Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self

by Rebecca Walker

When Mel Leventhal married Alice Walker during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, his mother declared him dead and sat shiva for him. By the time her parents divorced, when Rebecca was eight, the excitement of the milieu that had brought her parents together and produced a "Movement baby" had died down and the foundation that gave her life meaning dropped out from under her. After their divorce, Rebecca alternated homes every two years, living in Mississippi, Brooklyn, San Francisco, the Bronx, and suburban New York. With each new place came a new identity and desperate attempts to fit in: as white or black, as Puerto Rican or Jewish, as a party girl, a fighter, or a lover. Confused, and mostly alone, Rebecca Walker turned to sex, drugs, books, and complicated alliances. Black, White, and Jewish, her much-anticipated memoir, is the story of a child's unique struggle for identity and home when nothing in her world tells her who she is or where she belongs.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Jewish, Biography, Race, Biography Memoir, African American

288 pages, Hardcover

First published December 28, 2000

Reviews

[Danika · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Black, White & Jewish while I was in high school. It was one of the single most important autobiographies I read during that period. At the time, I felt like the only mixed kid on the block and was going through severe identity issues. Black, White & Jewish has one simple message: you are the architect of your own identity.

I'm not sure how much I agree with that statement now, but it is a cornerstone of the way I reflect upon myself and how I choose to live.

[Laura Norton-Cruz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Provides (beautifully narrated) insight into:
-why girls use sex to get attention and affection and fill painful little gaps in their lives
-some challenges that mixed race youth may face
-what happens to children of neglectful, in attentive parents
-the effects on youth of parents who do not embrace all of their identities and attempt to impose identities on them

[Scottsdale Public Library]

I heard of Rebecca Walker’s writing while reading an article about another individual, so I became interested in her work. It wasn’t until I was a quarter of a way into "Black, White & Jewish" that I realized she’s the daughter of famed African American writer Alice Walker. But her work definitely stands on its own, both in style and candor.

Her biography focuses on her upbringing, in which she was shuttled among family in Mississippi, San Francisco, the Bronx, and Washington DC after her mom and her Jewish father Mel Leventhal divorced. In each new setting, she felt a need to redefine herself in order to fit in, and she longed for each side to recognize her as family. She comments on her identity struggle at a time when attitudes in America toward interracial relationships shifted from acceptance during the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King Jr. to suspicion during the rise of Black Power. At one point, she wondered if her great-grandparents on each side would have fully claimed and embraced her.

Her story is also one in which she longed to establish her identity as a writer, especially in the shadow of her celebrated mother. When asked over and over if she’s proud of her mother, she eventually wants to ask in return, “Isn’t she supposed to be proud of me?”

A quick, interesting, and well-written biography. – Sara Z.

[Amy Keyishian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ech, I don't know what to think. I'm not so naive as to expect novelist Alice Walker to be a perfect person, but her daughter's tale of being left alone as an early teenager for days and even weeks at a time, eating fast food and schtupping for comfort, made me want to tear my hair out. On the other hand, there were amazing benefits to her upbringing -- an amazing private high school, jobs and internships that were surely easier for her to access given her mom's reputation -- that she comes off as a little ungrateful, as well.

I want to like her, but she keeps making it difficult for me. She never quite gives herself to her story; her style of writing is episodic, minimalist, and she picks up little pieces of story, blurts them out without preamble or followup, and then moves on to the next subject. She storms out of her father's home, choosing to live with her mother. But given the benefit of years, how does she feel about it now? Does she have more sympathy for him and for the stepmother who was clearly dear to her at certain points -- or is she still estranged? She talks about an obsessive relationship with a boyfriend in high school, describing how they flew between LA and SF every weekend, and then just drops the thread -- after declaring that her teachers saved her life that year, I'm left wondering: what did they do? Did the boyfriend get schmucky?

The woman needs an editor who can stand up to her! My sense is that she wrote this book and said "publish it as is, dammit. I won't have my voice compromised," and because her mom is Alice Walker, someone did. And she seems entirely blind to this possibility.

I'm set to read her next memoir, about motherhood, and friends already tell me I'll run up against the same problems. Ah well. At least this one was full of San Francisco scenes I found familiar and fun to read.

[Kathryn in FL · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this story when it was published in 2002. Though, I can't address this in the format of a "proper" book review (my memory 17 years later is a tad foggy), this was a very insightful story that has continued to resonate with me. The challenges Rebecca shares as a biracial individual is vivid and heart wrenching.

The book starts out much as the publisher's introductory blurb. "The Civil Rights movement brought author Alice Walker and lawyer Mel Leventhal together, and in 1969 their daughter, Rebecca, was born." Their relationship terminated when Rebecca was approx. 5 years old (though I don't recall exactly). Her father moved back East and her mother remained in CA. According to their agreement, Rebecca floated back and forth 6 months of 12 with each parent. Their demeanor and lifestyles were very different. Her mother treating her more as a contemporary or ignoring her presence. Meanwhile, her father parented her with structure (meals at a certain time, bedtime etc.) so he was much more involved in her daily life. He remarried and her stepmother was very loving. Though they tried very hard as parents, she felt they ignored her biracial heritage and even made insensitive remarks about her black ancestry. It seemed as though this added to her confusion about her identity and place in society. Eventually, her mother didn't even want her around and Rebecca spent much of her teens with her father. This reject was deeply painful (obviously, who wouldn't feel abandoned!).

