Abstract
As recently as the late 1970s and 1980s, a broad consensus in both Israel and US Jewish communities asserted that Israel should be the primary destination for Jewish migrants. Hebrew terms like yordim (those who go down) and noshrim (dropouts) stigmatized “Jewish communal deviants” who chose to settle outside of Israel. Moreover, whether they established themselves in Tel Aviv or Los Angeles, Jewish migrants were expected to cooperate with the religious, economic, political, cultural, and national agendas created for them by their host communities. While migrants had their own preferences about resettlement, they had limited ability to act on them. However, by the mid-1990s, a series of political, economic, ideological and demographic developments had transformed the status and treatment of Jewish migrants. The United States had received hundreds of thousands of Jewish migrants, either in competition with, or from, Israel. The American Jewish community, in consort with migrant activists and Israel itself, extended an array of social, economic, and religious services to Jewish migrants. And in both Israel and the United States, migrant populations increasingly selected their own patterns of national, political, linguistic, cultural, and religious identity—conforming to the agendas of host communities only in ways that they themselves chose. The net effect of these recent transformations has been to greatly enhance the autonomy of Jewish migrants. In this, we see a movement away from nationally-bounded forms of Jewish identity within Israel, the United States and other settings, and their replacement with flexible and less geographically fixed forms of Jewish identification. This article draws on in-depth interviews with Jewish migrants and resettlement staff to discuss recent transformations among Jewish migrants in the United States. It reviews some of the causes of these changes and considers their impacts. It concludes that skilled Jewish migrants with access to multiple places and ways of settlement have a great deal to offer the American Jewish community, but also considerable freedom to decide how and where they will live. Such factors transform established understandings of American Jewish life and need to be considered by scholars and policy makers involved in Jewish population research.
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Notes
Research on Soviet Jews was conducted between 1982 and 1994, primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. I conducted in-depth interviews with 68 émigrés and 25 non-refugee service providers. I also did extensive participant observation as a volunteer English teacher in émigré homes, businesses, and other settings. Finally, I served for two years as a board member in an agency that assisted Soviet Jewish immigrants (Gold 1992, 1995). To learn about the experience of Israeli immigrants, I worked in conjunction with five Hebrew-speaking women research assistants to collect several forms of qualitative data between June 1991 and July 2004 (Gold and Hart 2009). A major source was 194 in-depth interviews (conducted in both Hebrew and English) with Israeli immigrants and others knowledgeable about their community in the Los Angeles area. Additional interviews were conducted in suburban Detroit and in New York City. Referrals to Israeli respondents were obtained from a variety of sources, including Jewish communal agencies, the Israeli Consulate, representatives of various Israeli associations, research assistants’ acquaintances, and snowball referrals. Questions were selected from prepared lists of interview issues (Gold 2002).
Following the events of 9-11-2001, up to 100 undocumented Israelis in the United States were detained, with some being deported. Many had been involved in informal retail activities, such as door-to-door sales of artworks and the marketing of cosmetics and trinkets in shopping mall kiosks (Lewin and Cowan 2001; Radler 2001).
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Gold, S.J. Enhanced Agency for Recent Jewish Migrants to the United States. Cont Jewry 33, 145–167 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-013-9100-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-013-9100-z