Mixed Race Studies

On Raising Asian-Jewish Children

The Jewish Daily Forward
the sisterhood: where jewish women converse
2011-05-30

Renee Ghert-Zand

The recent Forward article “Raising Children on Kugel and Kimchi, and as Jews” centered on a new study that found that many families in which one parent is Jewish and the other is Asian are raising their children as Jews. The research was conducted by a married couple of sociologists, Helen Kim, who is of Korean descent, and Noah Leavitt, who is Jewish. Having written a post for The Sisterhood about the stereotypes about Jewish men and Asian women that are found in popular media — a post that garnered quite a few pointed comments — I was eager to get a behind-the-scenes look at Kim and Leavitt’s methodology and findings. The researchers spoke recently with The Sisterhood.

Renee Ghert-Zand: How did you end up choosing the specific 37 couples that ended up being the sample in your study?

Helen Kim: We worked with Be’chol Lashon. They helped us send out a screening survey. There were waves of responses. We recruited people based on where they were in the queue of 250 or so responses as they came in. We also chose couples so there was a wide range of different demographic variables: ethnicity, religious affiliation and religiosity, kids or no kids, age. For instance, we didn’t want to have an overrepresentation of Chinese-Americans…

Read the entire interview here.

Hybrid Identities: Theoretical and Empirical Examinations

Brill Publishing
2008
412 pages
Hardback ISBN-13: 978 90 04 17039 1; ISBN-10: 90 04 17039 1

Edited by

Keri E. Iyall Smith, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Suffolk University, Boston, Massachusetts

Patricia Leavy, Associate Professor of Sociology
Stonehill College, Easton, Massachusetts

Combining theoretical and empirical pieces, this book explores the emerging theoretical work seeking to describe hybrid identities while also illustrating the application of these theories in empirical research. The sociological perspective of this volume sets it apart. Hybrid identities continue to be predominant in minority or immigrant communities, but these are not the only sites of hybridity in the globalized world. Given a compressed world and a constrained state, identities for all individuals and collective selves are becoming more complex. The hybrid identity allows for the perpetuation of the local, in the context of the global. This book presents studies of types of hybrid identities: transnational, double consciousness, gender, diaspora, the third space, and the internal colony.

Contributors include: Keri E. Iyall Smith, Patrick Gun Cuninghame, Judith R. Blau, Eric S. Brown, Fabienne Darling-Wolf, Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, Melissa F. Weiner, Bedelia Nicola Richards, Keith Nurse, Roderick Bush, Patricia Leavy, Trinidad Gonzales, Sharlene Hesse-Biber, Emily Brooke Barko, Tess Moeke-Maxwell, Helen Kim, Bedelia Nicola Richards, Helene K. Lee, Alex Frame, Paul Meredith, David L. Brunsma and Daniel J. Delgado.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgements

I. THEORETICAL STUDY OF HYBRIDITY
1. Hybrid Identities: Theoretical Examinations, Keri E. Iyall Smith
2. Hybridity, Transnationalism, and Identity in the US-Mexican Borderlands, Patrick Gun Cuninghame
3. DuBois and Diasporic Identity: The Veil and the Unveiling Project, Judith R. Blau and Eric S. Brown
4. Disturbingly Hybrid or Distressingly Patriarchal? Gender Hybridity in a Global Environment, Fabienne Darling-Wolf
5. Gender and the Hybrid Identity: On Passing Through, Salvador Vidal-Ortiz
6. Bridging the Theoretical Gap: The Diasporized Hybrid in Sociological Theory, Melissa F. Weiner and Bedelia Nicola Richards
7. Geoculture and Popular Culture: Carnivals, Diasporas, and Hybridities in the Americas, Keith Nurse
8. The Internal Colony Hybrid: Reformulating Structure, Culture, and Agency, Roderick Bush

PART II. EMPIRICAL STUDIES ON HYBRID IDENTITIES
9. An Introduction to Empirical Examinations of Hybridity, Patricia Leavy
10. Conquest, Colonization, and Borderland Identities: The World of Ethnic Mexicans in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, 1900–1930, Trinidad Gonzales
11. Neither Black nor White Enough – and Beyond Black or White: The Lived Experiences of African-American Women at Predominantly White Colleges, Sharlene Hesse-Biber and Emily Brooke Barko
12. Creating Place from Confl icted Space: Bi/Multi Racial Māori Women’s Inclusion within New Zealand Mental Health Services, Tess Moeke-Maxwell
13. Women Occupying the Hybrid Space: Second-Generation Korean-American Women Negotiating Choices Regarding Work and Family, Helen Kim
14. Hybrid Identities in the Diaspora: Second-Generation West Indians in Brooklyn, Bedelia Nicola Richards
15. Hybridized Korean Identities: The Making of Korean-Americans and Joseonjok, Helene K. Lee
16. One Plus One Equals Three: Legal Hybridity in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Alex Frame and Paul Meredith
17. Occupying Third Space: Hybridity and Identity Matrices in the Multiracial Experience, David L. Brunsma and Daniel J. Delgado

Author Biographies
References
Index