Likewise, Rebecca feels this magnified in her general life, an overwhelming sense of not fitting in. She feels rejected by her black peers but never truly connects with her white friends either.

I have a friend in a similar situation. As I shared the thoughts expressed by Ms. Walker, my friend very much identified with these challenges. She shared things that she hadn't expressed before and it opened the door for new understanding on my part and a connection with her pain, that I wasn't unaware of until then. More recently, I met a friend, who had a child with a Jewish rabbi, with whom she had a daughter, she was excited for an opportunity to talk with her daughter once she gained insight from Ms. Walker's experiences.

Obviously, this book provides an opportunity to connect and understand the challenges faced by person's defined as biracial. I have watched my documentaries on this topic both in the U.S., Australia, UK, Ireland, S. Africa, Vietnam, India and other regions of the world. Although, it seems that their is a greater sensitivity toward people impacted by this "stamp" on their heritage, it is one that we would all do well to respect and embrace with much more compassion.

It wasn't that long ago, that even people from one European culture refused to interact with those from another European culture. If you weren't a "guinea", you stayed away. Likewise, Micks stayed away from the English! If you were were Polish, you were a dumb Polack. And so forth, gradually those epithets were only spoken behind closed doors and then that even was not done around certain family members. Hopefully, distinctions based on melanin, nose and eye shape will become a celebrated point of interest instead of reason for discord or attack.

Frankly, I think at the very least, it should be recommended reading in high school.

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting…this was not nearly as much about being “Black White and Jewish” as being parented by parents lacking parenting skills. I wanted to shake the begeezes out of both her mother and father for the ridiculous set up of living in New York (or its suburbs) for two years then San Francisco and then back again. That’s just poor, no common sense parenting from two intelligent people.

The amount of sex Rebecca engaged in, especially in middle school, horrified me. It’s just plain scary because I doubt the situation has improved immensely! It makes me scared to send my 8th grader to school—or actually to let her go any where besides structured classes like ballet or sports practices! Piano lessons are good, too! I’m actually not that much older than Rebecca Walker and don’t recall hearing about that much sex happening (I don’t know why??).

I would have liked to have had her focus on the Jewish, black and white aspects of her upbringing and compare and contrast them. It doesn’t seem like we’d really know she was Jewish except for the title. It could have been Black White and Episcopalian. The memoir was interesting, but I could have skipped some (a lot) of the sex and learned about the culture a bit more.

The book probably deserves a higher rating from me than I gave because I'm just kind of ticked at her parents for not stepping up!


Money seemed to be more 'lacking' than I expected. SOme how, I would have thought Alice Walker would have had a little cottage somewhere, not an apartment? I wish I had more of a timeline of when Alice Walker's books came out in relation to Rebecca's childhood.

[Doris Jean · Rating 1 out of 5]

A sad angry book.? I think it was cold and sad and poorly written because of suppressed anger, maybe? The author's subtitle was accurate, it was "Autobiography of a Shifting Self" and the book was ungrounded and skipped around on many levels. Time shifted from present to past without any guidance for the reader to become oriented. It was a shifting book - in many ways. The main feeling of the book was the shifting and the instability and hatred of her parents that the author felt as a child of divorce shifting between two very different politically ambitious but uncaring parents.

The father was a lawyer and a secular jew and there was no feeling of any religion from either parent. There was no Judaism in this book, just peripheral mentions. The father seemed unreal and ghost-like. Rebecca did not keep his name. The father remarried, and the new wife, Rebecca's stepmother seems to have sincerely tried to mother her, but Rebecca seems to have not given her any chance and seems to have completely rejected her and the father's side of the family. I think Rebecca resented her father, but I don't know why, except that both her parents had blind, cold ambition dedicated to their political activism and that Rebecca was not important to either parent as their child.

Parental activism and their focus on race seemed to be their only religion. The author, as well, did not seem to relate to any higher power and on every single page she mentioned race at least once. This was unpleasant. Rebecca's implied victimhood stained the book and gave it a repulsive undertone. I cannot understand how some people are able to focus so intensely on things they cannot control. It's a recipe for frustration. This made me dislike Rebecca. Rebecca did have many opportunities to make a good life for herself apart from the parental failings, but she seemed to lack the concept of gratitude. She did not seem to have any ideals or goals, only suppressed negative feelings.

The author made me feel sad because she seemed to be completely unanchored and floating without standards and without values and without religion. Her parents were social activists and were from very different cultures and they both seem to have been very obsessed with race, as was Rebecca. Maybe their marriage was only for political reasons?? Maybe Rebecca was created to be used as a tool of their politics?? I don't know. There seemed to me to be a coldness of all personal relations throughout the book. Cold ambition. Politics. There was lack of warmth and a lack of attachment between these three.

