Abstract: This paper examines the geographies of how young people, aged 11–25, in the Greek, Jewish and Palestinian diasporas in the Midlands region of England articulate notions of formal and informal politics. In doing so, it connects work on diasporic politics with work on the geographies of diaspora, young people's politics, and, in particular, diasporic youth politics. The paper discusses how young people have views on politics and on being political but feel that they struggle to have their voices heard by those in positions of power. At the same time, it paints a picture of how these participants articulate such feelings of politics in complex, multi-scalar, multi-directional ways. In doing so, they are potentially creating new spaces to feel and be political. The paper therefore stresses that it is important that diasporic politics takes into account the views of young people and that assumptions should not be made as to where such politics are located.
Abstract: Two years after the Tunisian people overthrew an entrenched dictatorship, the country seems to be definitively turning a new page in its history. Its diminutive Jewish community continues to fade away, a vestige from another time now remembered only through writing. This article analyses how four francophone Jewish writers of Tunisian origins, Catherine Dana, Colette Fellous, Corine Scemama-Ammar, and Brigitte Smadja ‘write/return’ to Tunisia in the 1990s and 2000s. Given their own interrupted experience in Tunisia, they end up remembering through and on behalf of others, including elders, grandmothers and mothers, and siblings. Along with (re)visiting the houses and graves of their elders during the last decades of Ben Ali's rule, they negotiate a role for themselves in the complex diasporic identity that emerged after Tunisian Jewry's post-independence migrations. Nevertheless, I argue that the writing of return provides no simple resolution for the rupture experienced by the last generation of Jewish women born in Tunisia before the great exile in the 1960s. Rather physical return to contemporary Tunisia and its inscription in French transforms these women into inadvertent mediators between the past and present, homeland and diaspora, oral history and writing.
Abstract: This dissertation illustrates how a moral burden of history manifests itself in social relationships, cultural processes, and material products. Specifically, it argues that what appears to many as a superficial, commercially motivated revival of Jewishness in Poland is also a significant joint venture between non-Jewish Poles and Jewish visitors to Poland in exploring inter-ethnic memory-building and reconciliation. The findings are based on 18 months of ethnographic research in the historical Jewish quarter (Kazimierz) in Krakow, Poland, with further research in Israel and the United States among diaspora Jews. My research reveals that the notion of uniform Holocaust tourism disguises a movement to contest lachrymose conceptions of Jewishness as victimhood. I document a sense of Jewish connection to Poland---overlooked in mainstream discourses---that animates new generations of Jews and Poles to seek each other out. Similarly, much of the Jewish revival in Kazimierz is orchestrated by non-Jewish Poles. I show how they use identification with Jewishness to reconfigure their own Polishness and their visions for a pluralistic Polish nation state. I conclude that (1) popular cultural products, practices, and spaces can be important manifestations of---and tools for---moral reckoning; (2) identification with someone else's ethnicity/religion (often called appropriation) can be understood as an enlargement of, rather than an escape from, the self, and (3) Kazimierz in Krakow represents the cutting edge of Polish-Jewish relations via local grassroots culture brokers who use Jewishness to expand the Polish universe of obligation.
Abstract: Wenn Peter Sloterdijk Museen allgemein als »Schule der Befremdung« erkennt, wie ergeht es dann erst Besucherinnen und Besuchern von jüdischen Museen? Gehört jüdische Geschichte »zu uns« oder nicht? Ist jüdische Kultur Teil des »Eigenen« oder des »Anderen«? Jüdische Museen sind, um eine Formulierung von Zygmunt Baumann zu verwenden, konstitutiv »auf dem Zaun«, in einer prekären Lage der Ambivalenz, der Zweideutigkeit situiert. In Zeiten, in denen Identitätsdebatten in Europa mehr und mehr im Zeichen des Ausschluss des »Anderen« – und heute vor allem im Zeichen des Ausschlusses von Muslimen – stehen, werden Juden und jüdische Geschichte – aber auch der Staat Israel – auf andere Weise relevant als noch vor zwanzig Jahren. Der politische Mainstream, aber auch wachsende Teile der populistischen Rechten, sehen im »Jüdischen« nun offenbar das »gute Andere« Europas, das sich im neuen rassistischen Diskurs trefflich instrumentalisieren lässt. Der Druck auf jüdische Museen wächst, sich einer scheinbaren Eindeutigkeit zu verschreiben, die die neuen europäischen Identitätsdiskurse nicht länger stört.
