Leaving Zion


Book Description

Explores Jewish emigration from Palestine and Israel during the critical period between 1945 and the late 1950s by weaving together the perspectives of governments, aid organizations, Jewish communities and the personal stories of individual migrants.




Jewish Emigrants from Israel in the United States


Book Description

In Jewish Population Studies 19 (Papers in Jewish Demography, 1985), 251-266. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a rough estimate of the total number of Israeli emigrants in the United States; to analyze and describe the characteristics of those who were born in Israel and were enumerated in the 1980 census of the United States and to compare the characteristics of the latter with those of the Israeli-born population living in Israel.




The New Jewish Diaspora


Book Description

In 1900 over five million Jews lived in the Russian empire; today, there are four times as many Russian-speaking Jews residing outside the former Soviet Union than there are in that region. The New Jewish Diaspora is the first English-language study of the Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora. This migration has made deep marks on the social, cultural, and political terrain of many countries, in particular the United States, Israel, and Germany. The contributors examine the varied ways these immigrants have adapted to new environments, while identifying the common cultural bonds that continue to unite them. Assembling an international array of experts on the Soviet and post-Soviet Jewish diaspora, the book makes room for a wide range of scholarly approaches, allowing readers to appreciate the significance of this migration from many different angles. Some chapters offer data-driven analyses that seek to quantify the impact Russian-speaking Jewish populations are making in their adoptive countries and their adaptations there. Others take a more ethnographic approach, using interviews and observations to determine how these immigrants integrate their old traditions and affiliations into their new identities. Further chapters examine how, despite the oceans separating them, members of this diaspora form imagined communities within cyberspace and through literature, enabling them to keep their shared culture alive. Above all, the scholars in The New Jewish Diaspora place the migration of Russian-speaking Jews in its historical and social contexts, showing where it fits within the larger historic saga of the Jewish diaspora, exploring its dynamic engagement with the contemporary world, and pointing to future paths these immigrants and their descendants might follow.




American Israelis


Book Description

This book is a scientific and comprehensive analysis of Israelis who live in the United States. Using different complementary sources of data, and through cutting-edge approaches in the social sciences, this volume examines the settlement patterns of the Israeli immigrants, their social profile, their economic achievements, their Americanization processes, as well as the nature and rhythm of their Jewish identification including changes in attachment to the homeland. The characteristics of the immigrants shed light on Israeli society. At the same time they also have important implications for the Jewish community in the host country and on Jewish continuity in America. "...Rebhun and Lev Ari do what the title outlines. They offer nuanced and in-depth insights into transnationalism, identity and diaspora of American Jewish Israelis. Based on their theoretical and methodological expertise, the book can be recommended to scholars of these areas, regardless of its focus on Israel. For experts, American Israelis is a gem: it offers so much in terms of data and analysis that it makes for many questions, which should be addressed in further research, qualitative and quantitative alike." Dani Kranz, Erfurt University "This book is central to Israeli Studies as it has comprehensive and current data on Israelis in America." Yoram Bitton, Columbia University




An Unpromising Land


Book Description

The Jewish migration at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries was one of the dramatic events that changed the Jewish people in modern times. Millions of Jews sought to escape the distressful conditions of their lives in Eastern Europe and find a better future for themselves and their families overseas. The vast majority of the Jewish migrants went to the United States, and others, in smaller numbers, reached Argentina, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. From the beginning of the twentieth century until the First World War, about 35,000 Jews reached Palestine. Because of this difference in scale and because of the place the land of Israel possesses in Jewish thought, historians and social scientists have tended to apply different criteria to immigration, stressing the uniqueness of Jewish immigration to Palestine and the importance of the Zionist ideology as a central factor in that immigration. This book questions this assumption, and presents a more complex picture both of the causes of immigration to Palestine and of the mass of immigrants who reached the port of Jaffa in the years 1904–1914.




