Russian Jews Research Articles

Sweet Burdens. Welafre and Communality among Russian Jews in Germany. By Sveta Roberman. Albany: SUNY Press, 2015, 234 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Plates. $85.00, hard Bound.

Sweet Burdens. Welafre and Communality among Russian Jews in Germany. By Sveta Roberman. Albany: SUNY Press, 2015, 234 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Plates. $85.00, hard Bound.

Forget Israel—The Future is in Berlin! Local Jews, Russian Immigrants, and Israeli Jews in Berlin and across Germany

It goes against the intuition of some, triggers strong responses from others, and still raises the eyebrows of many: not only did Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) and German Jews withstand attempts to entice them to make aliyah from Germany post-Shoah and become “local Jews,” but also Russian Jews immigrated in higher numbers to Germany than to Israel for a while, and now Israeli Jews are immigrating to Germany, too. Yet do Jews in Germany see themselves in exile from Israel, or has Germany become their home of choice? This paper explores the life-worlds of a select number of individuals who fall into the age cohort of the Third Generation, and who form part of the three numerically largest groups: German Jews and Displaced Persons (DPs) and their descendants (“local Jews”); Russian Jews and their children who came to Germany in the 1990s; and Israelis who started arriving in significant numbers in the 2000s. By depicting their life-worlds, the paper sheds light onto how Jews in the country structure, live, do, experience, and contend their Jewishness collectiveness, and express Jewishnessess individually, and how, effectively, they create diasporic life-worlds, and have a special relationship to Israel but hardly feel in exile from Israel.

‘Peculiar Resistance’: Tuberculosis, Identity and Conflict among Jewish Physicians in Early- Twentieth-Century America

‘Peculiar Resistance’:Tuberculosis, Identity and Conflict among Jewish Physicians in Early- Twentieth-Century America Adrienne Denoyelles (bio) Throughout the nineteenth century, tuberculosis (TB) killed more Americans than any other infectious disease.1 For much of this period, people regarded TB as an age-old, private malady caused largely by hereditary factors. Only after German physician Robert Koch’s discovery of the TB bacillus in the 1880s did its image begin shifting into that of a modern, public scourge requiring medical intervention.2 This reconceptualization also reflected Americans’ reactions to the modern forces transforming their physical and cultural landscape. Prominent citizens questioned whether unchecked immigration, industrialization, and urban development had compromised their nation’s ability to compete for resources, defend its borders, or even reproduce effectively, triggering widespread fears of “race suicide.”3 Tuberculosis, an infectious disease that saps the inner strength and vitality of its victims, embodied these fears perfectly. Social anxiety, together with the fluid etiology of TB, created ideal conditions for associating tuberculosis with “new” immigrants—particularly Eastern European Jews, whose urban backgrounds, indoor occupations, [End Page 349] and popular caricatures suggested strong ties between modernity and physical weakness.4 Immigration Restriction League officer Prescott Hall spoke for many antisemitic Americans when he portrayed Jews as potential societal burdens who were likely to contract tuberculosis shortly after their arrival.5 These depictions of the foreign-born as deadly vectors of disease comprised a central component of the growing debate over immigration, which became increasingly racialized and reinforced by scientific or pseudoscientific arguments.6 While historians have shed considerable light on the role of immigrant physicians as cultural mediators, much work remains in examining the difficult terrain they negotiated as aspiring professionals and as representatives for their minority groups.7 The writings of Maurice Fishberg, Theodore B. Sachs, and Charles David Spivak demonstrate that Jewish immigrant physicians did not speak with one voice as they worked to safeguard their fellows’ health and advancement opportunities. Fishberg, who was also a physical anthropologist, promoted Jews as hardy, tuberculosis-resistant survivors whose cultural values resonated with America’s white middle class. This argument placed him into conflict with Sachs and Spivak, who founded sanitariums to address a growing tuberculosis crisis among the Jewish poor. These approaches in turn faced criticism from Solomon Solis-Cohen, a nativeborn physician whose [End Page 350] assessment of Jewish tuberculosis called for a drastic restructuring of American society altogether. Placing these physicians into conversation through their professional publications yields valuable insights into the challenges of American identity-building for immigrant Jews and their communities—most notably the intra-ethnic and individual conflicts accompanying that process.8 Fishberg, Sachs, Spivak: Common Background Factors A glimpse into these immigrant physicians’ formative years suggests that they, along with a generation of aspiring Russian Jews, encountered discrimination and the challenges of bridging their cultural and national identities long before arriving in the United States. Born between 1860 and 1875 in different regions of present-day Ukraine, Maurice Fishberg, Theodore Sachs, and Charles Spivak grew up amid the social and intellectual ferment of the Haskala, or Jewish Enlightenment movement.9 As the tsarist government began easing restrictions in the 1860s regarding where educated Jewish professionals could live and work, increasing numbers of Jews abandoned traditional religious training to pursue a secular education in state-sponsored gymnasiums and universities.10 There, they hoped to find new paths upward where “a person would [End Page 351] be judged not by his wealth, fame or race, but by his knowledge and character.”11 These opportunities introduced Fishberg, Sachs, and Spivak to a broad range of Western languages and ideas, situating them within an emerging “Russified,” Jewish intelligentsia.12 Many Jewish students at the university level, Sachs and Spivak among them, achieved a measure of solidarity with their Russian classmates through common causes, most notably radical political activism.13 Fishberg, who attended university in the United States, listed his Russian secondary-school education among his professional credentials throughout his thirty-seven-year career, suggesting that he valued it highly as a mark of distinction.14 As they sought social mobility through state-sponsored channels, these men experienced the pressures of representing their ethnic group in non...

