Bible as Scripture within Judaism.

This chapter focuses on two authors who show monstrosity and the supernatural in a whole new light: Maurice Sendak and Virginia Hamilton. It first reads Sendak's 1963 picture book Where the Wild Things Are and how its power of fantasy makes the protagonist, Max, an Isaac unbound, as well as how Sendak's notions of monstrosity are informed by his renderings of Jewish ethnicity. It then analyzes Hamilton's “god chile” Pretty Pearl, which both does and does not escape the binding experienced by Jephthah's daughter. It also considers Hamilton's retellings of African American folk tales, with particular emphasis on those that feature women with magical powers, alongside David Wisniewski's picture book Golem. The chapter explains how Sendak and Hamilton move away from the myth of redemptively sacrificed children and toward more nuanced ways of articulating American identities through pain.

Among Israelis, Jewish ethnicity is usually understood as a dichotomy between Ashkenazi Jews (of European descent) and Mizrahi Jews (of Middle Eastern descent). The feature most stereotypically associated with Mizrahis is the production of the pharyngeal segments ([ʕ] and [ħ]), which all extant research suggests has been lost in the speech of most contemporary Israelis. In this chapter I examine Israeli metalinguistic discourse, and demonstrate that, despite the reported infrequency of pharyngealization, it is highly salient in the speech community. I argue that pharyngealization is enregistered as a Mizrahi feature, and that it is a stylistic resource with a rich set of indexical meanings that goes far beyond an ethnic marker. Using data from two Israeli reality TV shows, I show that participants on these shows, who do not consistently pharyngealize, do so when performing attributes associated with a stereotypical Mizrahi persona.