jewish immigration research paper

Session Archive

April 7, 2024, about the symposium.

Credit: Coming to America, 1952, Louis Stettner, © Louis Stettner Estate 2024

Reconsidering Jewish Migration to the United States: A Century of Controversy marks the 100th anniversary of the pivotal Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 by exploring a century of Jewish engagement with immigration at the national and international level. The symposium brings together nationally renowned scholars and experts to examine how the 1924 act restricted immigration from the interwar period to the 1960s, how Jews and other groups were affected, and how the liberalization of immigration law after the 1960s produced major demographic changes in the United States and set the stage for contemporary political controversies over the role of immigration in American life.

Purchase Tickets

The symposium is generously sponsored by the Selz Foundation, the David Berg Foundation, and supplemented by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. The symposium is the fifth installment in a larger series of public symposia sponsored by the Center for Jewish History’s  Jewish Public History Forum .

A century has passed since Congress voted to restrict immigration to the United States through the Johnson-Reed Act. Two distinguished historians of immigration examine how the act came to be and the kind of transformation it wrought not only in American immigration policy but in widespread attitudes and assumptions. The significance of the Johnson-Reed Act reverberated throughout American society and endures even after new legislation revising the rules around immigration. This moment of furious debate over immigration and how the United States should police its southern border calls for historical perspectives on how Americans understood immigration in the past and why they changed their minds.

New York University

Columbia University

University of Michigan

Passage of The Johnson-Reed Act in 1924 reflected and anticipated larger nativist trends in the United States. On the one hand, the 1924 law responded to a decades-long animus towards any number of immigrant groups seeking refuge in the United States. On the other, it set a restriction baseline that would determine the course of immigration history for the next century. Panelists studying a diverse set of immigrant groups will gather to discuss nativism, the specific impact of the Johnson-Reed Act, and then explore its significance in the decades that followed.

Gustavus Adolphus College

Georgetown University

University of Maryland

San Francisco State University

With the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act, rates of immigration to the United States fell by eighty percent. But numbers tell only part of the story. This panel explores how migrants navigated the quota system through both legal and illegal means. Panelists will consider how individuals and communities worked within the constraints of the new legislation and also campaigned to overturn the law. Finally, this session will ask what this historical period reveals about enduring notions of citizenship, borders, and national identity.

University of California, Santa Cruz

Kingsborough Community College/Graduate Center (CUNY)

University of Pennsylvania

In 1965, Congress passed the Hart-Celler Act abolishing national origins quotas that had long guided American immigration policy. Heralded by many as the opening of American gates, the new legislation had a far more complicated history and set of consequences, which serves as the topic of this panel. In place of national origins quotas, the law instituted several classificatory schemes that continued to distinguish between desirable and undesirable immigrants and put a special cap on the number of permissible immigrants from the Western hemisphere. Entangled domestic and foreign policy goals produced a late-twentieth-century system that relied on unprecedented levels of government funds to patrol borders, even as refugee resettlement projects also built new political coalitions and movements.

Tulane University

Harvard University

Vanderbilt University

Temple University

The same fears that led to the restrictions of the Johnson-Reed Act continue to resonate in American society today. In recent years, conspiracy theories about immigration have had a devastating impact on both present-day immigrants and native-born American Jews. In this panel, white supremacy scholar Kathleen Blee and Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society President Mark Hetfield will discuss the connections between contemporary xenophobia and antisemitism, and the impact of both on immigration policy and the current election cycle.

President & CEO, HIAS

University of Pittsburgh

Katherine Benton-Cohen

Katherine Benton-Cohen is Professor of History at Georgetown University. She is the author of Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy (Harvard, 2018) and Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (Harvard, 2009). She served as historical advisor to the film Bisbee ’17, a New York Times best film of the year in 2018. Benton- Cohen has held numerous national fellowships and has been a visiting scholar in Tokyo and Germany. She is currently writing a global history of the Phelps-Dodge copper-mining and family empire in New York, the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, and the Middle East.

Lila Corwin Berman

Lila Corwin Berman holds the Murray Friedman Chair of American Jewish History at Temple University, where she directs the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History. Her most recent book, The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution , has been awarded prizes from the Organization of American Historians and the American Jewish Historical Society. Her articles have appeared in many scholarly publications, including the American Historical Review and the Journal of American History , and she has written guest columns for the Washington Post , the Forward , and the Chronicle of Higher Education . She is currently writing a book called American Jewish Citizenship: An Untold History .

