Wood, MaryHatay, Molly2024-01-102024-01-10https://hdl.handle.net/1794/29224In this dissertation, I examine literary representations of Jewishness published between 1955 and 2021, after the perceived end of the transition of Jews into whiteness in the mid to late 1940s. Primary among these texts are Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar (1955), Jonathan Rosen’s Eve’s Apple (1997), and Melissia Broder’s Milk Fed (2021). In these texts, eating is figured as an important way that characters negotiate a conditional whiteness. To facilitate a more nuanced discussion about the racial formation of Jewish whiteness in the US, I explain the ways representations of eating and not eating in literature serve to reinforce the category of whiteness while simultaneously revealing the instability of Jewish whiteness. In addition, abstaining from particular foods and refusing to eat has implications for how eating and refusing food offer both the opportunity for individuals and communities to actively invest in ideologies of white supremacy that reinforce their inclusion in whiteness and to undermine that inclusion by revealing difference. Moreover, by examining food refusal, we can better understand the interplay of white hereopatriarchy and the pressure it places on Jews, particularly Jewish women. Thus, my dissertation explains how depictions of eating illustrate the ways that Jews are perceived as constantly on the verge of being full members of the category of whiteness. While Jewish communities have benefited from their inclusion in the category of whiteness, this inclusion is by no means stable or settled, and literature illustrates the ways Jewish communities and individuals continue to negotiate an ethnoracial identification and assignment that is continually in flux. Examining texts written between 1955 and 2021, this dissertation aims to examine the contemporary relationship between Jews and whiteness and its shifts to demonstrate how this unstable and every evolving relationship exists into the present.en-USAll Rights Reserved.Eating DisordersJewish ethoracialJewish whitenessRaceElectronic Thesis or Dissertation