Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self

Rating:
Summary: Black, White, Jewish, and Privileged
Review: Like many of the other reviewers, I had high hopes for this book. However, I must agree, Ms. Walker does not realize how privileged she is in recounting her life, nor does she really provide the reader with any insight or depth. She simply rambles on, delivering undeveloped, whiny sound bites.

Pass this one up.

Rating:
Summary: Scratching the surface
Review: I'm not sure how old Rebecca Walker is now but I think she's relatively young to have written a memoir. I picked it up because I was interested in the account of a mixed race person's childhood in America.

Since I am also of mixed ethnicity I could very much relate to some of the things she talked about. It seems to be that those of us who are mixed often identify with the side we resemble most. I know that for myself this is true, although I have tried to explore my roots on both sides, taking lessons in the languages, reading up on them, traveling to the countries of my family's origin, etc. I feel like Rebecca didn't get to explore her other half, perhaps because of her volatile relationship with her father and the tumultuous relationship between her parents.

I was also shocked at her mother's neglect, leaving a teenaged Rebecca on her own for days and sometimes weeks at a time. It's been a little while since I read this book so it isn't crystal-clear in my mind--I don't recall exactly what happened to drive Rebecca and her father apart. It seems like of like Rebecca wanted to eradicate her whiteness and isn't proud of her dual heritage and I think it's too bad. I guess I was hoping that she was able to resolve being a mixture of things and appreciating them all, but it doesn't seem to have happened.

Rating:
Summary: Shifting Self
Review: I met Rebecca today and I'm still reeling. She is the most peaceful person that I have ever met, and Black White and Jewish will rock your world like you won't believe. I read her memoir twice and the key for me in understanding it is that she cannot and will not be contained by neat categories. She poetically captures continually changing identity. Rebecca said today that she has changed since writing this and she embraces further development. Black White and Jewish illustrates her subjective interpretation of her life as she felt and experienced it. Who are we to judge what she felt at fourteen years old, etc because she doesn't fit what we want her to be? Should she have censored herself to portray a dishonest picuture of her life because of a critical audience? She sacrifices the image to maintain the integrity of the book. This is memoir at its very best.

Rating:
Summary: Embrace the challenge
Review: I was shocked and appalled to read some of the harsh reviews of Black, White and Jewish. I read this book twice in a row because I had never read anything that I connected to as much as this book. This is not because I had the same experiences as Rebecca, it is because I felt I knew her as a biracial person. This book is personal, challenging, and sometimes shocking. But it is also her life. I think she did a beautiful job describing her experience as a young biracial woman, who was finding her way in an equally complex world.

Rating:
Summary: Survival, and Triumph
Review: This is a riveting account of a child struggling to understand her place in the world. As a "movement child" of two loving parents, Rebecca knew who she was and owned her beauty. After he parents' divorce, she lost that identity and began a struggle to overcome the identity assigned to her in the communities she bounced between while growing up in a cross-country joint custody journey. She chronicles the colorless love of those who stood by her throughout it all, and evidences the racial discrimination that most White Americans today deny. She is a virbrant voice for all women who came of age before aids, in the early eighties when sexual expectations were extreme. She paints a rich portrait of the spiritual effort to bridge cultures between her Jewish father's affluent world, and the inner-city world she lived in with her mother. Not only will this book be valuable to anyone interested in cultural diversity, but it is a tribute to all of us who have fought to find ourselvs.

Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly Universal...but Something is Missing
Review: One day I was walking the aisles of [a local bookstore] when I stumbled across a large display featuring Rebecca Walker's childhood memoir: Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self. I was instantly struck by reverie as I recalled the first novel I had ever read (without having a teacher assign it) some thirteen years earlier: Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Perhaps it was with the nostalgia that I remember discovering reading for the pleasure of experiencing the world through another human beings eyes that made me linger at that display. I decided that I liked Ms. Walker's "smiling eyes" and since we both shared an ethnically indiscernible appearance (the "what are you mixed with?" syndrome), I sat down with a coffee and began reading the book. After all I thought, writing talent probably runs in the family. Although I was compelled to read along I was thinking that the big grandiose realizations about what race means in America and what it means to the individual who is hard to categorize were just around the corner. The profound social commentary never came. Neither did any revealing introspection, and although I was entertained by the account of a childhood that far excelled my own in terms of scandal and discovery, I was left disappointed.

