How Jews Became White Folks and what that Says about Race in America

I would say this book is “important” more than I would say it is “good”. It's a seminal text in studies of Jewish ethnicity and racial assignment, but it's missing important information and is pretty dated at this point.

Firstly, as others have (correctly) noted, the book is almost solely about the Ashkenazi American experience, and does not acknowledge or discuss non-Ashkenazi culture. This is an enormous missed opportunity for several reasons; it fails to consider the cultural distinctiveness of other Jewish ethnic groups, which has major implications for the construction and assignment of identity.

Sephardic Jews from Western Europe (Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands) were among the earliest Jews to come to the US in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and many of them had an important roles in the building of the country. Brodkin also doesn't consider the fact that a not-insignificant number of non-Ashkenazi Jews (Sepharadim and others) very much do pass as white.

Brodkin likewise doesn't take American “Jews of colour” into account, whether these are ethnic Jews of non-Ashkenazi ancestry who are not white in appearance, or non-white American converts to Judaism. These people are also American Jews, and they play a role in Jews' construction of racial identity, and in the racial assignment of Jews.

Secondly, the book is now dated (it was first published in 1998, and one chapter was published in 1994). It's simply no longer current in terms of discourses around Jewishness and race/ethnicity, or discourses around race/ethnicity in general in the 2010s and 2020s.

While I wouldn't not recommend this book, it's best read in concert with/alongside other texts on Jewishness and race/ethnicity, particularly alongside David Schraub's paper “White Jews: An Intersectional Approach” (AJS Review, vol. 43, no. 2, 2019). Other recommended readings on this subject are listed here: Bibliography: readings on Jewish race/ethnicity, whiteness, and antisemitism

A third problem with this book is that it tries to be autoethnography, history, and historiography simultaneously, and doesn't excel at any of those – the personal elements of Brodkin's narrative are scant (but present enough to be noteworthy and to make the reader wonder how much this book is an attempt at self-exculpation), and the historiography is limited to a few criticisms of other, earlier writers' paternalism and racism (in the latter chapters). The history is relatively scholarly and well-researched, but the writing is unbelievably dry.