Abstract: This groundbreaking report released by the JPR European Demography Unit finds that 630,000 ex-pat Israelis live across the world, most of whom choose English-speaking and European countries as their new home. The report notes that an estimated 325,000 children have been born to these Israelis when living abroad, bringing the total number of Israeli migrants and their children to close to a million. The report also finds that in certain destination countries, the proportion of ex-pat Israelis and their families now exceeds 20% of the national Jewish population.
Some of the key findings in this report:
About 630,000 Israelis lived outside Israel in 2021-2023. Of these, 328,000 were born in Israel, and another 302,000 were born elsewhere but acquired Israeli citizenship and lived in Israel during their lives.
Estimating the number of children born to Israelis living abroad, the report concludes there are 955,000 ‘Israel-connected’ people worldwide.
The ‘Israel-connected’ Jewish population currently constitutes 9% of the population of the Jewish Diaspora.
The largest Israel-born Jewish communities are in English-speaking countries (US, Canada, and UK) and European countries (with those in Germany and the UK making up nearly 50% of Israelis living in Europe).
Europe hosts about one-third of Israeli ex-pats but only 16% of all Jews living in the Diaspora.
Israel-born Jews make up nearly half of the Jewish population in Norway, 41% in Finland, and over 20% of the Jewish communities in Bulgaria, Ireland, Spain and Denmark.
Over the past decade, Israeli-born populations have grown significantly in the Baltic countries (up 135%), Ireland (+95%), Bulgaria (+78%), Czechia (+74%), Spain (+39%), The Netherlands (+36%), Germany (+34%) and the UK (+27%).
Israeli ex-pat communities in Europe are among the fastest growing in the world.
Abstract: Religious spaces in the London borough of Barnet provide a lens through which to understand Muslim–Jewish encounters. This case study, pre-dating the 2023 escalation in the Israel–Gaza conflict, examines community relations in the context of the hegemonic discourses that play into racialisations, power dynamics and cultural connectedness through minority religious and ethnic identities in superdiverse urban centres. It focuses on a mosque’s application for planning permission in an area with a sizable Jewish population. Contestations and cooperation developed between the mosque and local Jewish communities, with some offering support while others mobilised, eventually successfully, to prevent planning permission being granted. Power differentials around race, class, religious affiliation and access to political power structures emerge in these instances, in which the impacts of racialisations, societal anxiety and communal hierarchy are sometimes overt and sometimes subtle. These complex and multifaceted events can be productively viewed through the narratives that circulate through local relations, social hierarchies, national discourses and culturally charged communal entanglements. This article draws on mixed methods of interviewing, press and social media analysis, and ethnographic observations to explore religious spaces as a lens to local encounters, in a manner that seeks to avoid direct involvement in an already complex incident.
Abstract: From an intercultural perspective, this article explores majority/minority and between minorities interactions, and revisits Allport’s contact theory, in a socially and ethnically diverse urban area hosting a large proportion of Jews and Muslims. The data comes from a telephone survey of a sample of inhabitants of the 19th arrondissement of Paris. Open and closed questions explore the symbolic social and political boundaries respondents construct between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and their patterns of sociability. Survey experiments with vignettes deal with more sensitive issues (reactions to circulating cartoons at school and police reactions to verbal assault, according to the ethnicity of the victim). The immediate social and ethnic surrounding of each respondent is reconstructed on the basis of census and ethnographic data. The results go against several common beliefs. Religion is not the only dimension of respondents’ identity; it intersects with social class, gender and generation. The relations between Jews and Muslims are not so much conflictual as ambivalent. Being minorities and feeling discriminated against as such brings them together. They both are more religious than the majority population, more traditional on sexual issues and more family-oriented, and most of them consider that Jews and Muslims have a common cultural heritage and should be united against discrimination. Nevertheless, there are friction points (Israeli-Palestinian conflict/the colonial past of France). Politically and socially Muslims are closer to the non-European immigrants, while Jews are closer to the French and the European-born ‘white’ population. Antisemitism is a clear taboo; anti-Jewish cartoons are seen as far more reprehensible than any other. But a majority of the sample, and Muslims a little more than average, see Jews as a ‘group apart’, and believe in the old stereotype about Jews having more influence, being more likely, for instance, to be helped by the police if needed.
