Journal Article

Enhanced Agency for Recent Jewish Migrants to the United States

Gold, Steven J.

2013

Overview

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.

• Publisher: Springer,Springer Netherlands,Springer Nature B.V
• Subject: Activism / Anthropology / Autonomy / Community / Demography / Immigration / International migration / Jewish Americans / Jewish culture / Jewish diaspora / Jewish identity / Jewish life & ethics / Jewish migration / Jewish people / Jewish peoples / Migrant communities / Migrants / Migration / Policy making / Religious identity / Religious Studies / Russian culture / Social Sciences / Sociology of Religion / Travel