72

Scoring weed for your uncle...Hanging out with porn stars on Christmas Eve...Eating nachos with the Mossad...Observing the Dyke Days of Awe...Getting held up at a Weight Watcher's meeting...Spying on your naked Hebrew School teacher. From Heeb magazine--the definitive voice of a proud, searching, and irreverent new generation of American Jews--this first-of-a-kind fast and fun showcase spotlights the hilarious and heartful raconteurial gifts of many of today's leading writers, comedians, actors, artists, and musicians. Laura Silverman, Michael Showalter, Andy Borowitz, Joel Stein, Ben Greenman, Darrin Strauss, and others navigate sex, drugs, work, youth, family, and, on the lighter side, body and soul. You'll never bleach your arm hair again.

The imbibing country clubbers were tooting their New Years Eve miniature horns, prematurely. An elderly man at the adjoining table is obviously choking on an under chewed piece of steak, Jason hollers, “can you talk?” The gasping man shakes his head, “no!” The Heimlich maneuver fails. Jason yanks the tablecloth and the dishes crash to the floor. He lifts the cyanotic, gasping man to the table with his head extended over the edge. He remembers Dr Heifer’s words “The most important thing to remember in performing a tracheotomy is to extend the neck and the trachea will project forward.” He grabs a steak knife, makes an incision into the wind pipe below the voice box and inserts a horn as a make shift tracheotomy tube. With each breath, the tooting horn improves the color of the man from blue to pink and ushers in the New Year.

It was a balmy early September evening in 1998. The event was the annual fund-raiser for the Missouri Delta Medical Center, and I was the guest of honor; to receive a meritorious service award and recognition for services performed as a surgeon for more than four decades, as well as my work in various community projects and promotions. This was the second annual fund-raising event sponsored by the Missouri Delta Medical Center Foundation. The first one, the year before, had paid tribute to Judge Marshall Craig, a distinguished circuit court jurist, a legal icon in our region, and an all-American basketball player at the University of Missouri during his college days. It was my privilege to introduce the out-of-town special guests in attendance that had come to honor Judge Craig. The president of the University of Missouri, Dr. George Russell, originally from Bertrand, Missouri, a small town just east of Sikeston, and the renowned coach of the University of Missouri Tigers basketball team for more than twenty-five years, Coach Norman Stewart, had traveled down from Columbia, Missouri, to help honor Judge Craig.

What has it meant to be Jewish in a nation preoccupied with the categories of black and white? The Price of Whiteness documents the uneasy place Jews have held in America's racial culture since the late nineteenth century. The book traces Jews' often tumultuous encounter with race from the 1870s through World War II, when they became vested as part of America's white mainstream and abandoned the practice of describing themselves in racial terms. American Jewish history is often told as a story of quick and successful adaptation, but Goldstein demonstrates how the process of identifying as white Americans was an ambivalent one, filled with hard choices and conflicting emotions for Jewish immigrants and their children. Jews enjoyed a much greater level of social inclusion than African Americans, but their membership in white America was frequently made contingent on their conformity to prevailing racial mores and on the eradication of their perceived racial distinctiveness. While Jews consistently sought acceptance as whites, their tendency to express their own group bonds through the language of "race" led to deep misgivings about what was required of them. Today, despite the great success Jews enjoy in the United States, they still struggle with the constraints of America's black-white dichotomy. The Price of Whiteness concludes that while Jews' status as white has opened many doors for them, it has also placed limits on their ability to assert themselves as a group apart.