Wandering Jews

Global Jewish Migration

Steven J. Gold

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781557539991
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia ebraica

Despite the importance of historical and contemporary migration to the American Jewish community, popular awareness of the diversity and complexity of the American Jewish migration legacy is limited and largely focused upon Yiddish-speaking Jews who left the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1920 to settle in eastern and midwestern cities.

Wandering Jews provides readers with a broader understanding of the Jewish experience of migration in the United States and elsewhere. It describes the record of a wide variety of Jewish migrant groups, including those encountering different locations of settlement, historical periods, and facets of the migration experience. While migrants who left the Pale of Settlement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are discussed, the volume's authors also explore less well-studied topics. These include the fate of contemporary Jewish academics who seek to build communities in midwestern college towns; the adaptation experience of recent Jewish migrants from Latin America, Israel, and the former Soviet Union; the adjustment of Iranian Jews; the experience of contemporary Jewish migrants in France and Belgium; the return of Israelis living abroad; and a number of other topics. Interdisciplinary, the volume draws upon history, sociology, geography, and other fields.

Written in a lively and accessible style, Wandering Jews will appeal to a wide range of readers, including students and scholars in Jewish studies, international migration, history, ethnic studies, and religious studies, as well as general-interest readers.

Jewish Identity among Contemporary Jewish Immigrants in the United States

by Laura Limonic

INTRODUCTION

Jewish identity, practice, culture and religiosity are intrinsically tied to the nations where Jews reside. National economic and political structures impact the development of Jewish communities while cultural and social influences are important factors in the construction of Jewish identities. Jews from Latin America, for example, largely function within close-knit, centrally organized communities, ones where non-religious communal life is at the heart of Jewish identity. For Israeli Jews, on the other hand, Jewish religious life is interwoven with the Israeli political and social landscape. Other global Jewish communities have formed under diverse constraints. Some members of global Jewish communities may have little knowledge of Jewish religious rites, as was the case for many of the Jews in the former Soviet Union, whereas other communities might place religiosity and adherence to religious rites at the center of Jewish identity. What happens when members of these communities migrate and settle in the United States? How do American Jewish culture and communal structures affect their lived Jewish experience? In this chapter, I compare three immigrant groups from distinct geographic locations: the former Soviet Union, Israel and Latin America. By comparing demographic and socio-economic characteristics as well as markers of Jewish identity and behavior across these three immigrant groups we can widen our understanding of immigrant communities that comprise the larger US Jewish group. I use data from the Pew Research Center,¹ to construct variables aimed at measuring Jewish identity. Scales of Jewish identity are composed and measured across Jewish immigrant groups and Jewish native-born adults in the United States—providing insight into the changing nature of Jewish identity and the process of assimilation into the larger US Jewish community.

IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES

At the turn of the twentieth century, millions of immigrants from multiple countries and of diverse faiths descended upon the shores of the United States. These immigrants brought with them new languages, foods, cultures and religious practices. During the peak of this large migration wave, Protestantism was the dominant US religion. Yet the United States, with its constitutional emphasis on religious pluralism, was primed to accept new religious groups, even if de facto acceptance would arrive decades later.² The descendants of this first generation of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from eastern and southern Europe created new ethno-religious communities and eventually forged a path for the integration of Catholicism and Judaism as part of the tripartite Judeo-Christian civil religion in the United States.³ The children and grandchildren of the large wave of southern and eastern European immigrants not only changed the US religious landscape, they themselves altered their own religious practices. One example of this is the increased participation in Reform Judaism which espouses a Protestant style of convening and practicing religion and is more palatable and adaptable to being Jewish in the United States.⁴

Jewish Immigrants

The majority of the descendant of the first wave of immigrants successfully integrated into US mainstream culture. The children and grandchildren of Italian, Polish, Irish and Jewish immigrants seized opportunities that allowed them to assimilate into the economic, social and political landscape.⁵ Jews in particular made deep in-roads into American society, while also influencing US culture.⁶ The first group of Jewish immigrants arrived from Germany in the mid-1800s, assimilating into the middle class and gaining a strong economic foothold through commercial activities in the retail and clothing trades.⁷ Subsequent waves of Jewish immigrants of varying socio-economic backgrounds and levels of religiosity, largely from eastern Europe arrived in the United States and faced discrimination from native-born Americans and their German coreligionists.⁸ Over time, turn of the century Jewish immigrants adapted to the realities of life in the United States and descendants of German as well as eastern European Jews morphed into an “American Judaism,” which grew directly out of interaction with US society.

Contemporary Jewish Immigration

The decades following the large wave of immigration to the United States witnessed a paucity of new arrivals due to a combination of factors. The Great Depression and World War II were preceded by the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act which essentially banned new immigrants from “undesirable” regions, particularly southern and eastern Europe. Post-World War II, the United States began accepting refugees from the war, but the majority of contemporary immigrants arrived as a result of the change in immigration laws in 1965. The Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 paved the way for millions of new immigrants from all over the world to enter the United States. Post 1965, Jewish immigrants, many of whom were fleeing politically tenuous situations in their home countries, made the United States their home. The demise of the Soviet bloc was the catalyst for the largest wave of immigrations of Jews from the FSU.⁹ Numerous political and economic crisis prompted Jews from Latin America to leave their communities and immigrate to the United States. Latin American regional out-migration streams occurred in waves. Peruvian Jews made their way to Miami during the height of the Shining Path guerrilla movement in the 1980s, whereas the largest wave of Argentine Jews arrived during the economic crisis of 2001. Venezuelan Jews are the ne...