With its focus on oral history and the use of self-documentation of Jewish Italians in the 1930s and 1940s, Shira Klein's book showcases methodologies that tend to be under-represented in work on her topic. Her central argument is that the postwar myth of italiani brava gente was pervasive especially among Jewish emigrants from Italy, who established this persistent and politically influential narrative from the late 1930s. At the same time, and based on the canonical historiography of the last 20 years, Klein stresses the autochthonous character of Mussolini's antisemitism in Fascist Italy, reminding us that, with the German occupation of Italy from September 1943, ‘a total of 6806 Jews would be sent to killing centers in the east’ (p. 111), 837 of whom survived. Out of ‘4727 known cases, Italians arrested 1951 Jews (41 per cent), the Germans arrested 2444 (51 per cent), and Italians and Germans together arrested 332 (7 per cent)’ (p. 119). On the other hand, Klein points out that many Italians saved Jews: ‘Yad Vashem recognizes 610 Italians as “Righteous Among the Nations”, ranking Italy eighth out of 49 countries’ (p. 121).

The author establishes her hypothesis through documents from Jewish Italians in Italy and emigrants in Palestine and the United States, who had experienced and mostly supported Mussolini's Fascist regime but left the country after the promulgation of antisemitic racial laws from 1938. Notwithstanding their status as victims of Fascism and despite new perspectives afforded by distance, most emigrants remained loyal to the Italian patria. There are multiple reasons for the surprisingly positive image of Italy held by a majority of Jewish Italian refugees after their diaspora. As well as being an expression of their struggle to readjust to life abroad, whether to radical changes in everyday life (social status, poverty etc.), or simply to unfamiliar cultural habits (language, food etc.), the most important reason for defending Italy was the desire to protect family members back home. Even though the vast majority of emigrant Jewish Italians withdrew their support for Mussolini along with the United States when the latter declared war on the Axis powers in December 1941, the image of a beloved Italy remained a central aspect of their identity abroad. In turn, the development of the ‘good Italians’ narrative also seemed to have affected US policy, which – despite the war – treated the patria of Fascism with comparative tolerance (p. 140). This downplaying of Italy's Fascism, its antisemitism and war crimes in Abyssinia, Yugoslavia, Greece, and the like, foreshadows a phenomenon also found in postwar historiography, movies, and not least in the majority of public opinion in Italy and abroad.

Klein traces the origins of this Italian nostalgia back to a positive century of Jewish Italian history, from emancipation in the middle of the nineteenth century to Fascism (chapters 1–2). Thereafter, her work's temporal and quantitative core lies in the years 1938–1945, specifically in an exploration of antisemitism and its consequences in Fascist and German-occupied Italy (chapters 3–4). These developments in the country's history led to the emigration of more than 80 per cent of a total of approximately 48,000 Jewish Italians, mostly (but not exclusively) to the United States and Palestine (chapters 5–6). Nevertheless, a considerable number of Jewish Italian emigrants returned to Italy in what Klein describes as postwar ‘recovery and revival’, and this is another reason for the popularity of the myth of the good Italian (chapters 7–8). Regarding this specific temporal focus on the Second World War (and contrary to the promise of the book's title), Klein reminds the reader that her work ‘does not propose to be a comprehensive survey of modern Italian Jewish history’, but rather an analysis of ‘reactions to, and postwar narration of, the horrors of 1938–1945’ (p. 15).

Nevertheless, the merit of Shira Klein's work is the use of self-documentation of Italian Jews situated in three different countries, in the broad timeframe from the years prior to the First World War up to shortly after the Second World War. The combination of historical turning points interspersed with eyewitness accounts of everyday life adds up to a consistent corpus of valuable information on the history of Italian Jewry, presented in a very accessible writing style.

At the same time, the broad setting of this valuable source-based study invites some criticism, because the results of its research are already well known in the historiography of Italian Jewry. Regarding the focus on two dozen interviews the author carried out between 2009 and 2014, as well as the inclusion of five private family collections, the absence of Liliana Picciotto's Salvarsi. Gli ebrei d'Italia sfuggitti alla Shoah 1943–1945 (2017) from Klein's bibliography is surprising. Indeed Picciotto's work, the result of a project originated by the Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea (CDEC) in Milan, substantially and methodologically laid the foundations for research on Italian Jewry that emphasises the testimony of eyewitnesses, in this case those contemporary with Fascist and national-socialist antisemitism in Italy.

Despite these criticisms, it is beyond doubt that Klein's book will become a key reference of the historiographical canon on Jews in Fascist Italy and during their emigration. Her accessible and fruitful approach opens the field to a larger readership. This especially applies to the chapters in which Klein discusses the emigrants’ thoughts during the diaspora to the United States and Palestine. The examination of the destinies of these refugees, who were urged to leave everything behind and readjust, with its resonance in present-day events, marks out a valid research field with up-to-date relevance which has significant potential for further exploration.