Jewish left-liberal intellectuals were the key theorists of ethnicity

Evidence

Jewish writers had been the key theorists of ethnicity since the 1920s: Among these were Horace Kallen, Walter Lippman, Max Lerner, Milton Gordon, and Nathan Glazer. Jews were very active in the civil rights movement, had longstanding associations with liberalism and the left, and were clearly unhappy with the tendency— evident in both the Puritan roots and Southern Baptist currents in mainstream American Protestantism —to see the United States as a “Christian nation.” They properly linked biologistic racism with Nazism and the Holocaust. So ethnicity theory’s repudiation of religious and biologistic forms of discrimination and exclusion, and its claim that ethnicity (including race) was but a cultural distinction, overlapped with anti-racist political movements. — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 46

Categorization

• XREF: Dovetails with the ADDENDUM on immodesty moral panics: intellectuals’ identity position shapes what ‘neutral’ theory they produce. — connects to: Jews uniquely led immigrant defense because they had intellectuals and wealthy elites — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 721