PERILS OF THE PROMISED LAND

How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America. By Karen Brodkin. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1999. xi + 272 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $48.00 (cloth); $18.00 (paper).

Roger Waldinger
UCLA

American Jews oscillate between kvelling and kvetching—or so it would seem to this cynical, if not totally unsympathetic, observer. Now would seem the time for kvelling. After all, America has been good for the Jews…and how. One hundred and twenty years after the advent of the great migration from the Pale, American Jews have clearly arrived, having made it with a vengeance. Forty Jews sit in Congress, eight with six-year Senate terms. The professoriate of America's most elite universities is disproportionately Jewish, as are the presidents of the same Ivy League universities that tried to exclude Jewish students just two generations ago. Of the 400 richest Americans, 23 percent are Jewish. And if the typical Jew lives a far more modest life, the average is still pretty good—about twice the income enjoyed by non-Jews. Surprisingly, all this success has not inflamed the goyim [Gentiles], grandfather's anxieties notwithstanding, as anti-Semitism has dropped to its lowest ebb ever.