How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America

How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America. By Karen Brodkin. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998. xiv, 243 pp. Cloth, $48.00, ISBN 08135-2589-6. Paper, $18.00, ISBN 0-81352590-X.)

How Jews, the majority of whom came to the United States after 1880 at the apex of scientific racism, understood their own racial identities is well worth the attention of a serious scholar willing to tackle primary material. How that understanding, shaped by the legacy they carried of being Europe's "other," changed over a century deserves a deeply researched, nuanced analysis. How Americans placed Jews into their racial imagination also needs study. Many Americans saw Jews as something other than "white" or "black," and Jews articulated the idea that they fit no existing category upon which American society was based....