Mobilisation familiale : les Gunzburg en 14-18

Family Mobilization : The Gunzburgs during First World War. The Gunzburgs were Russian Jews established in Petrograd, Odesa, Paris, London, Vienna, Lausanne and Braila. Their archives, full of letters, memories, photographs, military papers or passports, offer an intimate chronicle of the First World War. There was no emphasis nor any signs of nationalism in the vision of this very privileged family of bankers : during those hard times, they showed a strong family spirit and a constant military and civilian commitment.

The Tragedy of a Generation: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe, by Joshua M. Karlip

The Tragedy of a Generation: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe, by Joshua M. Karlip. Cambridge, and London, Harvard University Press, 2013. xii, 378 pp. $45.00 US (cloth). Among the dizzying array of political ideologies that circulated among Russian and Eastern European Jews in the early years of the twentieth-century, diaspora nationalism is often overshadowed by the more influential ideologies of Zionism and Marxism. Recent works by Simon Rabinovitch, Kenneth Moss, Adam Rovner and others have sought to correct this imbalance, by turning our attention as well to the diaspora nationalists, Territorialists, and others who sought Jewish national autonomy outside of Palestine. In this, his first book, Joshua Karlip tells the tragic story of a trio of diaspora nationalists--Elias Tcherikower, Yisroel Efroikin, and Zelig Hirsh Kalmanovitch--each of whose career and ideological trajectories followed a similar path from idealism to despair. All three were born in the 1880s in the western provinces of Russia, to which Jewish residence was largely restricted. Tcherikower and Efroikin came from middle-class families, whereas Kalmanovitch had more modest roots. Yet all three managed to receive university educations, a difficult feat given restrictions on Jewish movement and quotas against Jewish students. In the university environment of the Russian fin-de-siecle and immediate aftermath of the 1905 revolution, all three became active in political opposition to the tsarist regime--Tcherikower as a Menshevik, Efroikin in the Jewish Socialist Labor Party (SERP), and Kalmanovitch as a Socialist Zionist. Within a few years, though, they became disillusioned with the possibilities of parliamentary politics in Russia, and instead turned to cultural activity, believing that a return to Jewish traditions, particularly as manifested in secular Yiddish culture, could help save Russian Jewry. Tcherikower first became involved with the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia and then moved to the United States to write for the Yiddish press; Efroikin put his faith in the cooperative movement in Russia; and Kalmanovitch became co-editor of the influential Kletskin press. By the time war broke out, all three were united in their belief in secular Jewish cultural autonomy. Like most Russian Jews, they greeted the fall of the tsar and the February Revolution of 1917 with euphoria, convinced that Jewish cultural autonomy was about to be fulfilled, only to be crestfallen with the Bolshevik takeover. They were once again disappointed when the pogroms destroyed any hopes for Jewish autonomy in Ukraine. Tcherikower now devoted himself to collecting documentation of the pogroms that plagued the region, encompassing a massive archive of testimonies. Efroikin, too, despaired of the shrinking opportunities for autonomy in the new states of Europe, and advocated for the establishment of a type of world Jewish congress. …