Dr. Kathleen Blee

Dr. Kathleen Blee is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. She has studied U.S. extremist white supremacist and antisemitic groups for over forty years and has published nine books, including Out of Hiding: Extremist White Supremacism and How It Can be Stopped (2024, co-authored with Robert Futrell and Pete Simi), and over a hundred journal articles and book chapters. She has lectured extensively in the U.S. and Europe, and has worked with multiple communities, public officials, media outlets, and educational and professional groups on the proliferation of organized hate.

Nathaniel Deutsch

Nathaniel Deutsch is Distinguished Professor of History and the Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he holds the Baumgarten Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies. He has served as the Workmen’s Circle/Dr. Emmanuel Patt Visiting Professor in Eastern European Jewish Studies at the YIVO Institute. Deutsch is the author of a number of books, including The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement (Harvard University Press), for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and, most recently, with Michael Casper, A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg (Yale University Press), which has won a National Jewish Book Award, the Saul Viener Book Prize, and a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award.

Hasia Diner

Hasia Diner is Professor Emerita, New York University, where she directs the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History. A Guggenheim winner, she specializes in American Jewish history and broadly, immigration history. She co-authored Immigration: An American History (Yale, 2022). Opening Doors: How the Unlikely Alliance between Irish and Jews Changed America (St. Martin’s, 2024) is forthcoming in July. A past president of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and former chair of the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society, she was elected to the Society of American Historians and the American Academy for Jewish Research.

Dr. Marc Dollinger

Dr. Marc Dollinger holds the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and Social Responsibility at San Francisco State University. Professor Dollinger is author of four scholarly books in American Jewish history, most recently Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s .

U.S. Representative Adriano Espaillat

Representative Adriano Espaillat is the first Dominican American to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. His district includes Harlem, East Harlem, West Harlem, Hamilton Heights, Washington Heights, Inwood, Marble Hill, and the north-west Bronx.

Rep. Espaillat serves as a member of the influential U.S. House Committee on Appropriations. He also serves on the House Budget Committee. Rep. Espaillat is Deputy Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and is Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. He is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and is a Senior Whip of the Democratic Caucus. During the 116th Congress, Rep. Espaillat introduced more than 40 bills and resolutions aimed at improving the lives of constituents including protecting the rights of immigrants.

Libby Garland

Libby Garland is Professor of History at Kingsborough Community College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she teaches courses on migration history, border studies, and urban studies. She is the author of After They Closed the Gates: Jewish Illegal Immigration to the United States, 1921-1965 .

Mark Hetfield

Mark Hetfield first joined HIAS (the Jewish community’s international refugee agency) in 1989 as a caseworker in Rome, Italy. He has worked for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a large law firm as an immigration attorney, and has held multiple roles at HIAS over the years. Mark was appointed President and CEO of HIAS in 2013. He is a frequent commentator and writer on refugee issues on television, radio, newspapers, and in other media. Mark holds both a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service and a Juris Doctor from Georgetown University, where he is also earning an MBA.

Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof

Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof is Professor of History at Harvard University. He is the author of A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York after 1950 and Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean (winner of the Theodore Saloutos Prize, co-winner of the Kenneth Jackson Prize), and the co-editor and co-translator with Paulina Alberto and George Reid Andrews of Voices of the Race, Black Newspapers in Latin America, 1870-1960 . He directed the Immigrant Justice Lab at the University of Michigan from 2017-2022, work that was recognized with an ACLS-Mellon Scholars-in-Society Fellowship in 2020-2021.

Madeline Y. Hsu

Madeline Y. Hsu teaches history and Asian American Studies at the University of Maryland where she is director of the Center for Global Migration Studies. Her award-winning books include Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882-1943 (2000) and The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (2015). In 2016, she published Asian American History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press). Please visit her K-12 curriculum project Teach Immigration History produced in collaboration with the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.

Shaul Kelner

Shaul Kelner is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Sociology at Vanderbilt University. His new book, A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized to Free Soviet Jews (NYU Press, 2024), will be published this Passover.

Rachel Kranson

Rachel Kranson is the Director of Jewish Studies and Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Kranson is the co-editor of A Jewish Feminine Mystique: Jewish Women in Postwar America (2010, National Jewish Book Award Finalist) and author of Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America (2017, First Book Award Finalist, Immigration and Ethnic History Society). In the Spring 2024 semester, she is serving as a scholar-in-residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute.

