Robert Ezra Park, the “father” of the Chicago race relations school, made the fatal mistake of conflating “race” and “nationality.” Park, of course, reflected the linguistic conventions at the turn of the twentieth century. For example, the forty-one-volume series published in 1911 by the Dillingham Commission spoke of the Negro race, the Chinese race, and the Japanese race, but it also spoke of the Irish race, the Italian race, and the Hebrew race. Thus, “race,” laced with Lamarckian assumptions, encompassed “nationality” and what in current parlance is called “ethnicity.” And when Park spun out his famous “race relations cycle,” predicting ultimate assimilation, he posited this as a universal process, with the caveat that in the case of Negroes, the assimilation process would be slower because of the deeper antipathies evoked by color difference.

The original sin of conflating race with ethnicity, and the concomitant failure to acknowledge the difference between colonized and immigrant minorities, have led to a conceptual muddle that has bedeviled the canon ever since. Victoria Hattam has fearlessly plunged into these convoluted waters, and her singular achievement is to shed light on the origins of “ethnicity.” She asks some fundamental questions: When and how did “ethnicity” emerge as a distinct construct, unhinged from race? How did “ethnicity” come to enjoy canonical status in the social sciences? And what were the political consequences of this lexical division between “race” and “ethnicity”? This last question is crucial because, as Hattam contends, politics were at the root of the bifurcation of race into “two distinct languages of difference.” Indeed, she notifies the reader that “the central argument of the book is that where race rhetoric goes, race politics follow” (p. 2, original emphasis).

In her excavation of the origins of “ethnicity” as word and construct, Hattam turns up an unexpected finding: that early twentieth-century Zionists played a decisive role in constructing “ethnicity” and introducing the term into the lexicon of social science. This is not entirely surprising since European Jews had long imagined themselves to be a nation in exile. Thus, Zionism provided a paradigm that allowed Jews—and by extension, other minorities—to make sense of their situation, and to claim all the rights of citizenship without forgoing their religious and ethnic distinctiveness. In a manner of speaking, Zionists were the first to claim the hijab as a political right!

The period between 1914 and 1921, which coincided with the Americanization movement, was the high point of American Zionism. Louis Brandeis and other Jewish leaders and intellectuals, steeped in Zionist thought, championed a brand of anti-assimilationist nationalism. Of course, this was not an exclusively Jewish impulse. As Hattam points out, W.E.B. Du Bois advanced a similar position with regard to blacks, and other leading intellectuals—including Randolph Bourne and John Dewey—were exponents of nascent forms of pluralism. To be sure, all ethnic groups (in varying degrees) sought to sustain difference and resist assimilation, but in the case of Jews, Zionism provided a logic and language for balancing rights of citizenship with a right of minorities to preserve their distinctive social systems.

The figure most identified with the transposition of Zionist precepts into U.S. discourse was Horace Kallen, the German-born Jew who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household, attended Harvard and Oxford, and became involved in the Zionist movement. In his famous 1915 essays on “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” Kallen reconceived American democracy, not as one that incorporated immigrants into a unified whole, but rather as “a commonwealth of nationalities” reflecting the “orchestration of mankind” (The Nation 100 [1915]). Critics have faulted Kallen for his silence on race, but Hattam shows that Kallen in fact devotes a good deal of attention to blacks, though as a counterpoint to ethnicity. The contrast between “race” and “ethnicity” thus implied a separation of biology and culture. As Hattam puts it, “race is repeatedly equated with heredity, fixity, homogeneity, and hierarchy, while ethnicity gets linked with culture, especially language and religion, which are seen as malleable, plural, and equalitarian” (p. 59).

Yet ethnicity was not just a matter of not being lumped with racial pariahs. According to Hattam, “for Kallen, ethnicity was not a stepping-stone on the way to whiteness” (p. 59). Rather, it represented “a third way,” a status between racial pariahdom and bland assimilation: ethnicity was a welcome diversity, to be honored and nurtured. Furthermore, Jews were the quintessential ethnics “precisely because they had no shared nationality to anchor their group together, yet they continued to cohere as a group” (p. 61).

Kallen was part of a circle of writers who wrote for the Menorah Journal, published by the Menorah Society that Kallen helped found as a student at Harvard. The thrust of their writing was to counter the Americanization Movement and its attack on hyphenated Americans. The Kallenites insisted that subnational identifications were not un-American: you could be both a Jew and an American. Indeed, for them the hallmark of American democracy was to permit and celebrate difference. Later scholars would go a step further and claim that plural identities were the life force of a healthy democracy.

