Haunting images: stereotypes of Jewishness among Russian Jewish immigrants in Germany

Glancing at the Jewish spaces in contemporary Germany, an occasional observer would probably be startled. Since the Russian Jewish migration of the 1990s, Germany's Jewish community has come to be the third-largest in Europe. Synagogues, Jewish community centres, and Jewish cultural events have burgeoned. There is even talk about a “Jewish renaissance” in Germany. However, many immigrants claim that the resurrection of Jewish life in Germany is “only a myth,” “an illusion.” This paper is part of a project exploring the processes of the reconstruction of Jewish identities and Jewish communal life by Russian Jewish immigrants in Germany. The focus of this paper is on the stereotypes of Jews and Jewishness evident in immigrants' perceptions and imaginings of their physical gathering spaces – the Jewish community centres (Gemeinden). Focusing on the images that haunt a particular place, I seek to shed light upon the difficulties of re/creating Jewish identity and life among the Russian Jewish immigrants in contemporary Germany.     

A Different Kind of Whiteness: Marking and Unmarking of Social Boundaries in the Construction of Hegemonic Ethnicity

This article proposes a new theoretical approach to the analysis of hegemonic ethnicity through an examination of the construction of white ethnicity among Ashkenazim (Jews of European origin) in Israel. Contrary to the theory of symbolic ethnicity, I argue that “Ashkenaziness” in Israel is not an optional, voluntary identity; rather, it is constituted by employing narratives that continually establish cultural, color‐based, and ethnic boundaries between Ashkenazim and Mizrahi Jews. In certain social and ideological circumstances, however, boundary marking is not enough to maintain a privileged status. From the narratives of Ashkenazi Jews—the Israeli version of whites—it emerges that not only do they demarcate social boundaries between themselves and other groups, thereby preserving the ethnic hierarchy, but they are constantly engaged in blurring or erasing these same boundaries, allowing Ashkenazim to remain a transparent, unmarked social category. This dual practice of marking and unmarking is a result of the tension between the Jewish‐Zionist and Western‐secular images of the state. While Israel's Jewish discourse supposedly negates intra‐Jewish ethnic conflicts, the Western ideal identifies Ashkenazim with the state, thus solidifying their power and preserving their privileged status.     

National Minority, National Mentality, and Communal Ethnicity: Changes in Ethnic Identity of Former Soviet Union Jewish Emigrants on the Israeli Kibbutz

In this paper we examine and compare the ethnic identity of the Jews in the former Soviet Union (FSU) and the process of change in ethnic identity among the new immigrants from the FSU. This analysis considers the role of the kibbutz as the first experience of Jewish community in their lives, as well as the location of the first phase of their process of absorption and resocialization into new and unfamiliar surroundings. The data are drawn through a longitudinal research design, with a pre‐ and post‐analysis of changes in the ethnicity of migrants studied from their arrival on the Israeli kibbutz until the completion of the five‐month kibbutz programme. We found that pre‐migration Soviet Jews defined their ethnicity as a discriminated national minority with a weak symbolic ethnicity content. The ambivalent nature of the ethnicity of Jews while in the FSU was expressed in the fact that although a majority were deculturized from traditional dimensions of Jewish life, they nevertheless felt they belonged to a specific ethnic group. Post‐migration ethnicity was found to be remarkably altered; the former ambivalence was dissolved. On the macro‐level, membership in the economically and politically successful Russian‐speaking group of Israeli society is a source of self esteem, rather than a sign of shameful otherness. On the micro‐level of ethnicity, the encounter in the initial phase of absorption in Israel, within the kibbutz Jewish community, often demands a re‐examination of their private concept of Jewishness, serving as a first step in resolving their ambivalent ethnic identity. Consequently, their new ethnic identity may now well have weaker boundaries, but a more positive (non‐alienating) content than that left behind.     

Jewish response to the non-Jewish question: “Where were the Jews during the fighting?” 1941–5

ABSTRACT

The war of the USSR against Nazi Germany led to an increase of negative expressions in regard to Jews. Often members of the Soviet population accused Jews of avoiding combat, of cowardice, and of an inherent incapacity to feel patriotic toward Russia. Such a view was an adaptation of prewar anti-Jewish prejudices to war-time conditions. Some Jews, both at the front and in the rear, viewed these expressions as a sign of the emergence of an ethnic inequality that did not exist in the prewar Soviet Union. Increased Jewish sensitivity to one aspect of the theme of equality (the idea that Jews were fighting as well and as bravely as members of other ethnic groups) inclined Soviet Jews to prefer the term and concept of “Soviet” rather than those of “Russian.” The former represented for them a state of all its ethnic groups, including the Jews, while the latter appeared to reflect a priority accorded to a single ethnic group, the Russians. Anti-Jewish attitudes in the Soviet rear and, to some extent, at the front as well, was one factor that led to the reinforcement of the Soviet Jewish identity.     

