Marco Greenberg, a blogger for Haaretz, has titled his blog “This Hyphenated Life” and explained its raison d’etre to be a celebration of hyphenated identity. “My posts will be a vessel to share ideas, insights, experiences and the sheer fun of leading multiple lives,” he wrote. “It’s for fellow hyphenates who want to examine their dual existence/s—to celebrate them, not just to dwell in the existential and neurotic angst. After all, in this assimilated world, aren’t we all hybrids to one degree or another?” The recent PBS series The Jewish Americans wondered, “Are we American Jews, Americans without a hyphenated identity, or simply Jewish?” Dozens of other cultural commentators refer to the state of being both American and Jewish as having a “hyphenated identity.” Despite its unmistakable postmodern ring, the idea of a hyphenated existence first became popular in a much earlier historical era. And in contrast to its current celebratory application to ethnic and religious difference, the hyphen has not always had a positive connotation.

The hyphen began to function as both a marker and a metonym for a person with two cultures in the late 19th century. In a period of mass immigration of both Jews and non-Jews, some Americans valued the assimilation of newcomers and wanted to accomplish it as quickly and completely as possible. Groups and individuals who were slow to shed old identities and values in favor of new American ones began to experience the judgmental gaze of those who considered themselves true Americans. In 1899, The Washington Post declared, “Hyphenated Hybrids Impossible,” which, it went on to explain, meant that those with two cultures were undesirable. During the 1904 elections, some politicians and voters wished for the day when hyphenated “factions” and “contingents” would no longer rear their ugly heads.

By the turn of the 20th century the term had become common parlance, and as World War I captured the nation’s interest, concern about “the hyphenated” grew. In 1915, Theodore Roosevelt said, “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.… A hyphenated American is not an American at all.” After a 1915 speech in which Woodrow Wilson announced, “You can’t be an American if you think of yourselves in groups,” the Los Angeles Times wrote: “No vigorous American should hesitate to rebuke any busybody of the hyphenated type who opens his lips to voice any spirit but the American spirit.” Both Wilson and the newspaper extended the criticism of “hyphenates” to become an appeal to all “real” Americans to put those hyphenates in their place. In some cases, a general plea to make sure one’s own community’s loyalties were sufficiently American became a call to police others.

Even American Jews actively denounced the term and those who embodied it. “Hyphenated Americans are among my pet aversions as Americans,” one Boston rabbi declared in 1910. He asserted that if Jews in America insisted on calling themselves something, their first choice should be simply “Americans,” and as a second choice “Jewish Americans,” but not “American Jews.” The emphasis, he explained, should always be the term “American.” In making a similar point at the dedication of a New York synagogue, a local official made a similar point using exactly the opposite terms: Jews were not hyphens, he explained, because they supported the United States. Therefore, “there is the American Jew, but not the Jewish American.” In 1915, a Washington, D.C. rabbi declared from the pulpit: “[T]his hyphen, whether it be in print or implied in thought, is a political and moral contradiction. It throws out a danger signal.” He went on to emphasize that the hyphen he objected to indicated a divided national allegiance, and that the differing “bloods, traditions, and habits of thought”—what we might call cultures—were no hindrance to American loyalty. In the same year, The New York Times ran an article under the headline, “Jews Shun the Hyphen.” B’nai B’rith had voted to support a national Jewish congress only if it could “be created along lines that will not render its members subject to stigma as hyphenated citizens.” Jewish communities, vigilant in a time of conspicuous anti-Semitism—Leo Frank was convicted and then lynched in 1915 for a crime he did not commit—went to significant lengths to make sure that other Americans thought of Jews as unhyphenated and loyal.

Although sentiment against “hyphenates” was rarely directed primarily at Jews, they remained on their guard for several reasons. All along, the term “hyphen” had carried with it not only the insinuation of two incompatible cultures or sets of values, but also the idea of “dual loyalty” to two different nations. Especially in the years leading up to and during World War I, this latter valence of the term loomed large. Many Jews were concerned about being portrayed as “hyphenated” not only because they were Jewish but also if they voiced any support for an independent Jewish nation. The B’nai B’rith members who “shunned the hyphen” were primarily concerned with others identifying them with Zionism, an ideology seen by many to be at odds with patriotism in America. Furthermore, the group that was probably the most frequent target of “hyphenate” diatribes were Americans of German heritage—even though many of them were the second or third generation of their families to live in the United States. Large portions of most Jewish communities in America could trace their lineage back to Germany, and although groups of German Jews were not specifically targeted for “hyphenism,” they remained vigilant about maintaining a public image that actively distanced them from anything that could be seen as dual loyalty.

After the war ended and the federal legislation severely curtailed immigration, the hyphen fell from its place in popular and political lingo. During World War II, the term did not make a resurgence; in fact, the few who did mention the term declared that it was no longer applicable. When Louis Adamic, a famous immigrant writer and World War I veteran, praised “foreign groups” for helping the war effort, he exclaimed: “No Hyphens This Time!” Nor did the label gain any traction during the McCarthy era. Despite accusations of disloyalty directed at Japanese Americans during World War II and both real and imagined communists in the McCarthy era, critics did not make use of the hyphen as a symbol.

The word resurfaced only during the various movements to embrace ethnicity and ethnic cultures that gained momentum in the late 1960s and 1970s. In these contexts, however, the minority groups themselves, rather than mainstream detractors, were the main users of the term. Members of these groups, especially African Americans, used the hyphen not as a sign of dual national loyalty but as a sign of participation in two cultures. Since then, American Jews have been able think of themselves using the hyphen as a metaphor for embracing both Judaism and America.

Sotomayor’s hearings, on the other hand, suggest that although the hyphen has acquired new life as a positive metonym, its earlier meaning hasn’t disappeared entirely.