Simply put, Black, White and Jewish is a recollection without any assessment. Rebecca Walker's story is summed up in the paragraph on the back of the book. During the Civil Rights Movement, Jewish activist lawyer, Mel Leventhal and Black activist writer Alice Walker, married and had a child named Rebecca in the unlikeliest of places for 1969: Jackson Mississippi. As the political climate changed and her parents relationship ended in divorce, Rebecca was forced to grow up shuttling back and forth across the country, searching for her self in the east coast Jewish culture, the boho San Francisco culture, and the Black urban southern culture of Atlanta. Rebecca was tossed to and fro by confusion and identity crises with every move and along the way she come to learn more and more about who Rebecca is instead of what Rebecca was born into.

Besides the title, there is a lot of irony in Black, White and Jewish. One of the early ironies that the reader discovers is that as exotic as her lineage is, Walker's story of finding her identity is painfully familiar to just about any teenager. We can all identify with the trials of being new somewhere and feeling targeted or left out or just plain different. You don't have to be of any peculiar heritage to know this experience. Being 15 years old will suffice. Even more ironic is that Walker still believes that it was the search for her identity in spite of being a racial/cultural anomaly in a country where ethnicity is such a dividing distinction (second only to gender) that makes her story so compelling. Perhaps Walker thinks we can all learn from her unique vantage point. But the truth is that Walker's perspective is hardly refreshing and has little to convey in spite of her unique perspective. Finding one's identity within a family of different values is not new and Walker doesn't really have the insight to draw any profound conclusions. This book reads more like a diary that was being kept all along as it was happening, than adult reflections on a turbulent childhood. The greatest irony is that in spite of being an adult when she wrote this book, she seems rather immature in her assessment of her childhood. She is still nonchalantly firing arrows at the things that made her feel insecure as a child (society, race, sexuality, teen-age cliques, etc.) rather than finally attacking the source of so much insecurity; her parents, and namely her mother. Being the daughter of a famous Pulitzer Prize winning writer perhaps made Walker feel special and so maybe it is asking for too much for Walker to see her mother for who she is. Perhaps Walker thinks she was supposed to share such a creative and wonderful mother with the rest of the world, but I can't help but read this book and feel that Walker was simply a lonely child that has repressed the real suffering that took place in her life as she was neglected. It was her mother's responsibility to make her feel special for who she was and most importantly to make her feel safe and secure and loved in a world that demanded that she choose an identity. In that regard, Walker's memoir reads like any other story of a child that wasn't loved enough and wasn't made to feel special enough by the people that mattered the most. Well Walker is a rather intelligent woman and given that this is her formal introduction into the literary world, she can only grow from here. But something tells me that eventually (and maybe already) she is going to regret having written and published this book. Maybe regret is a strong word here, but she will have to come to grips with how superficial and narcissistic here treatment is. Or at least she is going to want to give it another try and this time without the rose tinted glasses.

As a final note, I would like to say that it is only natural that Rebecca Walker would think that so much of what shaped her as a human being came to down to her unique racial identity rather than whether she felt loved or wanted or all of the other feelings that healthy children should have. I imagine people harped on her ethinicity constantly because that it he kind of thing people focos on: the strange and exotic. Ask anyone who is of bi-racial or bi-cultural lineage and you will be regaled with how tired they get of explaining how they could grow up normal in spite of having a Catholic mother and Muslim father or whatever the provactive mixture may be. The sad commentary that this book leaves the reader with is that Rebecca was never made to feel unique for anything she did as a child (and perhaps since) so she is still harping on the only thing that seems to make her stand out-her race. But she is more than her race, a lesson that she seems to try to communicate she has learned, but this reader is not so certain.