Karlip, Joshua M The Tragedy of a Generation: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe (review)

SEER, 93, 4, OCTOBER 2015 770 Bohemian spa to reassert itself — either in reality or, more likely, through the future lens of historical scholarship — as a counter-world of interanimating Jewish cultures. Department of Germanic Studies Sunny S. Yudkoff University of Chicago Karlip, Joshua M. The Tragedy of a Generation: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 2013. x + 378 pp. Notes. Index. $45.00: £33.95. Joshua M. Karlip’s The Tragedy of a Generation: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe is a meticulously researched study of an extraordinarily fecund and fateful period of modern Jewish history. But readers must be aware that the title — which is probably more the choice of Harvard University Press than the author — is misleading. Karlip’s PhD dissertation from the Jewish Theological Seminary (2006) on which this work is based, ‘The Center that Could Not Hold: Afn Sheydveg and the Crisis of Diaspora Nationalism’, is an accurate description of the book. Those who are expecting a comprehensive sweep, encompassing the many varieties of Jewish nationalism, even within a single generation, will be disappointed. This is not what this book offers. Yet if one possesses a fair amount of knowledge of European Jewish history, The Tragedy of a Generation is certain to be greatly appreciated. In a rather odd way, however, the book delivers more than it promises, even with a title of such wide berth. While it mainly comprises an analysis and contextualization of a journal, Oyfn sheydveg, and its three key figures — I. M. Cherikover (1881–1943), Zelig Kalmanovich (1885–1944), and Isroel Efroikin (1884–1954) — and ends in a thunderous clap with the Holocaust, it also may be seen as prefiguring the mind-set which led numerous Jews from universalist outlooks to embrace orthodoxy, ‘essentialist’ (p. 307), and authoritarian forms of Jewish nationalism, uncompromisingly bound to the territory of Palestine (later Israel) (p. 255). The thrust of the study is these men’s conception of, and evolving thought concerning Yiddishism and Diaspora Nationalism. Inherent in this emphasis are the strains they initially rejected: Zionism, Marxism (class struggle) and separatist varieties of Jewish orthodoxy. Yiddish culture and language was supposed to serve as the chief unifying force for Jews, while ‘Jewish statelessness’ was to be ‘celebrated’ (p. 151). Central to Karlip’s analysis is his explication of the extent to which the forms of supposed ‘nonreligious’ Jewish nationalism were deeply beholden to traditional Judaism: ‘A reading of their Oyfn sheydveg articles in light of their biographies unsettles our assumptions REVIEWS 771 regarding the categories of the secular and the religious, the cultural and politically radical and the conservative. More fundamentally, it questions the long-held assumptions of historians that secular Jewish nationalism’s break with traditional religious Judaism proved total and irreversible’ (p. 3). In a standard formulation of a dissertation-turned-book, Karlip states that ‘My study reveals that Diaspora nationalists and Yiddishists, long before the crisis of Nazism, constantly sought to both rebel against the religious tradition and to draw inspiration from it’ (p. 4). Certainly this thesis is well-supported. Yet how different is it from the ideas of classics such as Moses Rischin’s Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914 (Cambridge, MA, 1962), Jonathan Frankel’s Prophesy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1882–1917 (Cambridge and New York, 1981), Ezra Mendelsohn’s Class Struggle in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish Worker’s Movement in Tsarist Russia (Cambridge and New York, 1970) and David Weinberg’s stellar (but often overlooked) Between Tradition and Modernity: Haim Zhitlowski, Simon Dubnow, Ahad Ha-Am, and the Shaping of Modern Jewish Identity (Teaneck, NJ, 1996)? In the author’s own generation, this sensibility is far from absent in the sophisticated scholarship of, for example, Barry Trachtenberg in The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1913–1917 (Syracuse, NY, 2008) and Kenneth Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2009). Rather than the purported thesis of the book its greatest contribution may be its scope: tracing what happened to these people and their thought in the fires of Nazism. ‘On the...

