Rating: 
Summary: More Than Her Mother's Daughter
Review: I read this book in a day..I could not put it down and didn't want to. Initially, I got this book because I am a big fan of Alice Walker. However, Rebecca Walker has her own unique and worthwhile voice. Neither her black mother nor her white Jewish father ever had to experience exactly what she experienced and that's what makes this story fascinating. She is neither white nor black, she is simply Rebecca and she tells her very interesting story with compassion and a remarkable lack of great rage. She spins the tale with an extremely mature point of view, not seeming to favor either parent and not seeming to blame one more so than the other. Both parents, like everyone, come across as remarkably human, warts and all. But the difference is that Rebecca Walker also puts forth the very good qualities that exist in both of her parents. This is a refreshing memoir, not at all along the line of "Mommie Dearest" and its imitators, but a true account of a life lived in two worlds and still emerging victorious.
Rating: 
Summary: Mostly an autobiograph from adolescense to high school
Review: 10/04/03 Rebecca Leventhal Walker(formerly Rebecca Grant Leventhal)'s book reflects the tragedy of children raising themselves...It is all spoken by the author in the 1st person,even she at the age of 1(one).In Walker's case,all the understanding and liberalism her parents(Mel Leventhal,lawyer and Alice Walker,writer) gave her while married and after their divorce as she traveled from New York(father & step mother) to SanFrancisco(her single parent mother)was not enough due to the invalid thoughts and perceptions many adolescent/teen have{As Oscar Wilde would say "Youth is wasted on the Young"} (especially if all about them is not average{too fat,too skinny,too pale,too dark,an obsession to be a leader,an obsession to be envied,in schools where they are the minority,in schools where they're suppose to emphasis that they're the majority,where they think their teachers meddle too much,where they think their teachers don't care,where they are raised to believe school is just rote learning(and they are therefore bored " :they feel they're not being challenged enough") when it is really "Part of the Journey":e.g. self discipline)etc..In one passage Walker has mixed feelings ,in that she's comfortable doing "whatever",but wished a little that her parents would help protect her from herself in scrutinizing her whereabouts and her friends(many of them rich as well as poor,white as well as non white,Jewish as well as Gentile had no one checking on them either).Just the fact that she rejected her father's name(Leventhal) not because of him but because of the"grandfather she never met" shows adolescent/teen "slope of thought".
Rating:
Summary: A Journey Within
Review: In her powerful, poetic debut, Rebecca Walker speaks from her very soul about trying to find a sense of self in her ever-changing world. Rebecca Walker was considered a "Movement Baby," a child of a black civil rights activist and a white Jewish father who defied the rules and miscegenation laws of the South during the 60's. Her life begins innocently, full of love and a sense of peace, but all this changes with the divorce of her parents. Rebecca spends the remainder of her childhood and teenage years being shuffled back and forth between parents, no longer having a place to call "home." She desperately seeks to fit in somewhere, struggling with her own identity of being black and white, often denying what society has tried to label. Rebecca turned to sex, alcohol, and drugs to mask the pain of a disconnected father, an absent mother, and of not truly belonging to any particular group.
Rebecca Walker introduces us to the pivotal people in her life that molded her into the woman she is today: the Jewish grandmother who denied her, the boyfriend who became her refuge, her best friend she could not say good-bye to, and many others. It is not until later in life after much introspection, Rebecca is able to understand who she really is, and everything she tried to deny earlier in life is actually a part of her.
Rebecca Walker's writing style is fresh and poetic, her words flowing from one page to the next. I could easily relate to Rebecca's pain and sense of not belonging to any particular group while growing up, because I was also a child of two different worlds seeking to find "my place" in an unforgiving society.
BLACK WHITE AND JEWISH is more than an autobiography, it is a journey of love, pain, loss, and forgiveness. It is one woman's journey to embrace her "self."
Reviewed by Michelle Warren
of The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers
Rating: 
Summary: AN EXPOSE OF A MIXED BLOOD ADOLESENCE
Review: Rebecca Walker may not have fit into the Black, White , or Jewish worlds, or the female, middle class, or divorced family the way that their limitations subscribe. But her identity of being all in one, is explored indepth. Clearly descriptive, the unprepared rites of passage that live in all women are exposed- from the first public hair, first love, and first kiss, as Rebecca walks back through the pages of her youth. I found interest in this book, as a somewhat voyeristic exploration of her life. In fact, the truth that Rebecca tells is so vivid and explicit, that as a reader, I felt like I was snooping on her diarys, and getting to know a person who I have shared similar experiences. For the young adult reader who may find truth in Judy Blume, Rebecca Walker's writing sheds light on the experience of a youth, an adolesent, a young woman who has found her identity. As a litereary acheivement in Mixed heritage studies, I reccommend this book to anyone interested in race issues, autobiographies, or the inequalities that exist in a society that catagorizes its people.