Abstract: Much research on intercultural competence (IC) focuses on relatively recent human history, on a transnational era when, for many, especially in the economically privileged parts of the world, the possibilities for intercultural interactions have rapidly increased as physical and virtual mobility opportunities have also increased through processes such as globalization, tourism, economic migration and international education. Such research has also tended to focus on the modernist project, which developed essentially mono-ethnic, mono-cultural, and even mono-linguistic constructions of society, and inherent nationally framed understandings of cultures. Our work on IC has a different starting point. Using the narratives of often elderly Sephardic Jews living in Bulgaria, we reach back almost a century in order to trace the intra-, inter-, and transcultural activities that this diasporic community have engaged in, and continue to engage in, within and beyond their home society, interactions enabled by their multilingualism and especially their main language of cultural affiliation, Ladino. Based on our exploration of their stories, we have developed a new, data-grounded conceptualization of IC as a dynamic process of performing intra-/inter-/transcultural identities in zones of interculturality. Understood in this way, IC manifests itself as work ceaselessly in progress, as unfinished and evolving identity performance. Our research participants constantly experiment with and extend the language and relational resources they have. Whether it is when they seek interactional opportunities or when they respond to changing social circumstances, they play with the languages they have to achieve what they want to achieve and get on with their lives.
Abstract: Of about a million Jews that arrived to Israel from the (former) USSR after 1989 some 12% left the country by the end of 2017. It is estimated that about a half of them left "back" for the FSU, and the rest for the USA, Canada and the Western Europe. The book provides a comprehensive analysis of this specific Jewish Israeli Diaspora group through cutting-edge approaches in the social sciences, and examines the settlement patterns of Israeli Russian-speaking emigrants, their identity, social demographic profile, reasons of emigration, their economic achievements, identification, and status vis-à-vis host Jewish and non-Jewish environment, vision of Israel, migration interests and behavior, as well as their social and community networks, elites and institutions. Vladimir Ze’ev Khanin makes a significant contribution to migration theory, academic understanding of transnational Diasporas, and sheds a new light on the identity and structure of contemporary Israeli society. The book is based on the unique statistics from Israeli and other Government sources and sociological information obtained from the author’s first of this kind on-going study of Israeli Russian-speaking emigrant communities in different regions of the world.
Abstract: In this paper I present some initial findings from my multilocal ethnographic and ethnohistorical research on the “Trikalan Jews”, i.e. Jews living in or originating from Trikala, a city in the Thessaly region of central Greece. In particular, my research focuses on two axes: the historical processes of community formation and its social transition after World War II as well as the recent sense of belonging of the potential members of that “community” and the ways they experience and negotiate their collective memory and identity. On a theoretical level, the first hypothesis grounded in the field is that the “community” tends to appropriate/be appropriated by subjects who currently live “elsewhere”. In this sense, it is reproduced as a glocal network in which Jewishness and locality are interconnected, experienced, and performed in multiple, fluid, and often fragmented ways. On a methodological level, my research is based on the fundamental techniques of ethnographic and ethnohistorical research which have been adapted to the conditions and restraints of a multilocal field.
Abstract: В статье рассматриваются некоторые понятия и термины, связанные с такими явлениями, как миграции, диаспора, постсоветские диаспоры, транснациональные сообщества. Опираясь на различные социологические исследования, автор доказывает, что современные российские евреи не являются классической диаспорой, а также так называемой «новой еврейской диаспорой». В настоящее время они представляют часть русскоязычного транснационального сообщества, базирующегося на системе различных связей. В то же время автор подчеркивает, что такое сообщество имеет временный характер, поскольку иммигранты во втором и третьем поколении все более полно интегрируются в принимающих обществах, в том числе в израильском.
Abstract: Jewish emigration from Israel of the recent decades brought the creation of the communities of Israeli passport holders in the various countries of the world, including Russia and other post-Soviet states. Although this fact is commonly accepted as a totally new phenomenon, the returned migration of Russian and other Jews, who first immigrated to their historical Homeland - the Land of Israel/Palestine, and in a period of time came back to Russia has centuries-long history. In the 17th - 19th centuries this trend included Jerusalem and other Palestine Jewish communities' envoys, educators and fundraisers, who visited Russian and East European Jewish communities and sometimes stayed there for years, as well as Russian Jewish pilgrims to the Holy Land, who on returning were often respected as «representatives» of the Land of Israel and its Jewry. Some members of First, Second and Third Zionist Aliyot (waves of Jewish ideological repatriation) to the Land of Israel/Palestine of the late 19th and early 20th centuries created another substantial group of «Israeli Returnees» to Russia and the USSR. The article shows that typical patterns of immigrants from the Palestine to Russia and the early USSR are very close to, or even similar with «ideological re-immigrants», envoys, labor migrants, «economic refugees», and other relevant subgroups among current Israeli diaspora in Russia and the CIS.
Abstract: Austria shows another interesting example of the Israeli Diaspora community -«Israeli Sephardi Russians». This group consists of three to four thousand former Soviet Jews that stayed in Austria which was a transit point for Jewish emigration from the USSR to the West in 1970s, or returned there from Israel, as well as of those FSU Jews that joined them in the 1990s. The overwhelming majority of this group is composed of representatives of «oriental» Jewish communities of the (former) Soviet Union - mostly Bukhara, as well as Georgian and, to lesser extent, Caucasian (Mounting) Jews. A significant number or even majority of the Austrian Jewish immigrants with roots in the former USSR spent a certain period of their life in Israel, and thus are Israeli passport holders. As a result «Israeli Sephardi Russians» together with a few hundred «Israeli Ashkenazi Russians» and some two thousands of Israeli passport holders that were born either in Israel or in the Diaspora beyond the FSU, now compose one third to 40% of the Austrian Jewish population (the latter is estimated between 10-12,000, or 15-20,000; according to other sources, 95% of them in the Austrian capital of Vienna, although only 7,014 of them are officially registered as Jewish community members).
