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The Construction of Jewish Identity and Black Identity in Anna Deavere Smiths Fires in the Mirror
By Jordan Ealey
American literature is constantly evolving in its depictions of race, racial identity, and race
relations. Anna Deavere Smiths play Fires in the Mirror deals with race relations in an innovative
and unique way. Through conducting a series of interviews with public figures from both the Black
and Jewish communities and documenting and dramatizing those experiences, Smith creates a
distinctive snapshot of members of two different racial groups. I will provide an examination of the
juxtaposition of the construction of both Jewish identity and Black identity as it is found in this play.
In Fires in the Mirror, Anna Deavere Smith panders to existing stereotypes about Jewish identity
while painting a multidimensional portrait of Black identity.
Fires in the Mirror is a 1992 play by Anna Deavere Smith that dramatizes interviews that
Smith had with different individuals following the 1991 Crown Heights riots. In her introduction to
this edition, Smith writes that she was interested in experimenting with language and its relationship
to character. (xxiii) This introduction displays Smiths fascination with the ways that she can
manipulate language to evoke the emotions that she wants audiences and readers alike to feel. This
play began in the 1980s as a series of interviews to find character in the way that people speak.
(xxiii) Fires in the Mirror features prominent figures such as Ntosake Shange, Reverend Al Sharpton,
Angela Davis, Aaron M. Bernstein, Rivkah Siegal, and many more characters. Smith uses the distinct
voices of twenty-eight individuals and divides the play into seven sections: Identity, Mirrors,
Hair, Race, Rhythm, Seven Verses, and Crown Heights, Brooklyn, August 1991.
The Crown Heights riots, the incident at the core of the play, began when a procession
carrying the Lubavitcher rebbe, which is a spiritual leader in the Jewish community, ran a light and
hit Gavin Cato, a young African-American boy. (Smith xIiii) Cato eventually died from his injuries.

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This inciting incident led black community members in Brooklyn to stab Yankel Rosenbaum and
react with violence against other members of the Jewish community as well as against police. Smith
writes:
The conflict reflected long-standing tensions within Crown Heights between Lubavitchers
and Blacks, as well as the pain, oppression, and discrimination these groups have experienced
outside their own communities. Members of the Crown Heights Black communityface
discrimination both on the basis of their color and their national origin. And the Lubavitchers
members of an Orthodox Jewish sect that fled the Nazi genocide of Jews in Europe during
World War IIare particularly vulnerable to anti-Jewish stereotyping(xIiii)
What this portrays is the oppression that both racial groups face in the world. The fact that these two
groups, culturally opposite though both marginalized in similar ways, experience conflict is one of
the ways that makes this a complex and multidimensional piece of literature. The nuance of the racial
tension coupled with the ways that each group blames the other for racism lends itself to the proper
conditions for examining the depiction of race relations.
Ntosake Shange, a renowned playwright, is the first character that is introduced in the play.
Her monologue focuses on identity, which is an interesting way to begin the play. Ntosake declares:
I am part of my surroundings/and I become separate from them/and its being able to make
those differentiations clearly/that lets us have an identity/and whats inside our identity/is
everything thats ever happened to us. (The Desert11-16)
Already, Smith is setting the scene for there to be a focus on identity and the aspect of identity that
happens to be the most important in Fires in the Mirror is that of race.

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The section, Identity, also features two other monologues: Static by Anonymous
Lubavitcher Woman and 101 Dalmatians by George C. Wolfe. These two monologues
explicitly set up some differing feelings and also similarities concerning racial identities. The
Lubavitcher woman presents a snapshot of her life where Shabbas is occurring and her baby
turns on the stereo which creates a conflict for her because she cannot use electricity in any way
during Shabbas. After she invites a young black man into her home to ask him to help her turn
her stereo off, she says, and we laughed that he probably thought/And people say Jewish
people are really smart and they/dont know/how to turn off their radios. (Static 76-79)
The construction of Jewish identity is wrought with complexities. Douglas R. Golden,
T.A. Niles, and Michael L. Hecht, in their essay Jewish American Identity, write that
..identity, often seen as an enduring trait, also possesses a dynamic quality. The Lubavitcher
womans monologue provides a small snapshot of a race relation. The Lubavitcher woman
cannot just simply say that a young man helped her; she must qualify that it was a young, black
man who helped her. As Anna Deavere Smith claims in the introduction to the Crown Heights
riots that Jews felt that black anti-Semitism was one of the driving forces behind the riots, we
already see a bit of tension just in the way that the Lubavitcher woman perceives the young
black man who helps her.
Cultural conflicts occur when Smith begins to depict the individuals involved in the
Crown Heights riots. This cultural contested zone can be seen in Fires in the Mirror,
particularly in the monologues that discuss the Crown Heights riots. Rabbi Joseph Spielmans
monologue is centered on describing the inciting incident (the event in which Gavin Cato was
initially murdered). Spielman discusses the hard time that Jewish people went through, even at
times completely accusing the Black people of adding fuel to the writer. He refers to the black
people as Afro Americans, an outdated term that would not have been acceptable to use in

