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Date: 2018
Date: 2013
Abstract: This article explores the recent trend of return migration from Israel to countries of the former Soviet Union. The author analyses the current debates on the subject and, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Odessa, Ukraine conducted in 2005-2007, delves into the everyday experiences of «Russian» Israelis who have resettled in Odessa for personal and professional reasons. It focuses on their reasons for relocation and experiences of settling in their old/new environments, specifically their relationship to organized Jewish life and a sense of belonging. It argues that most returnees do not envision their relocation as a permanent decision and many do return to Israel or travel back and forth. In Odessa their experiences and connections to local Jewish life vary but for the most part returnees are concerned with improving their standard of living and see their relocation as a means of achieving that goal. It is too early to understand the full scope of «Russian» Israeli presence in the FSU, but we can already see that their future moves will most likely be determined by the personal and professional opportunities they encounter and family circumstances they face. The transnational orientations and open-ended journeys of «Russian» Israelis in Odessa complicate concepts of «Home» and «Diaspora» often applied to Israel and the Jewish people. On the one hand, leaving Israel constitutes Odessa as home; on the other hand, strong ties to Israel, displayed among many returnees, speak of Israel as a place of belonging. And yet other cases point to other realities where Russian Israelis explore other options or remain on the move. Placing the material in the wider context of Diaspora studies the author argues that «Home» and «Diaspora» are not fixed categories and can no longer be seen in a simplified manner of ideological constants.
Author(s): Kapralski, Slawomir
Date: 2017
Abstract: The argument focuses on the reception of the globalized narrative of the Holocaust in the regional memories of East‐Central Europe, in particular Poland. It is argued that this narrative has not been successfully integrated into the regional memory, partly because of the narrative's own deficiencies and partly due to the specific nature of the way in which regional memories have been produced. Instead, it has contributed to the split of collective and social memories in the region as well as to further fragmentation of each of these two kinds of memory. In result we may say that in post‐communist Poland the Holocaust has been commemorated on the level of official institutions, rituals of memory, and elitist discourses, but not necessarily remembered on the level of social memory. It is claimed that to understand this phenomenon we should put the remembrance and commemoration of the Holocaust in the context of the post‐communist transformation, in which the memory of the Holocaust has been constructed rather than retrieved in the process of re‐composition of identities that faced existential insecurity. The non‐Jewish Poles, who in the 1990s experienced the structural trauma of transformation, turned to the past not to learn the truth but to strengthen the group's sense of continuity in time. In this process many of them perceived the cosmopolitan Holocaust narrative as an instrument of the economic/cultural colonization of Eastern Europe in which the historical suffering of the non‐Jewish East Europeans is not properly recognized. Thus the elitist efforts to reconnect with the European discourse and to critically examine one's own identity has clashed with the mainstream's politics of mnemonic security as part of the strategy of collective immortalization that contributed to the development of antagonistic memories and deepened social cleavage.
Author(s): Roda, Jessica
Date: 2016
Author(s): Remennick, Larissa
Date: 2007
Author(s): Laguerre, Michel S.
Date: 2008
Abstract: Global Neighborhoods analyzes the organization of everyday life and the social integration of contemporary Jewish neighborhoods in Paris, London, and Berlin. Concentrating on the post-Holocaust era, Michel S. Laguerre explains how each urban diasporic site has followed a different path of development influenced by the local milieu in which it is incorporated. He also considers how technology has enabled extraterritorial relations with Israel and other diasporic enclaves inside and outside the hostland.

Shifting the frame of reference from assimilation theory to globalization theory and the information technology revolution, Laguerre argues that Jewish neighborhoods are not simply transnational social formations, but are fundamentally transglobal entities. Connected to multiple overseas diasporic sites, their interactions reach beyond their homelands, and they develop the logic of their social interactions inside this larger network of relationships. As with all transglobal communities, there is constant movement of people, goods, communications, ideas, images, and capital that sustains and adds vibrancy to everyday life. Since all are connected through the network, Laguerre contends that the variable shape of the local is affected by and affects the global.

