I want to know when and how Jews came to be seen as "white" by American society. I know this has been asked before here, but I'm unsatisfied by answers such as "ultimately they were accepted by other whites." There is clearly something more complicated going on here. If you asked anyone in my (Jewish) family if they are white, they would say yes, they are "white," as in, "not black, hispanic or asian." But they still have a strong sense of Jewish identity as distinct from mainstream white American culture. I often find myself in a situation where someone with a surname like Taylor or Thompson says I'm white, and I say, "Yeah, but not the way that you're white."
On the other hand, it seems Jews do observe some of the same race taboos in regards to blackness as do other whites. As an example, intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews is more acceptable these days, but between Jews and blacks, it would be far more controversial (at least among the older generation). This from the same group of people who understands that when conservative pundits talk about "the white race," they aren't talking about us.
This question has also been asked here about Italians and Irish, but there's the same problem. Most Italian and Irish Americans, even if they have been assimilated for generations, recognize themselves as white but still have a sense of their heritage as unique, whereas for the descendants of English, German, and Scots-Irish immigrants they self-describe as "white" and "American." It's like "whiteness" is a label that any upwardly mobile middle class ethnic group can claim, but "white culture" really only refers to English Americans, Scots-Irish Americans, German Americans, and may refer to Jews, Italians, Irish, Greeks, Armenians, etc as the situation demands.
So why do Jews self-identify as white, why do other whites recognize Jews as white, and does any of this have anything to do with ethnic identity or just class?
A while ago I read a book called "How Jews Became White Folks" by Karen Brodkin. I believe she's an anthropologist, but her basic premise was that when Jews immigrated to the U.S. in large numbers around the turn of the 20th century they (we) were not white. Then, in the post-war period, many Jewish families moved from Jewish neighborhoods in large cities to the suburbs, where they began to assimilate into white, middle-class culture while retaining some sense of otherness. But after a generation or two of that, a lot of the idea of Jews being racially distinct had dissipated. She also talks about Jewish racism towards African Americans as being part of the process of identifying with whites.