The history of Jews in the United States is one of racial change that
provides useful insights on race in America. Prevailing
classifications have sometimes assigned Jews to the white race and at
other times have created an off-white racial designation for them.
Those changes in racial assignment have shaped the ways American Jews
of different eras have constructed their ethnoracial identities.
Brodkin illustrates these changes through an analysis of her own
family's multi-generational experience. She shows how Jews experience
a kind of double vision that comes from racial middleness: on the one
hand, marginality with regard to whiteness; on the other, whiteness
and belonging with regard to blackness.