Rebecca seemed to be a cold child and later, a cold adult. She tells of one of her past good friends who as an adult looked up Rebecca and knocked on her door. Rebecca waited inside, ignored the knocking and did not acknowledge the friend - without any reason. The friend returned many times and Rebecca hid and just let her knock and knock, until one day the friend saw Rebecca looking at her from the window and realized that she was being intentionally ignored, so then the friend stopped coming to her apartment. I wonder why Rebecca acted this way? This also made me dislike Rebecca.

Rebecca's mother wanted to be a poet and writer. Rebecca seems to have been secondary to the lives of both of her parents. It seems to me that they gave her no discipline, no guidance, no ideals, no morals, and just let her do as she wanted. Her mother often left her to live alone in the home by herself while the mother lived in her retreat so that the mother could pursue her all-important writing without the distraction of a daughter. Rebecca began sex at an early age and by age thirteen had experienced birth control and abortions and drugs and anything else that came along.

Rebecca flipped back and forth between her father's life in New York City and her mother's life in San Francisco and she seems to be deeply resentful of her unimportance as their daughter. Even though both of her parents were "successful", they seemed to me to be despiccable as people, and incompetent as parents. Rebecca was just as cold and unlikeable. So I did not like this fractured inadequate family and so I did not like this book. I found nothing redemptive in it. I did finish the book, but as I read, I felt sadder and sadder; so for me this unhappy book was not worth reading.

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everybody has a childhood issue that has to be dealt with during adulthood. Walker's birth symbolized the ideal of blacks and whites (and Jewish in this case) embracing in a segregated America at the height of the civil rights movement. Alas, dreams are usually much sweeter than reality, which Walker makes abundantly clear. After her parents' divorce when Walker was just a few years old, she was shuffled between them for two years at a time. It is this tension, between the permissive parenting of her famous mother, which might border on neglect, and the more conventional and stable family life provided by her equally famous father, that the memoir highlights. Walker skillfully includes anecdotes of this period to help her readers understand and maybe even appreciate her status as a resident outsider. I found the writing a bit academic but still accessible. It's informative for a public that knows little to nothing about racial politics in America. My only criticism is that it didn't teach me anything new.

[Catherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the beginning of this book less than I'd hoped to, and the end much more than the beginning led me to believe I would. Confusing, perhaps.

After reading Walker's Baby Love, and the record of her relationship with her mother falling apart so spectacularly, I wanted to read the book that was - for Alice - a large part of the cause. In the end, the Alice here is not the dragon I had expected to read about. She's withdrawn and self-controlled and there are glimpses of her depression, but she seems cold only when provoked by outsiders who are racist jerks. I wonder if what Alice objected to was the lack of meaningful talk about her work - a work that, in Rebecca's autobiography, is simply 'out there', being done, requiring book tours from time to time; not something explored or necessarily valued. But then I'm not sure that any child necessarily would understand what writer is, was, and can be?

The beginning of the book is so painfully self conscious about its literary worth that it was hard to gain traction with the story for the beautifully - painfully - careful construction of every phrase. There's a large gap between that prose and the childhood Rebecca describes, a dissonance I couldn't quite bridge. By the end of the book, the language matches the person described, and I felt more comfortable, invited in, sympathetic. Whether that was simply a result of feeling at home with the book, or the style, or the new subjects introduced, I can't exactly say. But the end is definitely worth the rest of the read.

I wish there'd been more analysis, more stepping back, more adult Rebecca present in the early chapters where she looked back on her life. I wanted her to tell her what Judaism really meant in her family, how her family honored being black, and there are glimpses of this, but nothing long and engaging. Again, this may be a question of me analyzing the book she didn't write rather than the one she did - especially as the end is avowedly analytical. I'm glad I read this, but feel left with no more real understanding of Rebecca's experience of being black, white, and Jewish than when I began.

[Chaz · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ekkkk- this memoir was a required reading for my graduate social diversity class and was a complete failure and waste of time. Since the majority of reviews have been female --here's my take as a male--stay far away!

O.K book -- for coming of age adolescent girl. I found it to be a overly melodramatic, perfumed exposition of a upper-middle-class brat who pities herself while boasting about her numerous sexual relationships and experiences from the age of 12 on.

To read a page and a half about her first blow job seemed inappropriate and if you want to read about a detailed sexual experience -- pick up a Penthouse... at least in that rag the language will be mellifluous and cinematic.

[Su · Rating 2 out of 5]

On the back cover this work is the promise that its inner contents are an exploration on identity when you are the child of a Black mother and White-Jewish father in the still deeply-segregated 1970s South, and how that affects your life for the rest of your life. At first glance that may seem...trite? Tired? Preachy?  Admittedly, this genre of memoir often can be. But one of the first excerpts I'd read was Walker writing "I am not tragic," and I was certain this memoir would not be (Walker, 24). Critics assured that Walker’s attempt to define herself as “a soul and not a symbol” was a welcome and fresh approach to this topic, so I was sure it would be.

