Dr. Joel Fetzer receives research fellowship to study effects of persecution on ethnic identity
By Bridget Graham Gungoren / Special to The Malibu Times
While many teachers were making summer plans at the end of the school year, Joel Fetzer, associate professor of political science at Pepperdine University, was preparing for his summer research project at Columbia University.
Fetzer has received a research fellowship from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History to study ethnic identity of German-American Jews and German-American Christians during the World War I era.
“I will look at the World War I era broadly to see what happens to ethnic identity when people are persecuted in some way,” Fetzer said.
His project, officially entitled “Repression, Violence and the Ethnic Identity of German-American Jews and Christians” will partly comprise of looking at archived letters throughout the month of July at the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Letters written by German-Americans being lynched during WWI can help give insight to identity with ethnic heritage.
“By sorting the letters we can find out what was really going on-what people identify with when they are attacked; it [persecution] accentuates attachments to identity,” Fetzer said.
For example, if a letter reads, “so bad here, want to go back to Germany,” it indicates an identity attachment to Germany. If a letter reads, “we want to offend as little as possible,” the writer is in more of an assimilation mode and identifies with America as home. Fetzer hopes to gain more insight into identification struggles as result of the study.
The professor teaches the immigrations politics and ethnic relations course, as well as other classes, including American people and politics. He moved to California in 1996, “during sort of an anti-Mexican campaign … and in response they waved Mexican flags,” he said. “They [Mexicans] said it was because they were proud of their heritage, their identity; this caused their identity to be accentuated.”
He said other groups can be studied as well. “We can go back and look at many other groups and see how persecution affected or affects them: Asians, Latin Americans and Muslims.
“After 9/11, the Muslim-Americans are in a similar situation. Maybe in 50 years we can come back and look to see what happened with their identity.”
Fetzer, who received an A.B. summa cum laude in government and English from Cornell University and his Ph.D. in political science from Yale, is the author of several journal articles and books, including “Muslims and the State in Britain, France, and Germany,” co-authored in 2004 with J. Christopher Sopher, dean of social science at Pepperdine. In 2000 Fetzer wrote “Public Attitudes Toward Immigration in the United States, France, and Germany.”
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History awards short-term fellowships to promote the study and “love” of American history. Of giving the grant to Fetzer, James Basker, president of the institute said, “This is an important study on the history of German-Americans during the World War I era … That it is exactly the kind of rigorous archival research we are eager to support.”