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the late 1980s and 1990s. This view of blacks being the ultimate antagonists of this situation is
contested through another monologue of this section of the play, that of Anonymous Man #1.
He says:
I know our words dont have no meanin/as black people in Crown Heights/You realize,
man/aint no justice/aint never been no justice/aint never gonna be no justice. (Wa Wa
Wa 124-129)
Anonymous Man #1, who is Black, feels very threatened by members of the Jewish community
and feels as if black people are being treated unfairly in this situation and through this
particular event. Therefore, the feeling of oppression and the discriminatory treatment is a
feeling that is expressed from both sides, though the feeling that the other is the one to blame
leads oppression to being a contested zone between Blacks and Jews in Fires in the Mirror.
Though Fires in the Mirror is a series of monologues, communication between the two ethnic
groups is a motif throughout the entire play. One of the essential aspects to remember in reading and
studying this play is that Smiths own judgement about how to characterize each character, what parts
of their interview are going to be used and what parts of their interviews are not going to be used is
an important way to which she is indirectly commenting on the situation. In Norman Rosenbaums
monologue, he primarily focuses on the lack of empathy that went into the senseless violence that
killed his brother. Rosenbaum cries, my brother was killed in the streets of Crown Heights/for no
other reason/than that he was a Jew! (My Brothers Blood 7-9) He also goes on to claim, When
my brother was stabbed four times/each and every American was stabbed four times (17-18) This
monologue is tugging on the conscience of the American psyche, indicting all of us for the murder of
this young man. Norman Rosenbaums cries of injustice are a reminder, in Smiths play, of the
prejudice that killed Yankel Rosenbaum and that the lack of sensitivity towards Yankel from the

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black community could possibly have been the catalyst of the crime in the first place. Had there been
some sort of shared sense of injustice between the two groups, Yankels death and even the ensuing
riots could have been prevented.
Racial perception plays a big role in Fires in the Mirror, particularly when it comes to its
performances. In her article, A One-Woman Riot: Brooklyn 1991 and Los Angeles 1992,
Jacqueline OConnor writes:
In both Fires and Twilight, Smith uses a solo performance structure to create a mosaic of
voices through which women of color are free to join other historically recognized and
recorded groupsin recording feelings about race riot violence and its consequence Her
striking and versatile talent combines compassion with craft, reproducing the voices with
loving accuracy; the characters reap the rhetorical benefits of a black female performer who
can dramatize a community in crisis while also revealing its strengths and its common goals.
(154-155)
Though one is capable of solely looking at the text and determining Smiths feelings about race, the
performative aspect of this play is an essential aspect of understanding its literary context. At a
rudimentary level, dramatic literature is written to be performed, making everything that playwrights
write essential because when onstage, every piece of dialogue must have a purpose versus other
forms of literature offer a little more room. OConnor additionally writes:
The specifics of speech and presence tie us to the incident, and thus do Smiths plays connect
history to dramaturgy, the real to its very own fictional representation, transforming the
painful words of hate and fear and destruction, through the power of performance, into words
that change us with change. (155-156)