The Immigrant Jew in America


Book Description




Aliya


Book Description

a·li·ya, n., also aliyah. pl. aliyas or aliyot. The immigration of Jews into Israel. Why would American Jews---not just materially successful in this country but perhaps for the first time in the two-thousand-year Jewish Diaspora truly socially accepted and at home---choose to leave the material comforts, safety, and peace of the United States for the uncertainty and violence of Israel? Still, aliya is a phenomenon that affects all American Jews. Understanding this phenomenon means understanding what is arguably the fundamental question of American Jewry; it is that question that Liel Leibovitz sets out to answer in Aliya. Leibovitz focuses on the stories of three generations of immigrants. Marlin and Betty Levin, searching for excitement and ideology, traveled to Palestine before Israel was even created. There, with Marlin working as a reporter and Betty volunteering with the Jewish underground movement, the two witnessed the bloody birth of the Jewish state. Two decades later, Mike Ginsberg, overcome with awe at the heroic Jews who fought for their country in the l967 war, immigrated as well and was involved in much of Israel's tumultuous history, including the Yom Kippur War. He was a member of Kibbutz Misgav Am during the famous terrorist attack on the infants' nursery there, and he helped repel numerous waves of terrorists attacks on his kibbutz. Finally, Danny and Sharon Kalker and their children left their home in Queens, New York, to move to a West Bank settlement in 2001, during one of the most unsettled phases in Israel's existence. With a keen writer's eye and unfeigned passion for his subject, Leibovitz explores the fears, hopes, and dreams of the American-Jewish immigrants to Israel and the journey they undertook, a journey that lies at the very heart of what it means to be a Jew.




After They Closed the Gates


Book Description

In 1921 and 1924, the United States passed laws to sharply reduce the influx of immigrants into the country. By allocating only small quotas to the nations of southern and eastern Europe, and banning almost all immigration from Asia, the new laws were supposed to stem the tide of foreigners considered especially inferior and dangerous. However, immigrants continued to come, sailing into the port of New York with fake passports, or from Cuba to Florida, hidden in the holds of boats loaded with contraband liquor. Jews, one of the main targets of the quota laws, figured prominently in the new international underworld of illegal immigration. However, they ultimately managed to escape permanent association with the identity of the “illegal alien” in a way that other groups, such as Mexicans, thus far, have not. In After They Closed the Gates, Libby Garland tells the untold stories of the Jewish migrants and smugglers involved in that underworld, showing how such stories contributed to growing national anxieties about illegal immigration. Garland also helps us understand how Jews were linked to, and then unlinked from, the specter of illegal immigration. By tracing this complex history, Garland offers compelling insights into the contingent nature of citizenship, belonging, and Americanness.




From New Zion to Old Zion


Book Description

From New Zion to Old Zion analyzes the migration of American Jews to Palestine between the two World Wars and explores the contribution of these settlers to the building of Palestine. American Aliyah (immigration to Palestine) began in the mid-nineteenth century fueled by the desire of American Jews to study Torah and by their wish to live and be buried in the Holy Land. His movement of people-men and women-increased between World War I and II, in direct contrast to European Jewry’s desire to immigrate to the United States. Why would American Jews want to leave America, and what characterized their resettlement? From New Zion to Old Zion analyzes the migration of American Jews to Palestine between the two world wars and explores the contribution of these settlers to the building of Palestine. From New Zion to Old Zion draws upon international archival correspondence, newspapers, maps, photographs, interviews, and fieldwork to provide students and scholars of immigration and settlement processes, the Yishuv (Jewish community in Palestine), and America-Holy Land studies a well-researched portrait of Aliyah.




Old Lives and New


Book Description

This is the moving story of a number of individuals who made the difficult and sometimes hazardous decision to leave their home, family, and friends and start new lives in Israel and the United States. Edith Rogovin Frankel interviews them twice: shortly after they leave the Soviet Union in the late 1970s and again, twenty-five years later, when they have long been settled in their new lives. Their experiences—from their formative years in the Soviet Union, to their decisions to leave, to their struggles to receive permission to emigrate—illuminate the complex history of Soviet Jews. The story of their emigration represents the universal tale of anyone who has ever migrated, hoping to find a new and better life elsewhere. Above all, this is the personal story of these men and women, of the desires that inspired them and of the dogged faith that kept them going.