Abstract: Концепция «двойной лояльности» в еврейском случае подразумевает, что еврей стоит на стороне Израиля вне зависимости от страны своего проживания, а принцип Талмуда, известный как «Закон государства обязателен для исполнения евреями» (Дина де-мальхута дина) часто рассматривается как требование к еврею придерживаться лояльности тому государству, где он живет. Попытка многих советских евреев, на разных этапах послевоенной истории этой страны, совмещать патриотизм в отношении страны проживания и преданность Израилю, воспринимался властями СССР как вызов и повод для репрессивных кампаний. Нынешняя ситуация в постсоветских странах в целом иная, и ближе к подходу современных демократических государств, признающих феномен «поли-лояльности» и двойного гражданства, закрепленного межправительственными соглашениями и программами о развитии культурных, научных, деловых и других связей.
Abstract: After the demise of state socialism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, over 1.6 million Jews and their non-Jewish family members from Russia, Ukraine, and other parts of the Former Soviet Union (FSU) emigrated to Israel, the United States, Canada, Germany, and other Western countries. Large communities of former Soviets found themselves in the diverse national contexts of the receiving countries as either refugees or independent migrants.1 Soon after establishing an initial economic and social foothold, former Soviet immigrants started rebuilding their social networks, both within each new homeland and across national borders. These networks, spanning four continents, based on common language, culture, and historic legacies, mainly come to the fore as informal social spaces, although there are also some examples of successful civic associations representing common interests of Russian immigrants or Russian Jewry at large. This introduction examines the roots of Russian Jewish identity in the Former Soviet Union and presents an overview of some major trends in late twentieth century Russian Jewish migration to the West.
Abstract: Krakow's Jews, scattered around the world, reminisce about their hometown. The main reasons for returning to Krakow are recurring images of the past and the urge to see their life story as a coherent whole. The returnees rediscover their hometown through their own traces of memory, although there are shared stops on the way. These are the places associated with their childhood and their family history, but also with the heritage of Krakow's Jews and the Holocaust. Such diverse stops on the trail of memories show dual identity of the city – the city of a once glorious past but also stigmatised by blood, murder and loss. The absence of the families of the murdered Jewish community is equivalent to the lack of natural environment of commemoration. Those returning are looking for a new commemorative milieu, and everyone who remembers will also become part of it (e.g. their school friends, teachers, neighbours etc.). Finally, the returnees are coming back home – to the house where they were born, but one that is not home anymore.
Abstract: How are local understandings of identity, relatedness, and belonging transformed in a global era? How does international tourism affect possibilities for who one can become?
In urban Portugal today, hundreds of individuals trace their ancestry to 15th century Jews forcibly converted to Catholicism, and many now seek to rejoin the Jewish people as a whole. For the most part, however, these self-titled Marranos ("hidden Jews") lack any direct experience of Jews or Judaism, and Portugal's tiny, tightly knit Jewish community offers no clear path of entry. According to Jewish law, to be recognized as a Jew one must be born to a Jewish mother or pursue religious conversion, an anathema to those who feel their ancestors' Judaism was cruelly stolen from them. After centuries of familial Catholicism, and having been refused inclusion locally, how will these self-declared ancestral Jews find belonging among "the Jewish family," writ large? How, that is, can people rejected as strangers face-to-face become members of a global imagined community - not only rhetorically, but experientially?
Leite addresses this question through intimate portraits of the lives and experiences of a network of urban Marranos who sought contact with foreign Jewish tourists and outreach workers as a means of gaining educational and moral support in their quest. Exploring mutual imaginings and direct encounters between Marranos, Portuguese Jews, and foreign Jewish visitors, Unorthodox Kin deftly tracks how visions of self and kin evolve over time and across social spaces, ending in an unexpected path to belonging. In the process, the analysis weaves together a diverse set of current anthropological themes, from intersubjectivity to international tourism, class structures to the construction of identity, cultural logics of relatedness to transcultural communication.
A compelling evocation of how ideas of ancestry shape the present, how feelings of kinship arise among far-flung strangers, and how some find mystical connection in a world said to be disenchanted, Unorthodox Kin will appeal to a wide audience interested in anthropology, sociology, Jewish studies, and religious studies. Its accessible, narrative-driven style makes it especially well suited for introductory and advanced courses in general cultural anthropology, ethnography, theories of identity and social categorization, and the study of globalization, kinship, tourism, and religion.