Rating: 
Summary: Self-Indulgent Drivel
Review: If someone were considering making it illegal to write a memoir before the age of, say, 60, Rebecca Walker's book, Black, White and Jewish, would be held up as a prime example. In this book, Walker recounts her childhood and teenage years as a daughter of a black mother, and white and Jewish father, and describes her struggle to find a sense of identity in a world that insisted that her cultural combination was a virtual impossibility. It is a compelling premise, but you'll be sorely disappointed if you're expecting an insightful reflection upon Walker's experiences growing up as a biracial Jewish child from the perspective of her adult self. The book is more of an adolescent diatribe about every sad, frustrating and/or confusing thing that happened to her before she graduated from high school. Yes, there was lots of confusing stuff. Her parents (divorced, estranged, and wildly inattentive to young Walker) made the unfathomable decision to have her alternate living between the two of them every two years, even though they lived on opposite sides of the country. So, just as Walker was settling into her identity with her black mother, or white Jewish father, she was whisked away to the opposite coast with a totally different peer group to start again. While one might have some stirrings of sympathy for her plight, the book's twin tones of self-pity and self-congratulation gets mighty tiresome. Fast. One gets the impression that by merely by surviving a complicated childhood, Walker thinks she performed some kind of feat that had no one else has done before. Moreover, most of the feelings of isolation and confusion she seems to embrace as uniquely hers will be recognized as entirely common to most American teenagers, whether biracial or not. I might have been able to forgive Walker for the invariable whine in her voice had she delivered any message more penetrating than 'it's tough to be a biracial/Jewish child of divorce.' I waited to see Walker become a grown-up, to rise above the childish insistence that the whole world understand her, and to divine and share some meaningful wisdom from her experiences. Didn't happen. If Walker has changed substantially from the self-centered, insecure teenager that she was, it's not obvious from her memoir. The reader is left to wonder how, if at all, she bridges her two worlds. Is she still "ashamed," as she puts it, of her white side? How does she think her childhood squares up against the experiences of other biracial children she's met, particularly those whose parents did not divorce, or at least remained amicable? What kind of advice or message would she give a biracial child that is struggling with his/her identity? What advice would she give to parents of a biracial child? Questions such as these are much more interesting and enlightening than a description of her first blow-job, or the names of the songs she listened to in junior high school. Walker's writing is fluid, and so, in that sense, the book is quite readable. And the contrast she offers of her antithetical worlds is vivid, packed with enough cultural details of the '80s to choke a hog. But, she seemed to be wrestling with something too big for her. She chooses a rather inapt central metaphor - her lack of memory - for a memoir. The first sentence of the book is: "I don't remember things" but then she spends the rest of the book spelling out every minor physical detail of her childhood and teenage years, starting from age 1. As a result, the memory theme feels embarrassingly contrived. (As do many of the pseudo-poetic musings she sprinkles throughout the book, like when some drunk barges into her Yale dorm room and asks how it can be possible that she's black and Jewish, she stares in the mirror and broods: 'Am I possible?' Girl, get over yourself.) In addition, she spends almost no time at all fleshing out the characters of those people who, for better or worse, influenced her life. She tosses everyone into simplistic categories - her Jewish grandmother was Racist, her mother was Uninvolved, her father Didn't Understand, the black men she met all had Beautiful Brown Skin, her white cousins had Hidden Racist Tendencies, etc. - and thus they all remain lifeless as cardboard cut-outs. Her willingness to cast the villains of her story in an unwavering negative light made me not fully trust her judgment and observations. For all the "honesty" that is supposedly bandied about in the book, I'd have trusted her view much more if she had managed to portray those who disappointed her as flawed humans with complex motivations and intentions instead of writing them off as Bad People. To me, that would be a hallmark of maturity. I could go on and on, but other disgruntled readers have hit what I've left out. Particularly the person who wrote about how she horribly oversimplifies - and renders superficial - what it means to be black, and what it means to be Jewish. The book really seemed to be a personal catharsis rather than a vehicle for sharing mature insight on the multicultural experience in America. Now that she has gotten to purge some of her bitterness at the expense of the reader, perhaps she can finally grow up. Maybe by the time she turns 60 she'll have learned enough to write a truly illuminating memoir that is for the reader, not for herself.