Abstract: Commensality – eating together – is often understood by anthropologists and others as fundamental to human sociality, binding groups together and also creating bridges between groups. Consequently, sharing food or making food together has been emphasised in many policies to promote intercultural and interreligious contact. However, a more critical literature has emphasised how consuming the cultural produce of the other may also create opportunities for exploitative rather than meaningfully positive relations (at worst, in bell hooks’ evocative phrase, a way of ‘eating the other’). Eating the culture of the other has become a significant element in forms of gentrification that capitalise on exoticised difference, sometimes leading ultimately to the displacement of minoritised communities. More recently, an alternative approach to the role of food in intercultural encounters has emerged within the ‘conviviality’ and ‘super-diversity’ literatures, focusing on the convivial tools and somatic work of food entrepreneurs. This article, drawing on the author’s fieldwork in London and on fieldwork by colleagues in other European cities, builds on this literature to explore how forms of commensality, and the commercial transactions around them, play a unique role in generating Jewish-Muslim encounters in urban Europe, which are ambivalent, marked by power asymmetries, shadowed by securitisation and geopolitical conflict, but nonetheless fragile resources for hope.
Abstract: This article argues that the Parisian spheres of Middle Eastern dance and Mediterranean music shape distinct Muslim-Jewish encounters for individuals involved in these practices, fostering a coexistence among artists from Muslim and Jewish backgrounds which involves carefully navigating tensions over geopolitical issues. Three key findings emerge from this study. First, respondents of Muslim and Jewish backgrounds shared a common Maghrebi heritage that was reappropriated by engaging in the practices of Middle Eastern dance and Mediterranean music. Second, these artistic encounters were not immune to instances of stigmatization and tensions, particularly relating to geopolitical issues, which reactivated symbolic boundaries between artists of Muslim and Jewish backgrounds. Third, participants employed strategies to avoid conflict, explicitly separating art from politics, and fostered mutual respect for differing perspectives. Nevertheless, some respondents politicized Muslim-Jewish commonalities, notably by reaffirming their shared Maghrebi heritage.
Abstract: This special issue, based around the European Encounters project research carried out before October 2023, explores ambivalence and boundary work in Jewish and Muslim encounters across urban European contexts. Drawing on case studies in Frankfurt, London and Paris, it examines intercultural negotiations and identity constructions among minoritised groups. Contributors analyse diverse sites of encounter, from musical collaborations to more formal interfaith initiatives and everyday commercial spaces. Across these settings, the articles highlight complex layers of commonality and difference shaping boundary dynamics between Muslims and Jews. Analytically, this issue deploys central cultural studies concepts like symbolic boundaries, conviviality and superdiversity to elucidate lived realities. Empirically, grounded examination of understudied intercultural encounters advances cultural studies scholarship. The juxtaposition of the cities enables a relational understanding of how national repertoires of discourse shape boundary negotiations differently across contexts. Furthermore, analysis complicates assumptions of conflict, foregrounding marginalised perspectives on identity and power. Key findings demonstrate the ambivalence underpinning most Muslim-Jewish interactions. Structural inequalities, avoidance and indifference more frequently characterise encounters than outright hostility. Yet significations of difference still dominate, as groups navigate uneasy proximities. This special issue challenges essentialist portrayals of immutable intergroup divisions. Its nuanced analysis underscores the need to understand quotidian encounters relationally, as a multi-level interdependency, grounded in their socio-historical contexts across and within groups. This yields multifaceted insights into minority experiences of othering and belonging in Europe’s superdiverse cities.
Abstract: Introduction: Amid escalating global antisemitism, particularly following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, this study addresses critical gaps in understanding the psychosocial impact of antisemitism on Jewish communities worldwide.
Methods: Focusing on the Jewish community in Germany, we conducted a cross-sectional survey of 420 Jewish individuals (mean age = 40.71 years, SD = 15.90; 57% female). Participants completed measures assessing four distinct forms of perceived and experienced antisemitism: everyday discrimination, microaggressions (subtle antisemitism and collective experiences such as encountering antisemitic comments on social media), vigilance against antisemitism, and perceived prevalence of antisemitism. Psychosocial outcomes—including depression, anxiety, subjective well-being, and social participation—were also measured. Data were analyzed using correlation analyses and multiple linear regressions, and Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) identified distinct groups based on shared perceptions and experiences of antisemitism and levels of Jewish identification.
Results: Results indicate that experiences of antisemitism, particularly everyday discriminatory acts, were significantly associated with poorer mental health outcomes and reduced social participation. The LPA revealed three distinct groups, with the high-identity, high-antisemitism group (53% of the sample) reporting significantly higher anxiety levels than those with average identification and more rare experience with antisemitism.
Discussion: These findings underscore the pervasive nature of antisemitism and its detrimental effects on the well-being of Jewish individuals. The study highlights the need for targeted interventions to promote resilience within Jewish communities and calls for broader societal efforts to combat antisemitism.