Sarah Imhoff is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago, where she works on gender and American Jewish history.

Benjamin Cardozo isn’t considered Hispanic because he didn’t come from Mexico, Central America, or the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, the three main immigrant sources feeding this country’s largest minority. Portugal doesn’t count, nor does Spain, since the Iberian Peninsula as a whole is seen popularly as the Evil Empire. Brazilians, too, are often excluded from being part of the Hispanic/Latino category because they speak Portuguese, not Spanish, although in Miami, among other places, exceptions are made in increasing fashion to make them feel part of the whole.

Needless to say, neither Hispanic nor Latino were terms in use in Justice Cardozo’s age, so he’s neither one nor the other. But the main problem, no doubt, is his religion: he was Jewish, e.g., not a Catholic, a distinction with a major difference in the Spanish-speaking community, which tends to conflate ethnic affiliation with the majoritarian faith. I say this as a Mexican Jew, the ultimate oxymoron.

Of course, in the age of Obama, categories like these are no longer what they seem—or shouldn’t be. Obama himself is a mulatto: his father was from Kenya, his mother was white. Among recalcitrant Blacks for whom slavery is the sine qua non of the African American experience, Obama is an outsider. All of which makes me wonder if Judge Sotomayor isn’t Jewish herself. After all, she grew up in the Puerto Rican diaspora, was educated among non-Hispanics, and likes the shifting game of identities.

Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. He is the author of Resurrecting Hebrew (Nextbook) and, forthcoming in September, the anthology Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing (Library of America).

Now there would be an illuminating witness at the Sotomayor hearing. Guinier was a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania when Clinton, at the start of his presidency, nominated her to be assistant attorney general for civil rights. The nomination was greeted by a front-page dispatch in the Forward, of which I was then editor, quoting articles she’d written arguing that civil-rights law required the election of minorities.

Quite a tumult followed that story, particularly after The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed piece under the headline “Quota Queen.” It resonated because the new administration was being tested in respect of first principles. Word soon went out from the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was headed by then-senator Joe Biden and included Senator Patrick Leahy, now the committee’s chair, that Guinier was too controversial. Clinton withdrew the nomination, saying he’d been reading her writings and found them troubling.

At the Forward, we’d been troubled by her writings, too, though we favored giving her a hearing. I often wondered what the professor would have said had the Senate had the decency to give her one. Then, in 2004, I sat down to review a collection of political essays by Hendrik Hertzberg, an editor at The New Yorker. The volume contained several pieces that touched on the Guinier affair, and it advanced one of the ideas that caused her so much trouble—proportional representation.

This is a system in which a winning party doesn’t take all. Instead a legislature is divvied up proportionally among parties. Proportional representation is in use in various parts of Europe and in Israel. It hasn’t won a lot of admirers here in America, though it was tried in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s. Its “main result,” I noted in a review of the Hertzberg collection, had been the admission of a communist faction onto the City Council. When proportional representation was repealed in New York in the late 1940s, the original New York Sun called it the communists’ worst defeat since they took over the American Labor Party.

Hertzberg promptly sent me a note expressing doubt that the elevation of the communists had been the main result of proportional representation in New York. “My impression,” Hertzberg wrote, “is that its results also included representation for other political minorities.” He mentioned, among others, Republicans. Hertzberg’s note, I wrote in a rejoinder, “caused me to sit up a bit straighter in my chair and stroke my chin, smiling at the thought of proportional representation as a way to elevate more Republicans to a City Council that is dominated by the left.”

Eventually I received an email from Guinier herself. My review had mentioned that the American Labor Party had followed up on the era of proportional representation by running Ewart Guinier, Lani Guinier’s father, for borough president of Manhattan. Lani Guinier wrote to tell me that proportional representation was not something she had discussed with her father, who had died in 1990 after a long bout with Alzheimer’s. In fact, she had not started writing about it until her father was well along in the disease.

Her interest in proportional representation, she wrote, was an outgrowth “of my concerns, after litigating cases in the South, that the single member districting strategy was not fulfilling its promise.” She said that when she became an academic, she “returned to explore further the questions that had haunted me from my litigating days. I also recalled learning about forms of PR in my corporations course at Yale Law School (since it is the way many corporations elect their board of directors).” She said that proportional representation had once been called by the head of the Citizens Union, Henry Stern—no leftist—the “golden age” of the City Council.

So one day I traveled to Cambridge and called on Guinier in her office at the law school. I was eager to ask her, among other things, about Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s campaign for non-partisan elections. I didn’t share the mayor’s annoyance with parties, and The New York Sun, now revived under my editorship, campaigned against his scheme, which the voters defeated. But I was troubled that the Republicans had been for so long been unable to gain but a toehold in the New York City Council, not to mention the State Assembly in Albany.

Guinier’s replies to me were off the record, but I don’t think it would be a violation of the ground rules to say that she struck me as not only exceptionally gracious but also extremely smart. I subsequently wrote a column in the Sun reprising all this and suggesting that Bloomberg invite her to lunch as he considered the next approach to charter revision in the city. And I invited Henry Stern of the Citizen’s Union to write a piece endorsing the possibility of proportional representation as a route to reform in the city.

Which leads me back to Sotomayor. She has just been overruled by the Supreme Court in the case of the New Haven firefighters, and we may be at the end of the era of affirmative action of the kind New Haven was using. But that doesn’t mean that the problems of racial bigotry—and other forms of exclusion—have been solved in our society. Not even conservatives like myself believe that. Guinier herself was quoted in The New York Times the other day as saying that the debate over Sotomayor’s nomination was, as the Times characterized it, “an opportunity for civil rights advocates to push back against the kind of criticism that had thwarted her own nomination.” I, for one, would be in a mood to hear what she has to say.