Rating: 
Summary: Rich teenagers are the angriest
Review: I picked up this book thinking it would be about being Black, White and Jewish, and found, instead, that it is about being Rebecca Walker, the privileged yet neglected child of divorced bi-costal parents. It is amazing that someone from two highly educated and idealistic parents, with her own incredible education, would have so little introspection into the parts of her identity that she claims to celebrate. Like many materially privileged yet emotionally neglected adolescents, Rebecca Walker is angry about all the wrong things. She has written a book that is really about being the daughter of an incredibly self-involved woman, and the dangers that self-involved parenting presents to young people. She has also written about the incredible financial and class advantages that she has been offered. However, she resents her privileges and celebrates her mother's neglect. She does not even seem to be able to understand her privilege, and comes off as little more than a spoiled and angry teenager, lashing out at her father and stepmother, who provided the most caring homelife she knew. At the writing of this book, Rebecca Walker was in her early thirties, and shows that, emotionally, she has progressed little towards being an adult. This is not a result of being Black, White and Jewish so much as it is a result of money and trips around the world replacing parental nurturing. The author's sole sense of white, Jewish identity seems to be based in being a member of the suburban upper-middle class. The title of her book seems to imply that this is what it means to be a White person or a Jewish person. Likewise, she seems to suggest that being a Black person is based on having big hips and "ghetto" attitude. It is shameful that anyone should think these identities are defined by shallow stereotypes like this, and especially disturbing that someone of such intellectual advantages is unable to see how limiting these ideas are to personal growth. As a Jewish person in a biracial family, I found it demeaning to be associated with these simplistic markers of identity. Likewise, as someone who grew up without financial advantage, I found it infuriating that the book never examines the coast-to-coast flights, expensive summer camps, and vacations in other countries as anything more than a common growing up experience. This book might be fine if it claimed to be something else- if it admitted that it was about being the child of wealthy professional parents who lived extrememly different lives. It is not a book about racial and cultural identity so much as it is a portrait of a certain class lifestyle, either the wealthy and cnservative or the wealthy and bohemian, depending on the parent. Rebecca Walker attended an elite high school and university, and has now chosen the life of an academic and writer. She has a lot more learning to do about the real factors that shaped her life, but, surrounding herself wih people of equal privilege, she may never be challenged to do so.
Rating:
Summary: I just don't know
Review: I don't know how I feel about this book though I did read it and enjoyed parts of it. Walker's life is very interesting, she had a hard life yes, but I think that she at times makes her self feel sorry for herself a little too much. It's an easy read but...the writing moves from moment to moment and you never really know if she's writing about when she's 21 or 12. I still recommend it but just be aware that you may not like it.
Rating:
Summary: Can't read Alice Walker any more
Review: The thing that has stayed with me most after reading this book was what a poor mother Alice Walker was. At one point, she leaves Rebecca, age 12, by herself for a week with money to buy food while Alice goes off somewhere to complete a writing project. Another time, Alice pays someone to take her daughter shopping for school clothes and register her for school. It is no wonder that Rebecca was promiscuous from an early age. The wonder is that she was able to recognize the need to pull herself together and apply to a good high school, and that she does not bear her mother any ill-will. Indeed they seem to have a good relationship. The book itself is interesting but others have better tackled the growing up interracial issue (e.g. "The Color of Water). I expect Rebecca will become a better writer as time goes on and she writes about other things. On the other hand, I have lost all taste for Alice Walker's novels. It makes me angry to realise the circumstances they were written under.
Rating:
Summary: Growing up Alone
Review: Black, White and Jewish is the story of a young girl blossoming into a woman almost entirely alone. Fortunately for Rebeeca Walker, she had strong intelligence and determination to help her along. Others would have had a much more difficult time. The prose in this book can really sing at times. Good non-fiction should be heavy on description and this book is careful when it describes place, but also the particulars in that place. We get a beautiful picture of the bedroom where Rebecca and her mother, the famed Alice Walker, sleep in an oversized bed with blood-red curtains. It was a frightening yet endearing scene for a young girl and Walker shares this intimacy. Also, San Francisco, and New York City come alive in the book. We get vivid details about the parts of each city and other cites. When Walker gets away from personal attachment of a scene, however, then the scene is being described only to show us what it looks like and not its connection to the author's emotional life. The book shares one way of living biracial in an intolerable world. Walker is careful to never say that is this is a how-to guide; it is nothing of the sort. It's a book of her experiences and her way of coping with the difficulties of growing up biracial. Father and daughter relationship was fascinating and I was curious to know more about it and especially what caused such a large rift in the relationship. we get the beginning of this situation but not more. Still, this book shares honesty, power, and a woman living, keeping on.
Rating:
Summary: Certainly not what I expected
Review: As the mother of two bi-racial children, I bought the book to understand what it was like to be "Black, White and Jewish". Perhaps I was expecting too much but I didn't expect to hear of one's drug use and sexual relationships at a young age etc. I don't believe the book spoke to it's title at all.
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