“We’re Not Jews” Imagining Jewish History and Jewish Bodies in Contemporary Multicultural Literature

Abstract

By the end of the twentieth century a new frontier had come into being on which Jews were imagined to have a special function. That new frontier was called multiculturalism and it defined itself quite literally in terms of real or perceived boundaries. It was, according to contemporary self-defined multicultural thinkers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, the space where “this mixture of races, rather than resulting in an inferior being, provides hybrid progeny, a mutable, more malleable species with a rich gene pool.”¹ Contemporary multicultural theory provides a further rehabilitation of notions of continually crossing ideas of race at the frontier. The Canadian filmmaker Christine Welsh effects a similar, necessary rehabilitation of the anxiety about being Métis, of mixed race: the Métis becomes one type on the Canadian frontier.² By positing the “cosmic race” as “healing the split at the foundation of our lives,” she removes the stigmata of illness from those at the borderlands.