Table of Contents

List of Figures, Tables, and Maps
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Neighborhood Globalization

2. Paris’s Jewish Quarter: Unmade, Remade, and Transformed

3. Berlin’s Jewish Quarter: The Local History of the Global

4. London’s Jewish Neighborhoods: Nodes of Global Networks

5. Residential Districts Versus Business Districts

6. The Jewish Quarter as a Global Chronopolis

7. Paris’s City Hall and the Jewish Quarter

8. Heritage Tourism: The Jewish Quarter as a Theme Park

9. The Jewish Quarter, Other Diasporic Sites, and Israel

10. Information Technology and the Jewish Neighborhood

11. Neighborhoods of Globalization

Conclusion: Global Neighborhoods in the Global Metropolis

Notes
References
Index
Author(s): Tye, Larry
Date: 2001
Abstract: From Publishers Weekly review:

The new Jewish diaspora of a "heterogeneous people who thrive in secular societies" is here to stay, asserts Boston Globe journalist Tye (The Father of Spin). As these diverse Jewish communities have become not merely way stations but enduring homes, they have begun to remake Judaism itself. Tye tells this intriguing story through sketches of people and of life in seven cities. In Dsseldorf, he finds an Orthodox rabbi invoking a more pluralistic Judaism to educate Russian refugees. In Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, a fervent Lubavitcher Hasidic rabbi has energized a dormant community. In Buenos Aires, a Jewish polity fragmented by economic setbacks and anti-Semitic attacks has begun to revive with new models of worship and organization. In Paris, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews have forged ties that could serve as a model for their fractious brethren in Israel. Tye's chapter on Dublin, where the Jewish community is dying, may at first seem anomalous, but, he argues, their determination to reestablish their "Gaelic brand of Judaism" elsewhere is a testament to the ability of Jews to survive wherever they may be. His two American chapters focus on Boston, where the Jewish community has fused learning, spirituality and social justice, and Atlanta, where rival denominations work with considerable amity. Yet Tye's optimism might have been better contextualized by a broader survey. Though the author understandably had to winnow his examples from many compelling possibilities, readers may wonder about Jewish communities in such places as Melbourne, Montreal and Johannesburg. While not a breakout book, Tye's presentation of a new diaspora may intrigue a broad Jewish audience.
Author(s): Körber, Karen
Date: 2011
Abstract: Das Konzept der Diaspora hat in den vergangenen Jahren in der akademischen Diskussion eine hohe Konjunktur erfahren. War der Bedeutungsgehalt des Begriffs historisch auf die klassischen Fälle von teils gewaltsamer Vertreibung, teils freiwilliger Neusiedlung der jüdischen und griechischen, sowie schließlich der armenischen Gemeinden beschränkt, so bezieht er sich inzwischen auf quasi alle außerhalb ihres ursprünglichen Territoriums lebenden ethnischen Gruppen (Tölölyan 1991). Dieser Schritt markiert einen sowohl theoretischen wie auch politischen Einschnitt, der in einem engen Zusammenhang mit den Debatten über die kulturellen Effekte der Globalisierung steht. Die Wiederkehr der Diaspora kann gewissermaßen als exemplarische Repräsentation einer Vergesellschaftungsform verstanden werden, die mit unseren nach wie vor territorial verorteten Kategorien bricht und in ihren transnationalen Bezügen die Grenzen eines „methodologischen Nationalismus“ (Beck 2004) aufzeigt. Das begriffliche Gegenüber der Diaspora bildet demzufolge der Nationalstaat. Anschließend an den postkolonialen Diskurs scheinen diasporische Gemeinschaften als alternative Entwürfe deterritorialisierter kultureller Identitäten auf, die im strikten Gegensatz zu nationalstaatlich organisierten Gesellschaften konstruiert sind (vgl. Appadurai 1994; Clifford 1997; kritisch dazu Anthias 1998). Wie ich im Folgenden zeigen möchte, übersieht diese behauptete Fundamentalopposition, dass und in welcher Weise Migrationspopulationen nach wie vor durch nationalstaatliche Regimes und deren institutionelle Zwänge gekennzeichnet sind. Im Unterschied zu einer Position, die insbesondere das kosmopolitische und grenzüberschreitende Potenzial von Diaspora-Gemeinschaften unterstreicht, will ich insofern gerade auf deren Einbettung in jeweils nationalstaatliche Rahmen verweisen, in und gegenüber denen die lokalen Diasporas ihre kulturelle Eigenständigkeit zu behaupten versuchen. Ein solches Vorgehen ist mit der migrationssoziologischen Annahme verknüpft, dass Einwanderung als Prozess aufzufassen ist, den sowohl die aufnehmende Gesellschaft als auch die Immigranten selbst strukturieren. Es handelt sich dabei nicht um einen symmetrischen Prozess, sondern um einen zu Lasten der Einwanderer ungleich gewichteten, denn diese müssen auf die politischen und symbolischen Ordnungsmuster Bezug nehmen, die in den verschiedenen Aufnahmegesellschaften maßgeblich sind (Bauböck 1992). Diesem Spannungsverhältnis soll am Beispiel der Migration russischsprachiger Juden nach Deutschland nachgegangen werden.
Author(s): Nissan, Ephraim
Date: 2011
Author(s): Gold, Steven J.
Date: 2002
Author(s): Leite, Naomi
Date: 2011
Abstract: This dissertation explores issues of identification, relatedness, and belonging on a global scale,
through an ethnographic study of Portugal’s urban Marranos (descendants of fifteenth-century
forced converts to Catholicism) and foreign Jews who travel from abroad to meet them.
Although not Jewish according to Jewish law, given centuries of intermarriage, Marranos are
nonetheless widely considered to be part of “the Jewish family,” “lost brethren” who should be