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The power of language is essential in the documentary-style that Anna Deavere Smith creates with
Fires in the Mirror, as it leads one to comprehend her commentary on race and lead us to participate
in the conversation she is attempting to facilitate. Conversely, Smiths style can lead to a false
narrative that does not completely represent the complexities that come with the consequences of
racism. Debby Thompsons article Is Race A Trope?: Anna Deavere Smith and the Question of
Racial Performativity explores this concept rather heavily. Thompson claims, By approaching racial
identity as performative, Anna Deavere Smith can question the fact of race without discounting
racisms very real effects.(130) Smith can go in and out of different characters and their cultural
performance but in some ways, the addressing of racism can feel rather one-dimensional, particularly
when it comes to the Jewish characters. She unfortunately falls into stereotyping the Jewish
individuals rather than creating nuance.
What place does Fires in the Mirror have in conversations concerning literature? Smith has
demonstrated how important language is in constructing her dialogue concerning race. Sandra Adells
article, Writing About Race, offers up some fascinating insight surrounding the construction of race
in literature. Focusing on the viewpoints of several authors including Toni Morrison, Adells main
focus is the evolution of the depictions of race within and across literature. In addition to discussing
blackness, Adells article also brings in the ways in which Jews are written about in literature to
supplement her argument. By using theory from Frantz Fanon and Julia Kristeva, Adell is able to
draw a connection between Jewishness and blackness and their literary representations. One
conclusion that she is able to find is though both groups are oppressed based on parts of the culture,
white privilege protects Jews from this prejudice because they are able to hide that aspect of them
while the Negros blackness marks him with the triple responsibility for body, race and ancestry.
(561-562) Though Jews and blacks have a shared history of a similar oppression, the advantages that
Jews receive from ethnically being considered white protects them from more prejudice versus

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blacks who are not as lucky. In Fires in the Mirror, this particular idea does not play out as nicely.
Anna Deavere Smiths portrayal of both the races seems to be a shared idea of false perception
The representation of Jewish people in American literature has a distinct yet complex history.
Michael Kramer, in his article Acts of Assimilation: The Invention of Jewish American Literary
History, describes Jewishness as an angle of vision, an inflection, or, at its most attenuated and
mysterious, an attitude or feeling of marginality (578) Kramer also goes on to characterize
contemporary Jewish literature as containing an unembarrassed Jewishness. (579) In Fires in the
Mirror, Smith, though she is not Jewish, has a distinct way of capturing Jewishness while, in some
ways, not capturing it at all. There is an uneasiness in the way that the Jewish characters are written
which differs from the reality and authenticity that one may get from a reading of the Black
characters.
If we look back at Norman Rosenbaums monologue, the raw and poignant quality that the
monologue has is not highlighted by the fact that there is hardly any real sense of Kramers idea of
unembarrassed Jewishness, which is a willingness to display their culture rather than to hide it.
Instead, it is replaced by a crafted Jewishness, a Jewishness that does not feel completely authentic
due to the fact that many of the Jewish characters seem to be written in the same vein. In contrast, the
Black characters have a world of difference. For example, there is the Anonymous Man #1 who, from
context, seems to be someone who could be classified as a thug but then she also represents
intellectuals such as Reverend Al Sharpton and Angela Davis. In the Michael S. Miller monologue,
he expresses the same sentiments that the other Jewish characters express but this time, focuses
specifically on slurs and other forms of blatant anti-Semitism. Miller says, To hear in Crown
Heights/and Hitler was no lover of Blacks/ Heil Hitler/ Hitler didnt finish the job/ We should
heat up the ovens/From Blacks? (Heil Hitler 31-35) Miller is questioning how another minority
group could promote such hatred. The Jewish individuals, according to this play, seem to have a

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preoccupation with the treatment of Jewish people by Black people while the Black characters
explore many other different ways that racism plays out.
Shelley Fisher Fishkins article Interrogating Whiteness complicates the Jewish identity
especially in its representation in literature. In the 1990s, literary scholars, according to Fishkin,
began to ask the question, are Jews white? (436) Fishkin even quotes scholar, Sander Gilman as
saying:
Are Jews white? Or do they become white when they . . . acculturate into American society,
so identifying with the ideals of "American" life, with all its evocation of race, that they-at
least in their own mind's eye-become white? Does black-face make everyone who puts it on
white? (436)
Not only does this place us back into the context of communication with the use of the term of
acculturation, but it emphasizes the ambivalent place that Jews are in society. Because their struggles
are both ethnic and religious, it is difficult to be able to place all Jewish people into one box that fits
all of their ideals. While Fires in the Mirror does well with representing the Jewish community in a
sympathetic and non-negative fashion, she does not do much to authenticate or complicate their
representation.
Blackness holds a different place in American literature. Sandra Adell takes parts of Toni
Morrisons book Playing in the Dark and discusses how Morrison analyzes and constructs blackness.
According to Adell, Morrison emphasizes the importance of the imagination for the act of writing.
(Adell 568) She also discusses how Morrison somewhat contradicts this statement in insisting that
for American writers, there is no way to completely unbind themselves from racialized language and
writing, simply due to the large role that race plays in greater American societies. Essentially,
Morrisons way of writing blackness is an inherent form of being, something that cannot be