I was wrong though, and overly gullible for believing so. Upon finishing the title I also found myself totally disappointed - as were Walker's parents when interviewed by various sources. Her parents are former civil rights lawyer Melvyn Leventhal and award-winning novelist, play-write, poet, and activist Alice Walker. Why would her parents be disappointed? Well, rather than the exploration identity through the lens of race, ethnicity, religion and environment that Walker promises to take readers throughout this memoir, Rebecca Walker details how her life with mother and father was at first jovial and then at the sudden divorce of her parents when she was 8 became an utter nightmare. She confidently claims her parents' marriage was little more than a fun try at interracial happiness and peace but once it wasn't just fun or cool anymore her father simply left her and her mother and returned to the peace and stability of his White-Jewish community. She also states matter-of-factly that her mother, having been betrayed by spouse, was therefore betrayed by Whiteness as well and as consequence couldn't fully accept Rebecca as her own anymore. While readers may not necessarily fault Walker for feeling or believing this to be the case, and certainly she didn’t have to get her parents’ permission or input on her own memoir either – I, personally, believe that she does readers a great disservice by presenting her feelings and beliefs regarding her parents’ split and their differing approaches at parenting as absolute truth and fact.

Walker doesn't question any of her beliefs or statements at all, although there is never any evidence that her version is, in fact, the only version. Rather, Walker’s richly detailed and sporadic accounts of past events instead highlight how many holes there are in her knowledge of what was going on around her and how utterly self-absorbed she was during those events and at the time of chronicling them for her memoir. She fails to ever see beyond herself or to even accurately look at herself. Nowhere in the memoir does she take the time to assess how her own actions and bias towards others may have affected their actions and beliefs regarding herself. This is troubling in a memoir, as Mary Karr writer in her work, The Art of Memoir, “the secret” to writing memoir effectively is “the writer’s finding a tractor beam of inner truth about psychological conflicts to shine the way” (Karr, 36). In Black, White, and Jewish, however, that light to shine the way is absent and “truth” is presented as absolute but feels discomfortingly subjective.

Much of this issue is due, I believe, to the fact that Walker writes almost exclusively in the Voice of Innocence until the end of the memoir. There is no meaningful reflection or inquiry, just detailed, cinematic rehashing of past events. The extreme rose-colored-glasses telling of the good events and the very dark-and-dreary of more painful events also makes it hard for the reader to believe that these events really happened as she claims they did. Nothing in her voice, shaky and uncertain of anything other than her parents couldn’t have loved her much or they would have stayed together, does not lend itself to credibility. As Sue Silvermann explains in Fearlesss Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir, the narrating voice of your memoir must be “both you and not you. [An] artistically created ‘you’” that does not simply put experience on the page but also makes sense of that experience and gives it life via an articulated thread that runs through the entirety of the memoir. Walker, though, neglects to meet this standard and instead writes haphazardly – she writes as pure purging. Furthermore, there is no clear structure or theme that this memoir is really about. Because it most certainly is not about her experience as a Black, White, Biracial, or Jewish person. She only ever mentions that other people would look at her and proclaim, “you must be this,” and she would refute it or accept it and that was that. There is no real mention of Judiasm at all other than to say her father was Jewish. Religiously? Ethnically? Both? We, as readers, have no idea. Nor do we have any idea why that actually matters to Walker or how she thinks it impacts her at all. These themes are virtually absent outside of discussion that her parents experimented, in her opinion, with an interracial relationship, created her, and then divorced and renounced the other half.

I want to say the structure – the framework through which Walker builds her story upon – is the utter lack of parenting she believes she experienced growing up and how that ruined her entire life. However, I feel that it’s not really fair to give her that, because even when she talks about her parents she doesn’t actually talk about them. Walker fails to bring to life either individual on the page or to even really give them space on the page at all. They are faceless and practically nameless throughout her memoir. If I did not already know who her parents were before reading this memoir, I would have had to constantly go back and search for the names of her parents and descriptions of them as well as their relationships to other poorly identified relatives Walker claims had an impact on her life, but neglects to tell us how. I don’t believe that memoirs need to be told in a chronological fashion, but perhaps in Walker’s it would have made more sense as the only thing that ties anything together in her work is her steadfast belief that she was broken and confused and self-destructive her entire life because her interracial parents got divorced. In my opinion that is simply not enough.

This was a difficult read to get through for me. Because she is so good at bringing to life the visuals and sensations of the past, but so totally unwilling to take any responsibility for herself or her own actions or to acknowledge that others may have had their own, complicated reasons for theirs. This is a point that I find very important in life in general, and she doesn't just drop the ball but throws it away completely. Did she undergo any transformation? Maybe? In the end, her voice becomes a little clearer and a little stronger and Walker claims she is at peace with herself finally, but as the reader I didn't buy it. She was still blaming her parents for everything, and quite often she was still simply running away from her problems both in an emotional and physical sense.  

I believe it was an important book for her to write for herself, to get it off her chest. But I also believe she pretty much published diary excerpts, not a fully realized memoir, and certainly not a memoir that was fair to anyone, including herself.