welcomed back to the Jewish people. Many Jews view them within the metanarrative of Jewish
destruction and survival, the “eternal spark” that remains despite the Inquisition’s attempted
elimination of Judaism from the Portuguese landscape. However, for numerous local reasons the
present-day Marranos are not welcomed by Portugal’s tiny normative Jewish community. As a
result, the urban Marranos, who feel strongly that they are Jews by descent, turn to foreign
Jewish travelers as sources of educational, spiritual, and material assistance in their bid to join
the Jewish world and attain recognition as Jews in the present.
Based on two years of fieldwork in Marrano organizations in Lisbon and Porto and traveling
alongside Jewish tourists and outreach workers, the dissertation undertakes a processual analysis
of the constitution of ancestral Jewish identity and of the role of transnational, cross-cultural
affective ties in affording a sense of global Jewish belonging. The primary questions driving this
work are, first, how and why do far-flung people come to feel that they are related to one
another, and what terms do they use to characterize and think through that feeling of relatedness?
Second, to what extent are their perceptions of essential connection disrupted or transformed by
face-to-face contact? By interrogating the cultural logics of kinship writ large—the language and
conceptual frameworks people use to articulate and make sense of their feelings of relatedness to
one another—and then examining how those logics play out “on the ground,” this study provides
a fine-grained ethnographic analysis of the mechanisms through which global and ancestral
imaginings become concretized in social interaction. Ultimately, I argue, physical proximity
remains the productive sphere for identification and belonging, even as global interconnection
provides new opportunities for encounter.
Author(s): Harris, Tracy K.
Date: 1994
Abstract: After expulsion from Spain in 1492, a large number of Spanish Jews (Sephardim) found refuge in lands of the Ottoman Empire. These Jews continued speaking a Spanish that, due to their isolation from Spain, developed independently in the empire from the various peninsular dialects. This language, called Judeo-Spanish (among other names), is the focus of Death of a Language, a sociolinguistic study describing the development of Judeo-Spanish from 1492 to the present, its characteristics, survival, and decline. To determine the current status of the language, Tracy K. Harris interviewed native Judeo-Spanish speakers from the sephardic communities of New York, Israel, and Los Angeles. This study analyzes the informants' use of the language, the characteristics of their speech, and the role of the language in Sephardic ethnicity.
Part I defines Judeo-Spanish, discusses the various names used to refer to the language, and presents a brief history of the Eastern Sephardim. The next part describes the language and its survival, first by examining the Spanish spoken by the Jews in pre-Expulsion Spain, and followed by a description of Judeo-Spanish as spoken in the Ottoman Empire, emphasizing the phonology, archaic features, new creations, euphemisms, proverbs, and foreign (non-Spanish) influences on the language. Finally, Harris discusses sociological or nonlinguistic reasons why Judeo-Spanish survived for four and one-half centuries in the Ottoman empire.
The third section of Death of a Language analyzes the present status and characteristics of Judeo-Spanish. This includes a description of the informants and the three Sephardic communities studied, as well as the present domains or uses of Judeo-Spanish in these communities. Current Judeo-Spanish shows extensive influences from English and Standard Spanish in the Judeo-Spanish spoken in the United States, and from Hebrew and French in Israel. No one under the age of fifty can speak it well enough (if at all) to pass it on to the next generation, and none of the informants' grandchildren can speak the language at all. Nothing is being done to ensure its perpetuation: the language is clearly dying.
Part IV examines the sociohistorical causes for the decline of Judeo-Spanish in the Levant and the United States, and presents the various attitudes of current speakers: 86 percent of the informants feel that the language is dying. A discussion of language and Sephardic identity from a sociolinguistic perspective comprises part V , which also examines Judeo-Spanish in the framework of dying languages in general and outlines the factors that contribute to language death. In the final chapter the author examines how a dying language affects a culture, specifically the role of Judeo-Spanish in Sephardic identity.
Date: 2006
Abstract: Far from being a blank space on the Jewish map, or a void in the Jewish cultural world, post-Shoah Europe is a place where Jewry has continued to develop, even though it is facing different challenges and opportunities than elsewhere. Living on a continent characterized by highly diverse patterns of culture, language, history, and relations to Jews, European Jewry mirrors that kaleidoscopic diversity. This volume explores such key questions as the new roles for Jews in Europe; models of Jewish community organization in Europe; concepts of diaspora and galut; a European-Jewish way of life in the era of globalization; and European Jews' relationship to Israel and to non-Jews. Some contributions highlight experiences of Jews in Britain, Sweden, Norway, Hungary, Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands. Helping us to understand the special and common characteristics of European Jewry, this collection offers a valuable contribution to the continued rebuilding of Jewish life in the postwar era.

Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Sandra Lustig and Ian Leveson
PART I: OVERARCHING QUESTIONS
Chapter 1. A New Role for Jews in Europe: Challenges and Responsibilities
Diana Pinto
Chapter 2. European Models of Community: Can Ambiguity Help?
Clive A. Lawton
Chapter 3. Concepts of Diaspora and Galut
Michael Galchinsky
Chapter 4. ‘Homo Zappiens’: A European-Jewish Way of Life in the Era of Globalisation
Lars Dencik
Chapter 5. Israel and Diaspora: From Solution to Problem
Göran Rosenberg
PART II: INNER-JEWISH CONCERNS: REBUILDING AND CONTINUITY
Chapter 6. Left Over – Living after the Shoah: (Re-)building Jewish Life in Europe. A Panel Discussion
Sandra Lustig
Chapter 7. Debora’s Disciples: AWomen’s Movement as an Expression of Renewing Jewish Life in Europe
Lara Dämmig and Elisa Klapheck
Chapter 8. A Jewish Cultural Renascence in Germany?
Y. Michal Bodemann
PART III: THE JEWISH SPACE IN EUROPE
Chapter 9. The Jewish Space in Europe
Diana Pinto
Chapter 10. Caught between Civil Society and the Cultural Market: Jewry and the Jewish Space in Europe. A Response to Diana Pinto
Ian Leveson and Sandra Lustig
Chapter 11. ‘The Germans Will Never Forgive the Jews for Auschwitz’. When Things Go Wrong in the Jewish Space: The Case of the Walser-Bubis Debate
Sandra Lustig
Notes on Contributors
Index