Higher Education for Imperial Russian Jews

Cecile Esther Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Culture: Scholarship for the Nation. 307 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ISBN-13 978-1107014206. $95.00. Today, higher education is often taken for granted, but for national movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries, a university using the nation's native tongue was a key demand. Czechs, for example, won their own section of Charles University in Prague in 1882. Similarly, some courses at the university in Lemberg/L'viv/Lwow were offered in Ukrainian from the 1870s. (1) For Jews--as usual--matters were more complicated. Among the factors contributing to the complexity were the development of both modern Hebrew and as national languages, starkly divergent political groupings, and the muddled issue of the religious--cultural-linguistic elements that would make up the modern Jew. Furthermore, a large portion of educated Jews denied the need for a specifically institution of higher learning altogether. In any case, it was only after the collapse of empires in 1917-18 and the construction of would-be nation-states that the creation of a modern university became an urgent possibility. (2) Cecile Kuznitz's book focuses on the single most famous center of modern scholarship, YIVO, which began work in Wilno (the city's Polish name, Vilna in Yiddish, today's Vilnius) in 1925. YIVO in Wilno lasted just over a decade before being closed down and then destroyed--along with most of Vilna--in the terrible years after September 1939. The influence of YIVO lives on, however, to this day, in part because of the transfer of the institution to New York, where it continues to exist and prosper into the 21st century. Remarkably, given the importance of this institution and its myth for studies, Kuznitz's is the first full-length study of YIVO in any language. Her work is more than just an institutional study of a major center of scholarship. It also provides insight into the development of modern identity and, in particular, of a secular Yiddish-speaking alternative that was almost entirely destroyed by the Holocaust. The story of YIVO, as this book's subtitle suggests, really encompasses the history of the nation. In 1900, it would have been quite difficult--at least in the context of Eastern Europe, including the Russian Empire--to distinguish the and the Jewish nations (in the words are the same). (3) A quarter-century later, when YIVO was founded, that distinction would have been far more apparent, and looking ahead another generation, in 1950, very few would have spoken of a Yiddish nation except in a nostalgic sense. Of course, no one could have predicted the cataclysm of 1939-45, but already in the 1920s many were concerned about the future of Yiddish. Long the main language for Ashkenazic Jews, even in the first generations of emigration, the status and continued importance of was called into question during the interwar period by linguistic acculturation and the growing strength of modern Hebrew as a language and ideology. Only with a strong Yiddish-language school system, including higher education, could retain its importance in the modern world. This is the context in which YIVO was born. Kuznitz begins her book, appropriately, with a chapter on scholarship on before YIVO. In the later 19th century, had established itself--not without considerable effort and controversy--as a literary language. But scholarship? To be sure, in the years preceding World War Es outbreak, S. An-sky (Shloyme Zaynvi Rapoport) had carried out ethnographic studies in Ukraine using Yiddish, but--as in Lithuanian, Slovak, Ukrainian, and other nonstate languages of the period--scientific literature and even vocabulary in was underdeveloped. (4) One of the explicit purposes for which YIVO was founded was to develop this side of the language. …