[Vonetta · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the best memoir I have read since "The Glass Castle" or "The Liar's Club." I would beg to know why "Black White and Jewish" is not as popular a memoir as the previous two, but I already know the answer: the title is contentious and scary, so people stay away from it. And they should not, because this was a joy! Walker, like her mother, has a way with language that is so poetic, and her imagery is essentially photographic. I will admit that the dialogue not being in quotation marks threw me off at first (and I normally hate when authors don't use quotation marks), but that just challenged me to pay attention. She definitely made it easy to tell who was speaking when, so that was never a question. I loved the progression of her voice as she aged, something that I'm attempting to do in my own memoir, and it's proving rather difficult. Also, I was telling my husband this morning that I love how she included so many other people; you can learn a lot about someone by looking at who they associate with, and she told her story even more beautifully through all of the people who came in and out of her life. So glad I read this!

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have no sympathy for Rebecca Walker. She manipulates the system, embraces the different pieces of her identity when it serves her to do so, dismisses and trash talks them when they're not going to work to her benefit. Ugh.

[Deacon Tom (Feeling Better) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brave

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The Oscar clearly lays out her emotions, feelings, and pains of being in two minority groups.

In some ways it’s a coming of age story, but others it embraces the challenge in a polarized world.

I recommend.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

The focus of this important memoir is to convey the fullness of Walker’s experience as a bi-racial female from childhood to adolescence. The memoir stands as testament to the social construction of gender and race. (The sociologist in me loves this.) Walker must assume distinct dialects, body language postures, and pop cultural tastes depending on whether she is in San Francisco with her mother, the African-American acclaimed author, or in Jewish suburban towns of New York with her father, a civil rights attorney. The real question of the book seems to be: what is the tension between the truth of personal identity and the human sense of belonging in the various racial and socio-economic landscapes of this country?

The memoir is written primarily in present tense, which gives it a meditative and impressionistic quality. By beginning the memoir saying how her memory is not as complete as she likes, Walker sets up the reader’s expectations for a more fragmented, kaleidoscopic narrative. Time mostly follows the chronology of an autobiography, her memories from childhood through college. But toward the end, the reader becomes aware of Walker’s present-day moment from which she writes the memoir. She is an adult now, co-parenting a child with her love, and teaching. On occasion, Walker does jump back and forth in time within one chapter or from one chapter to another within a section. Sometimes this provides a timeless quality to the narrative. At other times, I was a little bit confused because it was difficult for me to follow a flashback within a present-tense moment without going into past tense.

A theme Walker develops that I appreciate is the impact her identity had on her sexuality, or perhaps, vice versa. Her physical encounters with men and women, the intimacy both sexual and psychic in a variety of contexts were, in fact, anchors. I identify with the idea that when membership to a pre-determined identity or community seems elusive and slippery, it is the private and personal encounters, often wordless, that can provide temporary relief from an unmoored life.

Her worlds are in many ways, worlds that I know or recognize. For me, it was Jewish youth group and Hebrew School through tenth grade. While she writes little about Yale, I feel a sense of kinship and can imagine her trying to navigate the dining hall in Commons and the parties at the Af-Am house or La Casa. I also know that my first sense of membership to a community of color was with the other scholarship students at my private high school in Riverdale (where Walker also lived): girls from Co-op City, or Harlem, or Morningside Heights before it was gentrified. There were only two other Asians in my class, so it was the “black crowd” that I hung with, learning the wop, listening to Al B Sure and the Jungle Brothers, and swapping stories about how sometimes people slowed their speech and o-ver-en-un-ci-a-ted when they spoke to us.

I wonder how Walker sees those experiences today. I am interested to know if the feelings and issues of the memoir still resonate or if now they have assumed a different shape in her life. But the answers to those questions do not necessarily fit the scope of this work. They are my own curiosities.

This memoir’s purpose was to fully represent the experience of mixed identity with all its complexities – especially to those who have the luxury of a seemingly seamless identity. Walker certainly accomplishes this. I am so grateful she wrote it and memorialized that particular experience, given that the world continues, sadly, to privilege a different narrative.

[Alisha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’d say Walker is a better essayist than storyteller. Not to say her storytelling wasn’t good... it was engrossing while reading it, but by the end I realized I didn’t remember much. Maybe the overwhelming number of side characters/friends is what made the stories grow less and less memorable as the book went on.

However, her reflections on what it means to be a “movement child” split halfway between two worlds struck me more poignantly than any of her tales of drugs, sex, and temporary friendship. I dog-eared a lot of pages, so it was certainly a worthwhile read.

[Alli Hearne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the very interesting memoir of Rebecca Walker, daughter of famous author Alice Walker who married a Jewish man in the 1960s. The heart of the book is about identity - Rebecca feeling at once included and separate from any group she is around. Rebecca is a great writer and I enjoyed a glimpse into her world in this coming of age story. It’s especially timely to read now as the country is struggling with racism and antisemitism. Definitely worth a read.