Thus, cultural pluralism was born. The idea of the U.S. as “a nation of nations” entered sociology principally through the work of three scholars: Kallen, famous for coining “cultural pluralism”; Isaac Berkson, a forgotten scholar who published a path-breaking book under the title of Theories of Americanization (1920); and Julius Drachsler, a demographer who tracked Jewish population trends, including rates of intermarriage. Yet as Werner Sollors first pointed out, although these writers spoke freely of “ethnic groups,” “ethnic identity,” and “ethnic loyalty,” the noun “ethnicity” did not take root in the canon until the 1940s and 1950s. Hattam notes that this underscores the extent to which Jewish intellectuals “in the 1910s and 1920s were the early precursors to the more general shifts in American discourse in subsequent decades” (p. 46).

Indeed, as I show in Race Relations: A Critique (2007), the project of ethnic formation was further advanced by a second generation of Jewish sociologists—the intellectual heirs, if not the actual progeny, of those early Zionists. They entered the professoriate after World War II when Jews achieved prominence in the social sciences, particularly in the sub-discipline of racial and ethnic relations (note the bifurcation of race and ethnicity).

There are striking continuities between this first and second generation of Jewish sociologists. Just as the Menorah Journal, with its anchorage in religion, provided the medium for forging the discourse on ethnic pluralism, in this second generation, Commentary, a secular publication of the American Jewish Committee, provided a venue for the development of an intellectual discourse that wended its way into academic discourse as well. Nathan Glazer, the preeminent scholar of ethnicity during the postwar generation, forged his career as a Commentary intellectual before he crossed over into sociology. It was Glazer who resurrected the idea of cultural pluralism from obscurity in a 1953 article in Commentary under the title “America's Ethnic Pattern: ‘Melting Pot’ or ‘Nation of Nations.’” Glazer provided an updated version of Kallen's formulation, one that took into account the considerable extent to which Jews had assimilated into mainstream culture during the interim decades. Even so, Glazer held that ethnic groups in the U.S. existed as “ghost nations” built around ideologies of support of their home countries. In other words, all ethnics were Zionists of sorts.

With Oscar Handlin's help, in 1952, Commentary resurrected an obscure 1938 speech by Marcus Hansen that advanced the now famous thesis of “third-generation return,” postulating that “what the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember” (pp. 492–500). Clearly, the idea that the assimilation of their generation might lead to an ethnic resurgence in the next generation was appealing to Jewish intellectuals, given their own secularism and assimilation, mixed with nostalgia and lingering ethnic loyalties. Once again, Commentary served as the venue for the projection of this seminal idea into academic discourse.

If Glazer was a latter-day Kallen, the theoretician of ethnicity, then Milton Gordon, author of Assimilation in American Life, was an intellectual reincarnation of Isaac Berkson. Indeed, Gordon adopted Berkson's entire theoretical framework (with only minor attribution). And Theodore Drachsler had his rebirth in the work of Sidney Goldstein, the Brown University demographer who tracked Jewish population trends, including patterns of ethnic identification and intermarriage.

Thus, Hattam is right in her claim that Jewish intellectuals, with institutional support from the Jewish community, not only played an active role in the invention of ethnicity, but also laid the foundation for a second generation of Jewish social scientists. Both generations inflected their conceptions of ethnicity and their ethnic loyalties onto knowledge production. Indeed, the inception of ethnicity was largely a Jewish project.

In other chapters, Hattam traces the vicissitudes of racial and ethnic classification down to the present. One chapter explores official indecision over whether Mexicans were white; another, the racialization of Latinos with the 1977 Statistical Policy Directive No. 15 of the Office of Management and Budget. Still another chapter is devoted to Latinos in New York City politics and the failed attempt during mayoral elections to build a black-brown alliance. Hattam shows that this class-based racial coalition was subverted by blatant race-baiting screed, including denigrating cartoons, in the New York Post.

Hattam brings the reader on a somewhat dizzying ride, as she shifts abruptly from one focal point and one historical period to another. She is attentive both to the top-down inventions of race and ethnicity and to the ways in which race and ethnicity are reshaped “from below”—for example, by the 14,891,303 Latinos who checked “some other race” in the 2000 census. Her book is not a seamless whole, but it does provide a highly original analysis of the origins and permutations of ethnicity, especially as it emerged in reaction and opposition to the stigma of race (read: blackness). The ultimate irony is that, as we can now see with the benefit of hindsight, Kallen was wrong: ethnicity has served as a stepping stone on the way to whiteness, thus fulfilling Robert Park's prophecy. The preponderance of evidence suggests that even today's immigrants are assimilating along racial lines. The result is a dual melting pot, one consisting of peoples of African descent, including Afro-Latinos and immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa, and the other consisting of whites, light-skinned Latinos, and Asians. For all that has changed, we still exist as a nation in the shadow of race.