Professor Daniel Segal did not set out to make history in the state of California when he crossed out the word “Caucasian” and substituted “human” on the standard form required to obtain a birth certificate for his newborn daughter.
He just wanted little Hannah Rebecca Segal — who, after entering the world in a Los Angeles hospital, became the first legally recorded “human” born in the country — to live in a post-racial world.
His intent was to “disrupt the notion that there are self-evident and objective categories of race,” Segal explained at the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation’s recent Academic Consortium on Jewish identity.
The point was lost on the hospital staff, who returned the form after correcting his “error” by re-typing “Caucasian.” After lengthy negotiations, during which Segal offered “Jewess” in place of human (it, too, was rejected), frustrated hospital officials placed a call to state authorities in Sacramento. They were informed that “if the parents provided `human,’ then `human’ it was.”
A professor of anthropology at the Pitzer-Claremont Colleges, Segal has since become interested in exploring the role of the state in defining ethnic identities. He was joined at the standing-room-only Academic Consortium by anthropology Professors Joelle Bahloul of Indiana University and Sergei Kan of Dartmouth College.
The event was held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Association of Anthropologists and moderated by consortium members Dvora Yanow, visiting scholar at Stanford Law School and associate professor of public administration at Cal State Hayward, and Murray Baumgarten, professor of English and comparative literature at U.C. Santa Cruz.
When Kan took the podium, he shared his experience as a Russian Jew living among the Tlingit of southeastern Alaska.
As a Soviet Jewish emigre to the United States doing ethnographic work with the Tlingit, Kan arrived in Alaska as the last Russian-speaking Tlingit lay on his deathbed. After serving as a translator, Kan was adopted into a Tlingit family. He is currently writing a book on American anthropologists who have been adopted by Native Americans.
While he feels he is a part of the Tlingit community, Kan stressed that “maybe because I am Jewish, I don’t want to cross that line” into total assimilation.
“At first I didn’t wear my Jewishness on my sleeve, because it seemed irrelevant. But later, I found that by being open about it I could get more into their culture.”
Bahloul discussed her experiences in France, where the last traces of a visible Jewish community remain.
For most of France’s 700,000 Jews, she said, Judaism “has withdrawn into the limits of private life. The Jewish quarter still exits, but mostly symbolically…like a historical museum.
“Today it is the Lubavitchers who have invested in the area. But it originally was filled with Sephardic Jews from Morocco who established themselves there as merchants.”
To this day, said Bahloul, the depiction of Jews as a community of merchants persists in France’s travel guides and public culture, despite the fact that they have become completely integrated into French society.
“Whenever I wander around the urban jungle that is France,” she said, “I’m looking for the physical commercial presence of a Jewish community that once was.”
The consortium, a regional association of Bay Area academics and graduate students, was created more than a decade ago to link the Jewish academic community with the Jewish community at large, according to Baumgarten.
The first of its kind in the country, the Academic Consortium enables students and faculty in Jewish studies from different institutions to meet on a regular basis. It is supported by the JCF’s Endowment Fund, with a grant from the Swig Family Fund for Jewish Community Involvement.