The solution, many German Jews felt, was to make the shabby immigrants “respectable,” to clean them up, dust them off and teach them to act “like Americans.”

Long preoccupied with issues of identity, American society prefers to place its citizens into boxes on the basis of physical attributes and culture. No science supports this practice; it is simply a matter of habit and convenience. Like other paradigms, the black-white one allows people to simplify and make sense of a complex reality. And, of

a profoundly unequal place, Whiteness is supposed to mean something. Whenever that is threatened, a hot resentment bubbles.