THE AMBIGUITIES OF EXTERNAL MINORITY PROTECTION

This article focuses on the special and prominent place that the “Jewish question” occupied in the general discussion about Russian modernisation in the pre‐1914 period, both in American society and in the arena of US–Russian relations. It analyses the role that anti‐Jewish violence in Russia had in effecting a dramatic shift in the way Americans viewed the Russian Empire, which was being depicted by the American Jews and the leaders of the crusade for a “Free Russia” as a barbarous oppressor of political dissent and a savage persecutor of religious, national, and ethnic minorities. American society’s reaction to anti‐Jewish violence in the Russian Empire at the turn of the twentieth century helped, on the one hand, to shape the idea of the American belief that the United States bore special responsibility for carrying out reforms in Russia, and, on the other hand, to place relations between the two countries within such binary oppositions as “light and darkness,” “civilization and barbarity,” “modernity and medievalism,” “democracy and authoritarianism,” “freedom and slavery,” “the West and the Orient.” The article uses a broad range of verbal and graphic sources from the American press and new sources from archival collections. These sources help to illustrate one of the author’s principal tenets which holds that the United States’ view of the foreign policy of the Russian Empire was a result of the Americans’ projection of their own vision of the nature of the US foreign policy. In their official and public discourses, Americans considered Russia’s foreign policy an extension of Russia’s political regime. This study examines US foreign policy as a vital sphere in which national identity is redefined and reaffirmed and gives an opportunity to draw attention to the cultural and ideological dimensions of Russian–American relations, to understand the origins of dualistic American myths about Russia that have proven so enduring, and to demonstrate how a demonised Russia serves to revitalise American nationalism and how the Russian “Other” was used, in part, to construct the American “Self.”     

Assimilation,Ethnic Competition,and Ethnic Identities of U.S.‐Born Persons of Mexican Origin

Processes governing the ethnic identification of second and later generations of Mexican immigrant descendants are explored empirically using the Latino National Political Survey, 1989–1990. With multinomial logit regressions, I test hypotheses based on three contrasting perspectives, namely, that ethnic identification, or identification other than “American,” arises directly from: a) cultural continuity and a lower level of assimilation; b) an experience of ethnic competition; and c) both processes. The results from the LNPS support the view that both processes are at work. For example, consistent with the presence of an assimilation process, the chance of “Mexican” identification (as opposed to “American” identification) declines to half in the third generation and to one tenth in the fourth and later generations, relative to the chance in the second generation. Consistent with the presence of an ethnic competition process, (perceived) experience of discrimination doubles the respondent's chance of “Mexican” identification. Also, a level rise in the darkness of skin color is associated with a 60 percent increase in the chance of Mexican identification.     

English‐Language Proficiency among Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs in the United States, 1980–2000

This study assesses the determinants of English‐language proficiency among three subgroups of Israeli immigrants in the United States, namely native‐born Israeli Jews, foreign‐born Israeli Jews, and Palestinian Arabs, and how these determinants have changed over time. Multivariate analyses of decennial censuses from 1980, 1990, and 2000 reveal substantial differences in the directions and significance of the relationships between the independent variables and English proficiency of the subgroups under investigation. Ethnoreligious affiliation per se is seen to be an important factor that consistently explains intra‐group variation in English proficiency. This lends support to the split approach over the lump approach in attempting to understand immigrants’ linguistic dynamics in the new country. The findings are discussed in reference to three working hypotheses – “exposure,” “efficiency,” and “economic incentives” – and in the specific sociopolitical conditions of Jews and Arabs at both origin and destination.     