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completely taken out when writing. The 1990s also brought on interesting ideas concerning race in
literature, as identified in Shelley Fishkins article. Fishkin writes, The 1990s also brought a new
awareness of African-American influences on mainstream white American material cultureas
well as the idea of whiteness itself in the arts. (Fishkin 444) The idea is that often cultures define
themselves based on what they are not: white is white because it is not black.
The Black characters in Fires in the Mirror seem to achieve a certain level of authentic
blackness that may lead one to believe Smith may hold some biases in her writing due to her racial
identity as a black woman. The Anonymous Girl scene is about a young black girl looking in the
mirror and describing her journey of blackness while also making observations about whiteness,
some statements that are quite unexpected. She muses:
Black is beautiful/I dont know/Thats what I always say/I think White is beautiful too/But I
think Black is beautiful too. (Look in the Mirror 10-14)
This young black girl does not appear to be too deviant from the norms of societal expectations of
beauty because she acknowledges white beauty. However, her characterization provides nuance in
representation of blackness in literature because the Black girl is not only concerned about her own
racial identity but also identifies other aspects of other racial identities as well. This depiction by
Anna Deavere Smith is juxtaposed with the image of Angela Davis being completely engrossed in
discussing Black racial identity. While the Anonymous Girl can be played with a subdued and subtle
quality based on her word choice, specific stage directions from Smith such as (Increased volume,
speed, and energy) (Smith 28) display the way in which Smith expects actors to perform this
particular character as the militant, loud, and frustrated black woman adds a level to the dimensions
of blackness represented in Fires in the Mirror.

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With the black characters, there is also a greater representation of male and female characters
while there seems to be more of a focus on Jewish males when it comes to the Jewish representation
within the text. In examining the ways in which members of the different racial groups respond and
communicate their feelings about the Crown Heights riots as a contested zone, this places Fires in
the Mirror out of a tradition of portraying race relations in literature as whiteness affecting blackness.
Much of their grievances of the situations are placed on the Black community and the catalyst for the
riots was Black anger. Smith depicts whiteness, in terms of the Jewish community, as weakness and
inferiority as the Black people seem to be the ones that hold power, though that power is due to
violence. Smith depicts Black people in nuanced and complex ways, combatting the way that Black
people have traditionally been written. This depiction juxtaposed with the Jewish depiction opens up
a sort of ambivalence on the ways that Fires in the Mirror goes against the literary tradition.

WORKS CITED
Adell, Sandra. Writing About Race. American Literary History 6.3 (1994): 559-571. Web.
27 October 2015.
Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. Interrogating Whiteness, Complicating Blackness: Remapping
American Culture. American Quarterly 47.3 (1995): 428-466. Web. 27 October 2015.
Golden, Douglas R., Hecht, Michael L., Niles, T.A. Jewish American Identity. Readings in
Intercultural Communication: Experiences and Contexts. Ed. Lisa A. Flores, Judith N.
Martin, T.A. Niles. New York: McGraw Hill, 2002. 44-52. Print.
Kramer, Michael. Acts of Assimilation: The Invention of Jewish American Literary History.

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The Jewish Quarterly Review 103.4 (2003): 556-579. Web. 09 November 2015.
OConnor, Jacqueline. A One-Woman Riot: Brooklyn 1991 and Los Angeles 1992. Studies in
the Literary Imagination 40.2 (2007): 143-171. Web. 09 November 2015.
Smith, Anna Deavere. 101 Dalmatians. Fires in the Mirror. New York: Anchor, 1993. 9-12.
Print.
Smith, Anna Deavere. Heil Hitler. Fires in the Mirror. New York: Anchor, 1993. 85-87.
Print.
Smith, Anna Deavere. Look in the Mirror. Fires in the Mirror. New York: Anchor, 1993. 1618. Print.
Smith, Anna Deavere. My Brothers Blood. Fires in the Mirror. New York: Anchor, 1993.
94-96. Print.
Smith, Anna Deavere. Static. Fires in the Mirror. New York: Anchor, 1993. 5-8. Print.
Smith, Anna Deavere. The Desert. Fires in the Mirror. New York: Anchor, 1993. 3-4. Print.
Smith, Anna Deavere. Wa Wa Wa. Fires in the Mirror. New York: Anchor, 1993. 79-84.
Print.
Thompson, Debby. Is Race A Trope?: Anna Deavere Smith and the Question of Racial
Performativity. African-American Review 37.1 (2003): 127-128. Web. 20 October
2015.

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