[Super Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is fabulous. One of the few memoirs that accurately gives the reader an idea of what the Bay Areaa was like before the dotcoms and staggering wealth appeared, irrevocably altering the landscape of the real Bay Area forever. It is interesting that so many readers who are uncomfortable with the author's explicit sexual recollections would have no issue buying a Katy Perry or Miley Cyrus record for their young child or themselves. Rebecca's book is not sanitized sexual memoirs as marketing, her book is about her formative experiences and the impact they had. For a lot of tweens and teens left alone by 20 something Me-Era parents, sexual experimentation and being at risk was a given regardless of what race you were. It was, and still stands as, the most sexually charged/open time in industrialised history. There were NO parental filters for children anywhere unless you lived in an ultra religious household. This is why so many of us in Rebecca's generation who had artistic parents are now hands on parents, parents later in life or not parents at all. We know first hand that if there is no stability then parenting should not be attempted. We saw marriages become volatile, fall apart and then stability, residence, familiar faces vanish overnight. The fact that the author is able express her sexuality (and even drug use) with all the negative and positive implications is huge. Female artists of colour are often marginalized for having sexual appetites, experiences and interests. They are seen as "confused victims" to make liberals comfortable and deemed "uncivilised" to make conservatives feel smug. Due to her singular ability to see herself honestly and not defer to white OR liberal supremacy, Rebecca eclipses both of these requirements by scholars of the academic industrial complex. Thus this book has a special place in the pantheon of racial studies that is only going to grow more impressive with time.

Unsavoury/explicit details seem fine to many readers here when set in Victorian England or Paris in the 1930s but the 70's/80's of the Bay Area described in vivid detail does not carry the same snob appeal. Thi is where the book gets real. Rebecca takes us back there to go shoplifting at Stonestown or talk to the Hunter's Point corner pusher. And while there is anger and bewilderment there also is little to no bitterness. In many ways the book is surprisingly light hearted. There are a lot of funny moments ("you've got the crackers..." which refers to her male relatives who tease her about being 'well spoken') along with some very scary ones such as when she is slipped psychedelic drugs or when an errant friend vanishes after defaulting on a drug loan.

Another aspect which was surprising was the shifting nature of being the child of an well known artist. They may have their boutique 'issues' but they always have 'a name' to fall back on and 'pave their way', right? Wrong. This book dramatically changes one's perception in that regard. Book sales were not especially lucrative and did not create a safe place for Rebecca, they simply created a career path for her mother first and foremost. In a sad paradoxical twist of second wave feminism, the freedom of a career and the need to build ones fame into "the mold" leads Alice Walker to marginalize another female- in this case her own young daughter. In regards to how Alice Walker and her ex-husband's parenting is portrayed, knowing the era and that kind of parenting first hand, I thought Rebecca Walker actually held a lot back.

The historian Martin Duberman once wrote:

"We have become too aware of how reductive the standard identity categories of gender, class, race and ethnicity are when trying to capture the actual complexities of a given personality...Besides, many people have overlapping identities that compete for attention over time; and how we rank their importance in shaping our personalities can shift, which in turn leads to a re-allocation of political energies."

It applies to this book, she sees herself this way- unique and shifting. Rebecca is a very intelligent person who sees through all sides of the hypocrisy in liberalism, feminism, Gay rights...she has had a very honest non privileged life which has shaped her world view. Walker offers solutions and intelligent alternate observations in this work about how to navigate life if you present as "other". Do read this book!

*Trivia: The near blind and unnamed racist N bomb dropping father of Rebecca's teenage boyfriend and who is referred to anonymously, is, clearly to me, Shel Tamy who produced The Kinks early works and The Who's first album, later fleecing the latter for millions.

[Edith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rebecca Walker relates growing up with a Black mother, writer Alice Walker of "The Color Purple", and White father, Melvyn Levanthal, a New York Jewish civil rights lawyer. The marriage ended in divorce early on and Rebecca ended up being shared between the NY and LA homes of her parents without a lot of supervision since both parents were full tilt into their careers. She ended up essentially raising herself and suffered from neglect, getting into sexual relationships and drugs early on due to a lack of attention from her parents, especially her mother. This caused a serious rift in their relationship as Rebecca entered womanhood and she and her mother didn't speak for two years.

Alice Walker passes the buck on the mother-daughter issue by saying, "We had different expectations, I believe you mother everybody, not in a cloying, hovering way, but taking care of what is around you. We have suffered from building a country on the bones of the children of Indians. So true motherhood is accepting that everything needs to be cared for, not just your own child."

So Alice Walker feels qualified to be the mother of all the children of the world...but....couldn't find it in herself to address the personal needs of her own young child who craved the counsel and presence of a loving mother concerned about her well-being.....someone who was actually home and available.

"Words are opinion, not fact. Action is the only Truth." - Meditation by Marcus Aurelius

Ambition can subvert one's priorities and lead to huge mistakes. Case in point here.

[Sharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really difficult to rate this one because I really enjoyed the beginning, did not enjoy the middle, and then enjoyed some of the ending as well. I found the number of characters/friends very difficult to follow or care about. The descriptions of NY, both Brooklyn and camp, rang very true for me, and I really felt for the author who lived through an incredibly neglectful childhood. Kind of shocking to read about Alice Walker's lack of parenting skills or interest.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got far enough in this book to count it as read but I'm not going to finish this book. I see what she's doing, I get her point. I wanted to love this book but I could not. I will still try to read more from her but I just didn't get into this one.
I found it too chaotic which probably mirrored her life but still... dude.