Irregular Workers or Ethnic Kin? Post‐1990s Labour Migration from Bulgaria to Turkey

This paper addresses the invisibility of the post‐1990s irregular migration flows from Bulgaria to Turkey in the literature despite the increasingly significant number of such migrants. I suggest that this invisibility stems partially from a problem of classification that has to do with implicit suppositions about ethnicity and migration. The post‐1990s Turkish immigrants from Bulgaria are not specified in accounts of irregular migrant flows directed towards Turkey since they are assumed to belong to the category of ethnic “return” migrants: Because of their ethnic identity as Turkish, all Turkish migrants from Bulgaria tend to get considered as part of the intermittent “return” migration waves from Bulgaria, the most notable and well‐known of these being the fight of more than 300,000 Turks in 1989. However, while the ethnic affiliation of the post‐1990s migrants from Bulgaria renders them invisible as irregular migrants within scholarly migrant typologies, the same ethnic affiliation does not necessarily work to their advantage when it comes to their legal and social reception in Turkey. Based on ethnographic fieldwork that prioritizes micro‐level analysis from below, the paper demonstrates that the self designated ethnic affiliation of these migrants, counterpoised against their social marginalization as “the Bulgarian” domestics, heightens the paradoxes of belonging and affects migration strategies. The paper thus underscores the significance of ethnic affiliation as a factor that needs to be adequately taken into account in describing the present and in assessing the future of this particular migratory pattern.     

Beyond Guilt and Stigma: Changing Attitudes among Israeli Migrants in Canada

Over 60 years ago, the Jewish nationalist movement known as Zionism culminated in the creation of the State of Israel. Millions of Jews immigrated to Israel over the twentieth century, a process known as aliya (literally, “going up”). Yet over the years, thousands of Israelis have also chosen to leave Israel in a movement termed yerida (“going down”). As the term suggests, this reverse migration has been highly stigmatized. During the 1960s and 1970s, emigrants were publicly disparaged in the Israeli media for having abandoned a struggling state. Consequently, Israeli migrants suffered strong feelings of guilt that often, hampered their integration process abroad, a phenomenon observed as late as the 1990s. This paper, however, reveals that feelings of stigmatization have greatly decreased among Israeli migrants in recent years. The study is based on research that I conducted in 2008–2009, involving nine months of participant observation in Vancouver’s Israeli community and 34 in‐depth interviews. Unlike in previous studies, most of my informants expressed no feelings of guilt over having left Israel. Of those who did, most framed their guilt as a longing for family and friends rather than the patriotic longing for the land as expressed by previous generations. Previous studies have also found that Israelis harbour a “myth of return”– a continuously expressed desire to return to Israel and a reluctance to accept their stay abroad as permanent. However, I have not found that the myth of return is still strong today, despite the continued prevalence of a strong sense of Israeli identity among Israelis abroad. I suggest that these changing attitudes are the product of shifting ideals in Israeli society that have developed as the state of Israel has matured. This paper thus serves to update the outdated image of Israeli migrants as it exists in the prevailing literature.     

Global walls and global movement: new destinations in Jewish migration, 1918–1939

Research often argues or implies that the First World War suddenly discontinued the age of Jewish mass migration and led to increased sedentarism. Indeed, the former main destinations like the USA drastically cut down on the arrival of East European Jews. This did not, however, result in the end of Jewish mass migration. This article will demonstrate that it rather led to manifold attempts to circumvent the newly introduced and increasingly exclusive measures, to a rising complexity of transnational movement patterns, and finally to the emergence of new destinations and Jewish communities all over the globe. This movement, however, was overshadowed and impacted by the almost global rise of xenophobia and fascism. Based on local histories, statistical and legal sources, as well as reports and communications by delegates of Jewish relief organizations, this article presents a social history of the intersection between global Jewish migration and politically motivated migration management. It leaves behind the focus on “departure” and “arrival” in Jewish migration history and elaborates on the relevance and dynamics of transmigration, the dominance of migrant networks and the complex relationship between national policies and migrants' agency.     

Cyclops Cave

Written in the post‐structural traditions of symbolic interactionism, Cyclops Cave is a biographic‐interview‐based and fact‐and‐fiction‐plotted ethnodrama of anti‐Semitism in Soviet higher education. This project is premised on the theories of the “social self”—namely, the “looking‐glass racialized self,” constructed by the dominant ethnic “supremacy,” and the theories of racial stigma as an outcome of the racialized “me” production. Showing the stigma experiences of former Soviet Jewish academics from 1970 to the 1980s, the play adds a new illuminative and self‐interpretive case of a race‐situated symbolic interaction and deconstructs the “root image” of Soviet anti‐Semitism through interpreting the informants' stigma incidents and interactional conflicts between their “selfhood” symbols.     

