Hypervisible Invisibility: A Study Of Black-Jewish Relationships In African American Literature

In their fiction, canonical authors of African American literature such as Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nella Larsen have portrayed Jewish people in their work in both positive and negative ways. Additional works by Black American writers also explore the complexity of the relationship between Black Gentiles and non-Black Jews, with some authors even traversing the experience of being both Black and Jewish. In this thesis, I observe the portrayals of Jews of all races in the works of several Black American writers and discover that, despite the history of animosity in American Black-Jewish relationships, Black writers have consistently chosen to sympathize with Jewishness in fiction and nonfiction. Beginning with a portrayal in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901), I track the European Jew’s “choosing whiteness” throughout American history, and how this choice has changed the relationship between non-Black Jews, especially white Jews, and Black Gentiles. I describe the simultaneous hypervisible and invisible experience of Black people and Jews in the United States through historical examples and portrayals in these literary works to help contextualize the often-ambiguous relationship between these two groups in real life as well as fiction.