American Jewish History

In this lengthy study, Joel Perlmann reconstructs the bureaucratic decision-making, social scientific debates, and political wrangling that produced the categories into which the federal government has sorted immigrants—and the populace generally—according to "origins." He traces how those diverse "origins" have been understood, variously, as "race," "people," "nationality," and "ethnicity." These categories were constantly re-forged during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The granular history underlying this process of category-creation, Perlmann hopes, "may help dispel illusions about the nature and authority of the classifications and about the limits of their utility, while still leaving us"—both social scientists and, in the post-civil rights era, those fighting for racial justice—"able to appreciate and profit from that utility" (398).

Perlmann explores questions that matter to historians of migration and race. In particular, he addresses an issue central to debates over whiteness in the United States: the relationship between "two different kind of race difference," meaning the differences among European newcomers, on the one hand, and, on the other, "between Europeans and others—that is, between whites and nonwhites" (6). It was not so much that Europeans became white, he suggests, as that intra-European racial differences ultimately became less salient. Perlmann also attends to the outsized role Jews played, both as objects of classification and as participants, in the debates over state efforts to define ethno-racial categories.

Part I describes the complicated career of the "List of Races and Peoples." This classification scheme was introduced by New York-based immigration officials hoping to sort and track the increasingly broad array [End Page 650] of newcomers arriving in the late nineteenth century. The List was especially geared toward differentiating among European immigrants from multiethnic empires, who officials felt were getting jumbled together in government data. A few years later, the newly minted US Immigration Commission used the List as the basis for its multivolume report, and, shortly thereafter, proposed that the Census Bureau adopt the List as the framework for a new question on race. All the parties who engaged with the List grappled with conceptual confusion, but Jewish activists were particularly vocal critics, protesting the label of "Hebrew" in official data. Their objections threw a wrench in the government's data-gathering work, pushing officials to justify their schema and derailing the proposal to include the new "race" question on the 1910 census. Instead, the census continued to use "race" to signify differences along white/nonwhite lines, differentiating European peoples only by "mother tongue."

Part II examines the "National Origins" immigration law of 1924. Perlmann argues that this law, which drastically reduced the migration of eastern and southern Europeans, represents an important instance of racial distinctions among whites having significant discriminatory impact. This was so even as the law also enshrined an even greater divide between whites and nonwhites, most forcefully in its commitment to near-total Asian exclusion. Perlmann also explores the immigration legislation in the context of other policy debates around racial differences, including Supreme Court decisions declaring Asians racially ineligible to naturalization and the move to reclassify Mexicans as racially distinct in the 1930 census.

Part III explores the gradual embrace of the concept of "ethnicity" in the latter half of the twentieth century, both in social scientists' work and in government policy. Perlmann notes that "ethnicity" continued to reflect confusion around the significance of "origins." The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, for example, stipulated that visa applicants must state their "ethnic classification." This provision flummoxed government officials charged with implementing the law, however, and lengthy debates ensued. Meanwhile, Jewish lawmakers and advocates objected to categorizing "Jewish" as an ethnic classification, as their counterparts earlier had to including "Hebrew" as a category.

Part IV discusses shifting meanings of "race" and "ethnicity" during the civil rights era and beyond. Perlmann describes the increasing significance of official ethno-racial classification practices to the quest for racial justice, as federal data on race and...