Abstract: In this article, I focus on Antwerp’s Hasidic male immigrants, who must not only apprentice themselves to a new language (Flemish) and career, but also accustom themselves to an unfamiliar country and governmental bureaucracy. They must learn the local habits and social mores of Antwerp’s Hasidic community. Moreover, they must contend with the afterlife of a classed association – wherein Jewish male workers actively tethered their classed identities and subjectivities to the diamond and to its status as a “luxury” commodity. In the wake of the diamond industry’s decline for the vast majority of Antwerp’s Jewish male workforce, I attend to this space of displacement, in which the diamond industry continues to exert itself, despite its diminished capacity, over these men. Drawing upon fieldwork conducted between 2015-2019 in Antwerp, in cooperation with a Hasidic non-profit focused on the economic revitalization of Antwerp’s Hasidic male workforce, I examine the intersection between class, masculinity, and piety, through an initiative within Antwerp to recreate a new Hasidic man and worker-citizen. In this space of reinvention, Hasidic men must contend with the spectral presence of the diamond industry and its association with Jews, as they seek integration into the local Flemish labor force and legitimacy in the eyes of Antwerp’s Hasidic community.
Abstract: In this paper, I focus on online and offline practices of community-building within two specific religious communities that remain active despite mass emigration. These communities are based in Derbent, Dagestan, and Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria, with members located in Moscow and the North Caucasus. Both communities have formally accepted rabbis from Chabad-Lubavitch, who are likely to promote Chabad-Lubavitch values among community members. I investigate the strategies and methods used by Chabad emissaries in the region to facilitate the process of chabadization. In addition to outreach activities, the visual manifestations of chabadization are significant in this study, as they are presented across multiple online platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and other social forums, chats, and websites. My research combines online analysis with fieldwork conducted in Dagestan, Azerbaijan, and Moscow between 2018 and 2020.
Abstract: In this report:
The number of Jewish pupils enrolled in Jewish schools has been climbing consistently for several decades and has increased significantly since the mid-1990s. This rise, described in previous JPR Jewish schools bulletins, has occurred in both the 'mainstream' and the 'Strictly Orthodox' sectors, though at different rates.
According to the latest official figures, while the overall number of registered pupils in 2023/24 shows an increase of 0.2% per annum since figures were last published by JPR three years ago, in the previous year alone, there was a reduction of 471 pupils, or 1.3%. This marks the first decrease in numbers since JPR started collecting data annually in 1995/96.
Some of the key findings in this report:
There are 136 Jewish schools in the UK, a net increase of 3 schools since 2021. The total figure is comprised of 45 mainstream Jewish schools and 91 Strictly Orthodox schools.
36,064 Jewish pupils studied in these schools in the academic year 2023/24. This represents an increase of 239 pupils, or 0.2% per annum since figures were published three years ago.
However, this growth only occurred in the first two years of these three years; in the third year (between 2022/23 and 2023/24), there was a reduction of 471 pupils, or 1.3% - the first decrease in numbers since JPR started collecting data annually in 1995/96.
For the first time, the mainstream sector has decreased across all three years in secondary and primary schools.
The Strictly Orthodox sector saw an overall increase. However, in the last academic year, the number of pupils in Strictly Orthodox schools fell by 358. This is not a result of demographic decline or a change in parental preference; instead, it reflects shifting government policy and practice in schools, reducing the number of children recorded in registered Strictly Orthodox schools.
The balance between registered mainstream and Strictly Orthodox schools has remained stable. 60% of Jewish pupils in Jewish schools are in Strictly Orthodox schools; 40% are in mainstream Jewish schools. This is a significant shift since the mid-1990s when the ratio was 55% mainstream to 45% Strictly Orthodox.
87% of all Jewish pupils in mainstream schools are in Greater London and South Hertfordshire. This distinction is much less pronounced in the Strictly Orthodox sector, with 63% being in London.
Abstract: NEW YORK, NEW YORK: January 23, 2025—The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) today released the first-ever, eight-country Index on Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness, exposing a global trend in fading knowledge of basic facts about the Holocaust. The countries surveyed include the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Austria, Germany, Poland, Hungary and Romania.
The majority of respondents in each country, except Romania, believe something like the Holocaust (another mass genocide against Jewish people) could happen again today. Concern is highest in the United States, where more than three-quarters (76%) of all adults surveyed believe something like the Holocaust could happen again today, followed by the U.K. at 69%, France at 63%, Austria at 62%, Germany at 61%, Poland at 54%, Hungary at 52%, and Romania at 44%.
Shockingly, some adults surveyed say that they had not heard or weren’t sure if they had heard of the Holocaust (Shoah) prior to taking the survey. This is amplified among young adults ages 18-29 who are the most recent reflection of local education systems; when surveyed, they indicated that they had not heard or weren’t sure if they had heard of the Holocaust (Shoah): France (46%), Romania (15%), Austria (14%) and Germany (12%). Additionally, while Auschwitz-Birkenau is the most well-known camp, nearly half (48%) of Americans surveyed are unable to name a single camp or ghetto established by the Nazis during World War II.
