Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World

Content Warning: This section discusses fascist ideology, genocide, antisemitism, and racism.

There is a type of doubling that occurs when racialized individuals are confused with each other on the basis of their skin, eye, or hair color. As a white woman, Klein previously believed herself to be immune to this kind of doubling, but when people begin to confuse her with Wolf, her mother suggests that people conflate them because they are both Jewish. Prejudice functions by conjuring up a racial or ethnic double that comes to signify and represent all people within a hated group. Klein suggests that the ethnic double for Jewish people is Shylock, the “moneylending mutilator in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, determined to get his pound of flesh” (294). The image of Shylock is used to justify antisemitic hatred when it supersedes all individual Jewish people and defines them by stereotypes that they cannot escape.

Klein has “smoothed out [her] ethnic edges” (297) to avoid being associated with her ethnic double. She grapples with this choice. Antisemitism is on the rise again in the West, although it never disappeared entirely. Klein traces the origins of modern antisemitism to the Christian Bible, where Jewish people are associated with Satan and cast as “the demonic doppelgangers of the faithful followers of Christ” (298).