Exiled in Palestine: The Emigration of Zionist Convicts from the Soviet Union, 1924–1934

This slender volume deals with a minor but interesting episode in the history of Zionism, the expulsion from the Soviet Union to Palestine of more than 1,000 Zionist activists. Ziva Galili teaches Russian and Soviet history at Rutgers University, and Boris Morozov is a research fellow at the Cummings Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Tel Aviv.On the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia had the largest number of Jewish citizens of any country, more than 5 million. Despite the Jews’ reputation for espousing socialism and Communism, the majority of them favored Zionism. Thus in elections held in 1917 to the All-Russian Congress, Zionist candidates won 60 percent of the votes. This book informs us that “the Zionist parties received more than two-thirds of the votes given to Jewish parties in the elections to the Constituent Assembly. In these elections, the provinces of the so-called Pale of Settlement, which had large Jewish minorities, gave a considerably smaller vote to the Bolsheviks than [did] the Russian provinces.”The Bolsheviks, under Vladimir Lenin's influence, were fiercely anti-Zionist. In 1903, Lenin described the “Zionist idea” as “entirely false and reactionary in its essence.” In 1905 he wrote of Jewish nationalism in general and of Zionism in particular: “the idea of Jewish “nationality” bears a clearly reactionary character. … The idea of a Jewish nationality contradicts the interests of the Jewish proletariat, creating in it, directly and indirectly a mood hostile to assimilation, the mood of a ‘ghetto.’” Not surprisingly, soon after seizing power in Russia, the Bolsheviks began to harass and arrest Zionists. This despite the fact, documented in this volume, that Feliks Dzerzhinskii, the head of the secret police, opposed the persecution of Zionists. In a letter of March 1924, addressed to his deputies, he wrote, “I do not understand at all why [Zionists] are persecuted. … The majority of their attacks on us are based on our persecution of them. Persecuted, they are a thousand times more dangerous for us than they would be not persecuted.” Nevertheless, persecuted they were, and more with each year.As this book tells us, conditions for Zionist activity in Soviet Russia worsened appreciably in the mid-1920s. In 1924 thousands of Zionists were arrested, 3,000 in a single day. At this point, a prominent pianist who was friendly with Lev Kamenev, David Shor, proposed that instead of being imprisoned or exiled, active Zionists be allowed to emigrate. There was a precedent for such a solution. In 1922, several imprisoned Mensheviks were permitted to leave Soviet Russia. In July of that year, Lenin told Iosif Stalin that he wanted the leaders of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party expelled from the country. Later that year, the state security organs arrested and deported 120 anti-Soviet intellectuals who were forced to sign vouchers in which they acknowledged that if they refused to leave or tried to return they would be subject to execution.Shor's proposal was for voluntary exile abroad instead of confinement. Under his influence, beginning in 1924 and through the early 1930s, some arrested Zionists were given the opportunity to emigrate to Palestine. Thanks to British cooperation, described in detail in this book, the would-be immigrants reached their goal. Ziva Galili estimates their number at 1,200–1,300. This trickle would become a flood: a few decades later. After the dissolution of the USSR, more than a million Russian Jews emigrated to Israel, and today they constitute some 15 percent of that country's population.

New Evidence on Technology, Trade and Adjustment to Immigration in Israel

In the 1990s, nearly a million Russian Jews emigrated to Israel following the fall of the Iron Curtain. This event was exogenous in nature and resulted in a large increase in the relative supply of skilled labour in Israel. Despite this change in factor abundance occurring in conditions seemingly well suited to an application of the Rybczynski theorem, the evidence so far indicates that changes in sectoral output mix played no role in Israel's adjustment to Russian immigration. Instead, the inflow of factors complementary to skilled labour, such as skill-biased technology, has been put forward by the literature as an explanation for the adjustment process in Israel. By accounting for the extent of occupational downgrading of Russian immigrants and an appropriate amount of time for sectoral changes to occur I present new evidence that changes in the composition in output across sectors was indeed an important adjustment mechanism in Israel. Changes in output mix were of a similar importance to changes in production techniques within sectors in accounting for the increase in skilled labour. Changes in production techniques appear to be consistent with skills biased technical change; sectors with a greater high technology equipment and services input intensity were associated with increased skill upgrading in the workforce in subsequent years.