[ilana · Rating 5 out of 5]

New favorite book??
Rebecca Walker put into words so many of the feelings I've had about being mixed, growing up in several cultures, not feeling perfectly fit in either one and therefore not feeling like you're enough. Her writing is so captivating, I was just so lost in her story so much of the time.

[SunnyD · Rating 1 out of 5]

where were her mama's people to tell her that this was not for publishing? eeek. really bad. she did not inherit alice's talents.

[Ima Omar · Rating 3 out of 5]

The beginning of the book gave a very detailed account of Rebecca Walker’s early childhood years with her family. After the first few chapters, she lost direction and veered off to her life as a coming of age young woman growing up. I do not feel that she touched a lot on the topic of how her mix race played a role in her growth as a woman finding her identity in a post-segregated world. The story was more of a coming of age, misadventures of a young woman exploring with drugs and sexuality -- with the race factor playing a minor back story to her memoir. I didn't think that Walker’s main troubles were those of her identity and race, but of a young woman being neglected by the lack of structure and parenting.

Rebecca gives in-depth accounts of her father, Melvyn R Leventhal, a civil rights lawyer and her mother Alice Walker, a renowned award-winning novelist and activist. I got a sense of pride, nostalgia, and an unfulfilled longing of the past from her.

Her early years seemed quite stable with both her parents still married and living under the same roof. She touched on the tense relationship between her Jewish grandmother Miriam and her mother Alice Walker. Their gazes and the discomfort when around each other, but never really acknowledging one another’s presence. Rebecca only lightly touched upon the unsettling relationship. She failed to acknowledge that the source of that tension might have been from their religious and racial divide. The reader is left to assume that her grandmother, Miriam, did not approve of her son’s relationship with a black woman. Walker spent very little time dissecting her family’s racial and cultural backgrounds.

Her parents later got divorced and her family dynamics changed. During that time, she was shipped from one state to another, satisfying her parent’s custodial agreements. She recalls spending a lot of isolated time as she was moving around from one parent to another. Though her parent’s lifestyles differed - one parent-led a bohemian life surrounded with artists, while the other was that of a normal upper-middle-class family -- they were similar in that they had a hands-off style of parenting.

Walker’s relationship with her blackness seemed a bit disingenuous and disconnected. A lot of her recollections were about her avoidance and denying her blackness. In one incident she did not want her mother to show up to her play because she did not want some of her peers to know she was black; she did not want to be seen as "just one of the black girls." I got the sense that she took pride in her “high yellow’’ status. There was also an air of pride and arrogance towards her “otherness.” She states that the other black girls never accepted her because they thought she felt better than everyone. On the other hand, the white kids never fully accepted her either. Just when she found her footing in white spaces, she was quickly reminded that she was still not white enough. Walker spent most of her early adolescence dodging the question of her race. A lot of her low self-esteem issues had to do with the fact that her mother never played an impactful role in instilling a strong sense of identity. She was somewhat left to her own devices to figure it all out.

Walker’s mothers' disinterest in playing an active part in Rebecca’s life came off rather frustrating. Her mother sent her away in the most important and formative years of her life. Rebecca’s stepmother has to then fulfill that role and teach her about womanhood. According to Walker, her mother seemed more interested in her career than being a full-time mother. Walker’s abortion at the age of fourteen still did not change Alice Walker’s parenting style. Both parents failed Walker in their own way. They were both too busy with their respective careers and personal lives, to pay attention to their daughter’s internal sufferings.

Overall, Walker’s memoir did an okay job in painting a picture of what life was like growing up as a black, white and Jewish woman. However, I found it hard to sympathize with her upbringing. Her unstable life is incomparable to the amount of privilege she had growing up as an upper-middle-class young woman. Many doors were open to her because of her parents. Her mother’s life and status gave her an upper hand on options and choices that others could only dream of. I found her memoir to be self-indulgent and self-absorbed. Her recollections seemed one-sided and biased. It left me as the reader to wonder if there were some other versions of the stories to tell. What would Alice Walker’s input be in some of these stories? Walkers’ memoir gave a sense of closure to neither I, the reader, nor Walker herself. There are still many questions that were left unanswered and incomplete.

[Audrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Readers who complain about Walker's focus on parenting are not giving the book a fair assessment. What is striking is the juxtaposition of switching between her separate lives, her seemingly disparate identities as black, white, and Jewish. Each chapter about her father is contrasted with her mother and the difficulty she finds in identifying herself in relation to the multiple claims she feels upon her identity. She comes to the conclusion that she "exist[s] somewhere between black and white ... I am flesh and blood, yes, but I am also ether. This, too, is how memory works."
The book is a fascinating coming of age tale as well. This is thought-provoking and powerful.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Black White & Jewish is a compilation of compulsively readable memoirs by Rebecca Walker, who happens to be Alice Walker's daughter. I call them "memoirs" rather than autobiography because the author makes many stylistic choices which, astute though they may be, definitely mar the chronological format. The chapters are also artistically brief, sometimes mere vignettes, divided once again by theme. This singular style, compounded with Walker's direct but moving prose, is what makes her story so easy to fall into.