On a more positive note, there is overwhelming support for Holocaust education. Across all countries surveyed, nine-in-10 or more adults believe it is important to continue teaching about the Holocaust, in part, so it does not happen again.
Abstract: In diversity studies, categories of difference are seen as building blocks. Critical organisational scholars emphasise the need to move from fixed conceptualisations of identity towards a more flexible, intersectional, multi-layered, and context-sensitive understanding of social difference and organisational inequality. This critique also involves shifting from a social psychology lens to a sociologically-oriented and historically-informed perspective. The elusive and multi-dimensional nature of Jewish identity offers a unique opportunity to explore those complexities around organisations and social difference. Jewish difference seems to disrupt diversity scholarship and practice, problematising ideas of whiteness and otherness, dominance and marginality, diaspora and homeland. Bridging the gap between EDI and Jewishness—and between management and organisation studies and Jewish studies—is of theoretical, practical, and political importance. The research study presented in this thesis examines the construction of diversity and difference in Jewish nonprofit organisations in the UK. It is positioned at the intersection of three main contexts: British society, the Jewish world, and the nonprofit sector. Adopting a sector-based approach, two data sources were collected and analysed: 45 interviews with employees, senior managers, and volunteers; and 102 online statements by 34 organisations within the sector. The empirical discussion traces the construction of three main social differences: Jewishness, race and ethnicity, and political-ideological difference. Conceptualising the Jewish nonprofit as an identity-based and a diaspora organisation, the findings shed light on the boundary work around the Jewish space and the Jewish community, the relations between Jewishness and whiteness at work, and the role of Israel-Palestine in shaping diversity debates in the diaspora. The study contributes to understanding the contextual and relational nature of diversity; disputes and paradoxes around identity in organisations; and diversity-inclusion gaps. It suggests the idea of the political case for diversity, elaborates debates around whiteness at work, and contributes to nonprofit literature around the construction and role of communities.
Abstract: The new report by the JPR European Demography Unit estimates the ‘core’ Jewish population in the Netherlands is about 35,000. Furthermore, while the natural balance of Dutch Jews is negative (the population experiences more deaths than births), the Dutch Jewish population is growing slowly as a result of one single factor: migration, mainly from Israel.
The report was launched in Amsterdam in January 2025 in partnership with the Jewish Social Work Foundation/Joods Maatschappelijk Werk (JMW) and the Committee for Demography of Jews in the Netherlands.
Some of the key findings in this report:
The ‘core’ Jewish population of the Netherlands is estimated to be about 35,000 today (a mid-point of a 29,000–41,000 range), constituting 0.2% of the Dutch population.
According to the Israeli Law of Return, which applies to Jews, children and grandchildren of Jews, and all respective spouses, the estimated eligible population in the Netherlands might be as high as 65,000.
The Dutch Jewish population experiences more deaths than births and cannot grow on its own. Nevertheless, it is slowly increasing due to one single factor: migration. This situation is similar to that of the Dutch population as a whole.
Jews born in Israel constitute about 20% of the Jews living in the Netherlands today. The population with a direct connection to Israel, including those born in the Netherlands but with at least one parent born in Israel, comes to about a third of the Dutch Jewish population. A majority of Dutch Jewish children today are either Israel-born or born to Israeli parents already in the Netherlands.
Dutch Jews are one of the most secularised European Jewish communities. Only about 20% identify as ‘Orthodox’ or ‘Traditional’, and just 10%–20% are fully religiously observant. About 60% of partnered Dutch Jews are married to someone who is not Jewish.
A significant proportion of Dutch Jews (about 50%) currently identify with the Centre-Right in political terms. About a quarter are political centrists, and another quarter are Centre-Left. This situation is similar to the Dutch electorate as a whole.
Abstract: Rising antisemitism in the twenty-first century has alarmed Jewish communities and the general public, but antisemitic hate crime victimization remains understudied outside the US context. This study primarily relies on a comprehensive survey of 16,400 Jews across twelve European countries, supplemented with data from additional sources, to assess individual and country-level predictors of Jews’ experiences and fears of antisemitic harassment and violence. Multilevel models indicate that young age, perceived discrimination, identity visibility, and identification with Israel are pronounced individual risk factors for victimization. On the country level, negative opinion of Israel and Muslim population share predict victimization, highlighting the role of a “new” or Israel-derived antisemitism in the twenty-first century. The factors most strongly associated with fear are young age, previous victimization, perceptions of an ambient antisemitic threat, and recent occurrence of fatal antisemitic violence. Overall, the findings underscore the importance of integrating general theory on hate crime and victimization with context-specific factors when seeking to understand the experiences of targeted groups.