Russian Jewish Immigrants in the United States

This paper is concerned with the determinants of the English language proficiencies and labor market earnings of adult Russian Jewish male and female immigrants to the United States, compared to other immigrants, using the pooled files of the American Community Survey (2005–09). Although at arrival the Russian Jewish immigrants report lower levels of English skills and earnings, they experience a more rapid improvement over time, and eventually attain parity or higher levels than other immigrants. Moreover, they appear to obtain greater earnings (compared to other immigrants) in the US labor market from their schooling, their time in the United States, and their English proficiency. These findings mirror those found in earlier post-war data (1980–2000 Census) and, to the extent comparable, late 19th and early 20th century studies of Russian Jewish immigrants. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Conference on Contemporary Russian-Speaking Jewish Diaspora, Harvard University, November 13–15, 2011.

Le Yiddishland newyorkais: la mémoire enracinée (The Yiddishland New Yorker: the Ingrained Memory)

More than two million Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe to the USA between 1880 and 1910. Most of them settled in New York City, in the immigrant district of the Lower East Side. As they were uprooted, they tried to recreate a new version of their shtetl, the villages in which most Jews had been forced to reside in Eastern Europe. The Lower East Side thus became their new Yiddishland, their home, where most institutions were modeled after the original ones. Though American Jews had already provided for most necessary institutions like synagogues or schools, what they had established did not match Russian Jews’ habits – besides the fact that Yiddish played a major part in their lives, and was totally ignored by most American Jews. Thus the new immigrants built their own synagogues, schools, and mutual benefit societies. Yiddish culture was vibrant, thanks to Yiddish theatre and the Yiddish press that flourished for decades. Today, though most Jews left the Lower East Side long ago, there remain a few synagogues and shops that have become the symbols of an everlasting Jewish identity, traces of a cherished past, marked by hardship but also the joy of having finally found freedom after centuries of persecution. The Lower East Side has become the place where part of American Jewish history took place, and as such, is a sacred place. Hasia Diner called it the ‘Jewish Plymouth Rock’, underlining the idea that it is the foundation of the American Jewish community, that combines both American and Jewish identities. Jewishness in Europe has been wiped out in many countries, and the descendants of these Russian immigrants can no longer turn to their ancestors’ European ‘home’. It is the Lower East Side that plays the part of the alte heime (the old country), and as such, makes up part of their identity. Memory and identity are deeply rooted in the ‘sacred geography’ of the Lower East Side.

WWII: Jews in the Red Army

This paper focuses on the role of Jews in the Red Army in general and during WWII in particular. Historians estimate that a relatively high number of Jews (1.5 to 1.7 million) fought in the combined Allied Forces during WWII. At the same time, the fact that about 500,000 Jews enlisted or were conscripted into the Red Army has been largely ignored. After the demise of Communist regimes in the 1990s, however, the role of Jews serving in the Red Army began to be mentioned in cultural narratives. Today, especially in Israel, the increased focus on Jewish identity is often rooted in military and armed resistance during WWII. One author has termed this cultural phenomenon as “the migrating past.” [1] Citing examples from established scholarship and examining some previously unpublished documents, this paper sheds light on the heroic aspect of Jewish history during the war. This aspect of heroism, which has not always been recognized, today has moved into the mainstream cultural narrative of Russian Jews, affecting their Jewish identity. [1] (Roberman 2007, p. 1035)