As for the actual content... from reading other reviews, I've seen some complaints about too much sex and relationships. I may just be a hormonal teenager, but this didn't bother me at all. There are many parallels to be drawn between sexual and racial identity, and while the author could have drawn these parallels more clearly, her experiences are still relevent. That's another reason I put this book under the category of "memoir" and not "autobiography"; it is primarily emotive and does not attempt much of an intellectual or moral message. This may leave the reader feeling unsatisfied at the end, for we leave Walker's world as abruptly as we dive into it. Even during the story, the reader is sometimes left floundering, unsure of where we are in Walker's life, deprived of a deeper understanding of characters as importance as her own parents. Still, Rebecca Walker has a lot of interesting things to say about being a biracial person, and her voice cannot be easily forgotten.

[Ciara · Rating 4 out of 5]

rebecca walker is the only child of a white jewish father (a prestigious civil rights lawyer, though damned if i can remember his name) & a black mother (author alice walker, who wrote the color purple, possessing the secret of joy), etc. this is her memoir of growing up mixed race & trying to navigate the two different cultural worlds she inherited upon her parents' divorce. i don't know what to say about this book besides, "it was really, really good & you should read it." i mean, it was a really compelling memoir. i really liked rebecca as a narrator. the stories she told were varied (from the responsibility she felt to look out for her mom after the divorce to the typical teenage experimentations with drugs & sex) & interesting across the board. beyond the fact of trying to address the complications of being mixed race & having to interface with her mother's black family & her father's white jewish family & feeling like she never quite fit in anywhere, there was the added stress of having famous parents--especially parents that are famous in two different specific spheres, each of them pulling rebecca in certain ways to follow in their footsteps & embrace their value systems. i raced through this book & wanted more when i was done reading. i picked it up because it looked mildly intriguing, & it wound up being so much better than i expected. i'm so glad i found this book! now you go find it too.

[Zack · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quick, engaging read, Walker covers the terrain of her fascinating, if troubled childhood, split between multiple homes, schools and identities. Simultaneously, she paints a rich portrait of the different layers to American culture in the 1970s and 80s. As a child of divorce whose parents took two-year turns with her in different cities and then on separate coasts, she was often left to her own devices and had access to many different communities, of which she never felt quite a part. Walker has a great ear as a writer and a keen sensitivity to culture, gender and race, which together go a long way toward understanding not only herself but this country.

I have a guilty pleasure for memoirs, even if it's one I don't over-indulge. I may also have been partial to this title because of our shared mixed-race and part-Jewish backgrounds, and general political bent (Walker's a progressive and a prominent third-wave feminist). Indeed, while race and heritage are immensely important to Walker, she has never capitulated to what people, particularly from her respective backgrounds, have wanted her to be or expected of her. My own childhood was undoubtedly different, but it was interesting to see someone arrive at similar positions and utilize the same approaches to understand certain issues.

[erl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have conflicting feelings about this book. Walker's style is engaging, if blunt. But her story is not told chronologically, which makes it sometimes hard to follow. Her parents did not parent her-- neither of them. The person who seems to parent her most is her stepmother, whom she grows to detest. She was left on her own from the time she was in middle school. She never felt comfortable in her own skin, never felt she fit in anywhere she went. She only felt accepted when she was having sex. So she did, a lot. She doesn't explain why she finds her mother's neglect acceptable, but not her father's. Nor does she show any cognizance of the significance that it is her father, not her mother, who is Jewish. She mentions, for example, that her father's mother sat shiva because he married a black woman. But I suspect she sat shiva because he married a non-Jew, and that race wasn't a factor. Obviously it is a factor in so many areas of her life, but she seems woefully ignorant on just about all aspects of Jewish culture. This book left me feeling disappointed, and sad for Walker and the way she's had to bumble through life, fending for herself.

[Alice Heiserman · Rating 3 out of 5]

My granddaughter (who is black, white, and Jewish) and I are reading this as a book club of two. We both wondered what has happened to Rebecca in the twenty years since she wrote this book. Have the lines of acceptance of multi-racial children changed over the years--especially in the Jewish community? The answer is yes--some changes but there are still awkward encounters if not horrible ones and possibly more subtle discrimination. Bi-racial dating is trending, my granddaughter notes. Walker raised some valid issues on the color line and on the Jewish issues, but much of it seemed to be issues of class and not necessarily race or ethnicity--though that is how the issues she faced played out. How much of her feeling of alienation stemmed from the rift of shifting between parents' homes and cultures every two years--wrenching for anyone? Then, how much of her angst came from simply being a bright child and teen whose life moved from one of comfort with living with both parents to an irreparable division that no longer accommodated both sides of her? The book raised questions of acceptance and offered fertile grounds for our discussion, which will be continuing.