Jewish power and powerlessness: Prague Zionists and the Paris Peace Conference

This article explores how perceptions of Jewish power shaped the negotiations between Czechoslovak leaders and Jewish minority representatives at the time of the Paris Peace Conference. In the aftermath of the First World War, Prague-based Zionists embarked on a mission to convince Czechoslovak elites that attacks on Jews were detrimental to the internal stability of the new state and to Czechoslovak interests abroad. As Edvard Bene?, the head of the Czechoslovak delegation in Paris, worked to cultivate an image of the new state as more “Western” and “civilised” than other successor states – a strategy meant to garner international support for Czechoslovak territorial demands and its projected absorption of large minority populations – Jewish activists encouraged his uncertainty with regard to Jews' influence on Western audiences and statesmen. They did so in order to convince him to accept their demands for special protection clauses for the new country's Jews. The paper thus shows that the unprecedented victimisation of Jews and the upsurge in antisemitism during and after the war coexisted with a new bold and public Jewish activism. Yet, Jewish leaders did not in the end have the ability to convince Bene? and his colleagues to give in to international Jewish demands for special protection. Instead, they sought to cultivate a strategic alliance between the state's Czech elite and the Jewish minority which centred on the claim that Czechoslovakia was a particularly welcoming and tolerant place for Jews, an image that would evolve into a significant component of the myth of Czechoslovakia as an island of democracy in Eastern Europe.     

Choosing One or Being Both: The Identity Dilemmas of Russian-Jewish Mixed Ethnics Living in Russia and in Israel

ABSTRACT

A large share of Russian/Soviet Jews, especially among younger cohorts, are descendants of intermarriage. In this essay, I reflect on the implications of the built-in ambivalence of these mixed ethnics, comparing their identity qualms and social strategies in their native Russia and after migration to Israel. My analysis draws upon participant observation and interviews conducted in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and across Israel over the last 20 years. My theoretical anchors are recent discussions on the evolving nature of Jewish identity, formed at the intersection of religion, ethnicity, and culture, in the context of ongoing intermarriage and assimilation. The comparison between the (ex-)Soviet and Israeli context underscores the role of local social constructions of ethno-religious belonging, nationalism, and citizenship as synergistic forces in shaping social locations of mixed ethnics. It also sheds light on the tactics of adjustment and “passing” among individuals with ambivalent ethnic identities who experience rapid social transformation or migration.     

Anti-Jewish disturbances in the North-Western provinces in the early 1880s

This article is devoted to a single wave of anti-Jewish violence in Lithuania which spread through northern Lithuania during the first half of the summer of 1900. It claims that specific incidents that took place during the first half of 1900 at Konstantinovo (news of an allegedly kidnapped girl, the so-called Jewish “procession” and a domestic dispute between Jews and the priest's workmen) were among the most important reasons for the pogroms. At the same time, it is clear that there were some more general (structural) changes in this society which facilitated the occurrence of violence (changes in the economy, growing Lithuanian nationalism, antisemitic tendencies, and pogroms in the south of the Romanov empire in the early 1880s, because they established the idea that violence against Jews was somehow legitimate). Peasants in the Panev??ys and ?iauliai districts took up violence against Jews because, as they understood it, an offence had been committed which no one else (especially the authorities) would put right and so Jews would go unpunished. Uncontrolled rumours ruled the mobs. Since Catholic peasant religious sentiments had been affected the most, it was common religious identity that drew people into a temporary community of action. When Jews were beaten in public spaces, the doors and windows of their houses smashed, the Jews were not only being punished for their alleged offences, but being shown the clearly delineated boundaries within the local social hierarchy. In public life, Jews were supposed to submit to the monopoly of power enjoyed by the Catholic community. Thus, this wave of anti-Jewish violence essentially differs from the deadly pogroms that took place in the early twentieth century in other gubernias of the Jewish Pale of Settlement.     

Ethnic and Religious Components of the Jewish Income Advantage, 1969 and 1989

Because Jewish ethnicity and religion do not necessarily coincide, the income advantage associated with Jewish identity can be separated into its ethnic and religious components. We estimate the impact of Jewish ethnicity and religion on household income in 1969 and 1989. In both years, ethnically Jewish households had a considerable income advantage over other non-Hispanic White households. This advantage appears to have persisted even among households without full-time workers. Mixed-ethnicity households (those with both Jewish-born and non-Jewish workers) had a conspicuous advantage in 1969 but not in 1989. While religion brought an additional income advantage to Reform, Conservative, and nondenominational Jews, Orthodoxy was associated with a relative disadvantage. Orthodox Judaism appears to impede economic attainment, perhaps by isolating its adherents from the social and economic networks established by the broader Jewish community.     