REFLECTIONS ON THE FAILURE OF THE LOVERS OF ZION

In this article, we focus on the rift between the two sociocultural groups that constituted Hibbat Zion—the maskilim and the ultra-Orthodox—and on its overall activity. It seems clear that the Jews in Russia were not ready for a movement aimed at establishing a Jewish national entity in Palestine. After 1885, many of them felt that despite anti-Semitism, their living conditions were improving and only a few among them sought to emigrate to the USA. Only a small minority saw their destination as Eretz Israel, yet it was this relatively inconsequential minority that fuelled the activity of Hibbat Zion, even though only very few of them actually believed in the possibility of settling in Palestine. Hibbat Zion and the Odessa Committee both failed to achieve the goals they set for themselves. Yet, we must acknowledge that the very existence of these Jewish national movements and the evolution of patterns of activity and the leadership they engendered paved the way for the development of a national home for the Jews in Palestine. Their members and their leadership established structures that provided a foundation for those who succeeded them: Herzl's Zionist Organization and the state of Israel.

Bonds to the homeland: Patterns and determinants of women's transnational travel frequency among three immigrant groups in Germany.

Technology developments have changed immigrants' adaptation patterns in modern societies, allowing immigrants to sustain dense, complex connections with homeland while adjusting in the host country, a new phenomenon termed transnationalism. As empirical studies on immigrant transnationalism are still scarce, the purpose of this study was to investigate mean levels and determinants of a core component of transnationalism-transnational travel. Hypotheses were based on context of exiting homeland, living conditions in Germany and demographic and sociocultural variables. Transnational travel behaviour was assessed as frequency of return trips in three immigrant groups in Germany: ethnic Germans, Russian Jews and Turks. Interviews were conducted with 894 women participants from these groups. Results showed substantial transnational travel behaviour in all groups with Turks reporting higher levels than ethnic Germans and Russian Jews. Interindividual differences in transnational travel within groups were also examined. Results indicated similarities (e.g. network size in home country related positively to transnational travel frequency in all groups) and group-specific associations (e.g. co-ethnic identifying related positively to transnational travel frequency among Turks, but negatively for the other groups). Our study highlights the need for a new understanding of immigration and emphasises the consideration of group-specific mechanisms in transnational travel behaviour.

The reinvention of the Promised Land: utopian space and time in Soviet Jewish exodus literature

The Jewish underground movement in the Soviet Union in the second half of the 1960s produced literature that became a part of the counterculture of Soviet dissent. For the first time in decades, Russian Jews identified, to a significant degree, as people of the galut (Jewish Diaspora). The battle for the return to Israel and the new Jewish renaissance in the intellectual sphere of the unofficial led to the emergence of new topographical concepts, which were inspired primarily by the Jewish cultural tradition. In fact, the exodus texts written in the 1960s–1980s represented a new, late Soviet shaping of Zionist prose. They relate to the symbol of the Promised Land as a fundamental projection of aspirations. Late Soviet Zionist texts share the traditional Jewish vision of Israel as an imagined topos of the original homeland that is both retrospective (with reference to the biblical promise of the land and the seizure of Canaan) and prospective (return and redemption). The Exodus story contained in Sefer Shemot becomes a leading poetic, philosophical and at times religiously charged metaphor of liberation and reunification. The re-strengthened collective memory of tradition required biblical symbols to be imbued with new semiotic power.This paper will show that the historical dimension of the events dealt with in the literature often has strong mystical and mythological traits and displays messianic-apocalyptic hopes of salvation. However, alternative literary space and time models represented in the aliyah literature hereby betray their rootedness in the teleology of the communist regime. The powerful Israel utopia reflects both the eschatological time of the Soviet empire and its phantasms of paradise on earth. Late Soviet Zionism and totalitarian discourse are shown to be two space-time utopias.