Rating:
Summary: Black, White, and Jewish
Review: I love Rebecca Walker's style. Her personality shines through her writing. She tells the story of her life and I think a lot of her experiences ring true for many women of her generation. Though her life was very different from mine, I did navigate similar terrain in my adolescence (and pre-adolescence). She also includes the experiences of the people around her. She captures a piece of America, of which many young women will find a familiar aspect. It was courageous of her to be so honest about many taboo subjects. Sometimes she is bold in approaching subjects, and other times she is subtle (leaving us to use our own insight), such as her approach to sexual orientation and the fluidity with which women are now being honest about and seeking.

It is very important and educational to write/talk about the experience of being biracial. I think a lot of people don't realize how complicated it can be for someone who is caught "in between", and often not fully accepted by either side (or not recognized for who they are). Education about racism that is experienced on a daily basis (and not acknowledged) is one of the best and only tools we have to motivate people to be aware and to help work towards a more united and open world. People will listen to someone like Rebecca because she has confidence, a powerful message, and personal experience.

Rebecca had a lot of wonderful opportunities in her life, and I enjoyed reading about it. In addition there were aspects of her life that left her longing for support, and understanding. I feel she did a fabulous job expressing the complexity of these two aspects of her life growing up. She writes as if she were sitting and talking with you (from the perspective of the age she is describing). She is a real person and she is present in her writing.

By the end of the book Rebecca had pulled me into her world and mind. What I saw is an incredible, insightful, intelligent, interesting and motivated woman.

Rating:
Summary: phony balony
Review: Besides being self-consciously, but poorly, written I thought this writer was disingenuous. She begins the book talking about how poor her memory is and goes on to recall every detail of her life, down to what people said and wore. While she does not idealize her mother she also does not comment on the remarkable neglect she suffered at her hands, and furthermore does not acknowledge how important were the only two women who seemed to have cared for her, her paternal grandmother and stepmother. I realize that coming from a mixed background does not make things easy for a person, however, this writer does not make clear what her particular problem was. Her drug use and promiscuity seemed to be in large part due to the lack of involvement of her mother, and her 'poor me' attitude more to do with her character than her circumstances. And then the surprise at the end - the coy way she tells us she is a lesbian - just one more unexplained event.

Rating:
Summary: She should be embarrassed
Review: A child of privilege, Rebecca Walker falls into all the traps of those she criticizes -- and she just doesn't get that she's doing it, despite the Yale education. Ten years from now, or whenever she grows up, Rebecca Walker will wish she'd never published this book. While I was reading it, I felt that I was being set up by the famous Alice Walker, who apparently wants to get back at her ex-husband Mel Leventhal by getting their child Rebecca to the top of the bestseller list, and who has apparently encouraged their daughter to bare all the anti-Mel family secrets that she can recall. Despite Rebecca's attempts to make her mom look good, it's pretty obvious throughout this autobiography that Alice Walker neglected her daughter Rebecca in favor of becoming a famous author. That's understandable, perhaps, but what's NOT understandable is why Rebecca the rejected daughter clings to her mother and appears to hate her father so thoroughly, when he's the only family member who seemed to care enough to give her his time, his love, and his resources. A psychologist should analyze this book -- it's a gold mine. Is it worth reading? Maybe, if you have a teenage daughter whom you are neglecting and you are wondering what she's doing when she's not in your eyesight -- or perhaps if you are a famous author who wants to hurt your ex-spouse by getting your child to vent all that anger publicly. Is Rebecca Walker "a leader of her generation"? Let's hope not, unless irresponsibility, racism, anti-Semitism, and rejection of those who care about you are leadership characteristics that we want to encourage.

Rating:
Summary: Puerile Kvetching...
Review: ... This is an easy read because there isn't much to it! Rebecca Walker's book plays the same monotonous teen sex and drug scenes over and over,different chapter, different city. In "Black, White and Jewish" Rebecca Walker hints at her attraction to her female friends and one prepubescent lesbian sexual experience but she never gets to how she went from all of her "hetero" exploits to her current lesbian status...