Battling Against Interfaith Relations in Israel: Religion,Therapy, and Social Services

One of the less studied aspects of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is its demography. On the Jewish side, active steps are taken by the state to encourage Jewish immigration and Jewish births and discourage Jewish assimilation. As part of these efforts, the “problematic relationships” between Arab men and Jewish women from low socioeconomic background have become a high agenda item in public discussions in Israel during the last decade. I will examine here how the diagnostic category “girls at risk” and a therapeutic intervention employed by social services dealing with these couples helps maintaining the delicate balance between Jewish and democratic values. I will analyze these practices as a solution to a structural problem of the Jewish enclave in Israel. Video Abstract     

Jews in the News – Representations of Judaism and the Jewish Minority in the Norwegian Contemporary Press

This article provides an analysis of how Jewish rituals and Jews as a minority group are represented and debated in the Norwegian press: How is “news about the Jews” framed by the media? Which discourses dominate the debates? Are notions of what it “takes to be Norwegian” put forward in these cases? The article is also an analysis of Jewish voices in the press, and based on the fact that Jewish advocates refer to minority-based legal rights suggests that the Jewish minority benefits from the use of a broader international human rights discussion in the press. I claim that a multicultural discourse provides the Jewish minority with language that makes it possible to argue for cultural rights without referring to Jewishness; offering protection against a general fear of anti-Semitism.     

Communication and medial frontier crossings in the Jewish underground culture

ABSTRACT

In this essay, the author examines Jewish art and literature in the context of the unofficial public sphere in the late Soviet Union. This Jewish cultural underground emerged within a specific communicative niche, which was the result of intensive private exchange, limited knowledge, and collectively discovered sources. The space in which artists and authors shared both their “work surface” and their coffee table, and in which the cultural production coincided with its own reception and analysis, constituted the cradle of very specific aesthetic features: particular forms of intertextual and intermedial links, self-reference, as well as a blend of the alternative lifeworld and art. Moreover, the close contact with “non-Jewish” artists in the same creative and often physical space brought about a synthetic form of culture. However, unlike with the Jewish vanguard artists of the first third of the twentieth century (such as the famous Kultur-lige), this synthesis was also caused by the largely non-Jewish socialization of “new Jews” in the late Soviet Union. This paper will focus on the following questions: How did the communicative context – the partial ban on Jewish topics and the alternative, semi-private public sphere of the Jewish unofficial culture in the late Soviet era – come about, and how did these aspects influence its artifacts?     

Ages,Life Stages,and Generational Cohorts: Decomposing the Immigrant First and Second Generations in the United States1

This article focuses on problems with the definition and empirical identification of immigrant “first” and “second” generations in the United States. These loosely conceived aggregates are decomposed into a typology of distinct generational cohorts defined by age and life stage at migration for the foreign born and by parental nativity for the U.S. born. Differences in educational and occupational attainment and in language and other aspects of acculturation are then examined to consider whether the practice of “lumping” these generational cohorts together, or “splitting” them into distinctive units of analysis, is empirically supported by available evidence. The paper concludes with some thoughts on data needs and methodological considerations in the study of immigrant generations.

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A “Jewish Study Hall” Influenced Approach to Social Work Professional Identity Development: A Qualitative Study

The article presents the findings of a qualitative research study focused on the ancient “Jewish study hall” (Beit Midrash in Hebrew) approach. The research was conducted in the context of the Beit Midrash for Social Work and Judaism established at one school of social work in Israel. Twenty participants were included in the study. Content analysis of transcribed Beit Midrash sessions revealed four central themes: reflection on participant identities; expansion, stabilisation, and acceptance of one’s personal identity; clarification of professional identity; and convergence between Jewish and professional identity. Study results raise questions as to both the place and the space for exploration of religious and spiritual identity in social work education. Findings suggest that alternative learning spaces such as the Beit Midrash can enable social work students and practitioners to reflect honestly and profoundly on their religious and spiritual identity, helping them to integrate their different identities towards becoming “whole persons” better prepared to meet the challenges of the social work profession.