Jewish Liberal, Russian Conservative: Daniel Pasmanik between Zionism and the Anti-Bolshevik White Movement

It is generally assumed that during the civil war after the Revolution, Russian Jews sided with the Bolsheviks primarily because they were the least antisemitic party at the time. Yet Daniel Pasmanik, a little-known Zionist leader and ideologist, supported the White movement during the civil war, and after his immigration to Paris he even championed fascism to reunite Russia, which had been fragmented by the Bolsheviks. A careful examination of Pasmanik’s writings from his Zionist and anti-Bolshevist years reveals his dual nationalism, providing a more nuanced picture of Zionism and Russia in the revolutionary period. Furthermore, such an examination illuminates several reasons behind Jews’ support of the White movement despite its antisemitism.

Soviet Espionage in Israel, 1973–1991

In June 1967, the Soviet Union abruptly cut off diplomatic relations with Israel and withdrew its embassy staff from Tel-Aviv, including its large KGB Rezidentura. To develop new sources of intelligence in Israel, the KGB recruited under duress hundreds of Russian Jews to spy in Israel in return for allowing their families to leave the Soviet Union. Most of these ‘recruits’ abandoned their task once they reached Israel, leaving Soviet intelligence with only a small number of agents in Israel who were handled by KGB illegal case officers working out of Russian churches. These agents were able to make careers in Israel and obtain some access to confidential military information, but generally failed to reach Israel's inner circle of political and military decision makers. This inner circle was only breached in 1983 by the treachery of a highly placed former Mossad officer who offered his services to the Soviets and became the KGB's best source for secret information deep inside the Israeli government.

Economic Nationalism, Confiscation, and Genocide: A Comparison of the Ottoman and Russian Empires during World War I

Economic Nationalism, Confiscation, and Genocide: A Comparisation of the Ottoman and Russian Empires during World War I This article analyses the development of the Ottoman and Russian governments’ economic persecution of the Armenians and Jews during World War I. It will chart how this policy moved from boycott to discrimination, into confiscation and outright plunder, resulting in economic ruination for the victims. It identifies the main currents and developments of this ruthless policy and how it affected Armenian and Jewish communities. So far there exists no comparative treatment of the expropriation of Ottoman Armenians and Russian Jews during World War I. This article aims to fill that gap by looking at the confiscation process through a combination of approaches, focussing on the development of the legal process, explaining the ideology of economic nationalism, and concretely demonstrating the policy on the ground.

Mixed Economy in the Entrepreneurial Sphere? Ethnic Enterprise in the Wholesale and Retail Trades in the Late Nineteenth-Century United States

This study examines two competing views suggested by the literature on ethnic enterprise: (1) The business activities of groups that have abundant class resources are compartmentalized into niches or enclaves in which entrepreneurs from these groups monopolize the rewards of their superior assets through closure or hegemony; (2) The business activities of such advantaged groups will enhance the business activities of groups that have limited class resources when porous ethnic boundaries give rise to a mixed economy of mutually beneficial inter-group relationships. Regression analyses of Census data on retail and wholesale enterprise in the late nineteenth-century United States accord with the first view. Class-resource-advantaged groups (e.g., native whites) retained the benefits of wholesale entrepreneurship within their own respective ethnic economies and were not involved in mutually beneficial relationships with class-resource-disadvantaged groups that had high (e.g., Russian Jews) or low levels of retail entrepreneurship (e.g., the Irish).

Myths and counter-myths about Odessa’s Jewish intelligentsia during the late Tsarist period

This paper examines the Odessa myth in the context of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia of the nineteenth century. In a study of three contexts – the origins of the Russian-Jewish newspaper Rassvet; the (fictional) memoirs of Moshe Leib Lilienblum and Mendele Mocher Sforim (Solomon Abramovitch) who made Odessa their home; and the 1902 debates over schools in the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia – Horowitz discovers that for every myth, there is a counter-myth. Jewish Odessa of the nineteenth century was involved in a battle over its identity and definition. Rather than embodying a single ideological position, the Jewish intelligentsia tells a messy, complicated, and contradictory story of the development of the city and the evolution of the intelligentsia itself.