Borough President Mark Levine

Mark Levine , Manhattan Borough President since January 2022, previously represented parts of Upper Manhattan as a City Council member. During his eight years in the Council, he championed tenants' rights, public health, and equity in schools, transit, parks, and housing and was the Health Committee chair. Prior to his work in the Council, Mark founded a community credit union in Washington Heights, and he began his career as a bilingual math and science teacher in the South Bronx.

Jana K. Lipman

Jana K. Lipman  is Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of In Camps: Vietnamese Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and Repatriates (UC Press, 2020), Guantanamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution (UC Press, 2009), co-translator of Ship of Fate: Memoir of a Vietnamese Repatriate by Tr`ân Đình Tru . (University of Hawaii Press, 2017), and co-editor of Making the Empire Work: Labor and U.S. Imperialism (NYU Press, 2015). She was a Fulbright Scholar at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna in 2022.

Mireya Loza

Mireya Loza is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and the American Studies Program at Georgetown University. Her areas of research include immigration history and labor history. Her book, Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual and Political Freedom (UNC Press), examines America’s largest guest worker program. Her first book won the 2017 Theodore Saloutos Book Prize awarded by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and the Smithsonian Secretary’s Research Prize. Her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Smithsonian Institution’s Latino Center.

Maddalena Marinari

Maddalena Marinari teaches U.S. history at Gustavus Adolphus College. She has published extensively on immigration restriction and immigrant mobilization. She is the author of Unwanted: Italian and Jewish Mobilization Against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882-1965 and a co-editor of three edited volumes on different aspects of US immigration in the twentieth century. Along with Erika Lee, she has also co-edited a special issue of the Journal of American History on the hundredth anniversary of the passage of the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924. She is the president elect of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.

Deborah Dash Moore

Deborah Dash Moore is Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of History and Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She specializes in 20th-century urban Jewish history. Her recent book, Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Mid-Century New York (2023) won a National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies. Currently she serves as editor in chief of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, a ten-volume anthology of original sources translated into English from the biblical period to 2005, selected by leading scholars.

Mae Ngai is Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History at Columbia University. She is author of Impossible Subjects (2004), The Lucky Ones (2010), and The Chinese Question (2021), which won the Bancroft Prize. She writes on immigration and Asian American issues for the New York Times , The Atlantic , Dissent , and other publications. Ngai is now completing Nation of Immigrants: A Short History of an Idea .

Beth S. Wenger

Beth S. Wenger is Moritz and Josephine Berg Professor of History and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of History Lessons: The Creation of American Jewish Heritage ; New York Jews and the Great Depression : Uncertain Promise , and The Jewish Americans: Three Centuries of Jewish Voices in America . Wenger has worked on numerous public history projects, including museum exhibitions and documentary films.

Ticket Info

In person : $36 general; $28 members Zoom livestream : Pay what you wish

organized with support from

• Say Kaddish

Trending Topics:

• Rosh Hashanah Starts Oct. 2
• Say Kaddish Daily
• Learn Yiddish
• Healing service Mondays at 12:15 ET

Welcome to The Hub for online Jewish classes and events. Find an upcoming event hosted by Jewish organizations across the world, or explore our on-demand section to view recordings of past events.

Jewish Immigration To The U.S. Between 1820 and 1924

Hosted By: The Museum of Jewish Heritage-- A Living Memorial to the Holocaust

Between 1820 and 1924, there was a large influx of Jewish immigrants to the United States from Eastern and Central Europe. They were escaping oppressive laws that many parts of Europe passed that targeted Jews, along with increased violence from pogroms and riots. These immigrants hoped that the United States would provide them with a fresh start and more freedom. However, this was not always the case, as many Jews continued to experience antisemitism in their new home.

Explore Jewish immigration in the United States, presented by Hasia Diner , the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at New York University, in conversation with  Daniel Okrent , author of  The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law that Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America.  They will discuss the different waves of immigration during this period, the specific reasons why Jews left Europe, and why they chose the United States as their new home.

The event listed here is hosted by a third party. My Jewish Learning/70 Faces Media is not responsible for its content or for errors in the listing.

Never miss an event!

Sign up to receive daily events in your inbox

Related events

After orthodoxy: cultural creativity and the break with tradition.

Hosted by: YIVO

October 7 and its Aftermath: Mending the Broken Jewish Story to Find Our Resilience

Hosted by: 3GNY, Jewish Resilience Project

Discover More

Orthodoxy’s power.

What is it about Orthodoxy that has kept it alive in a marketplace of beliefs?

Jews & Non-Jews

Modern Orthodoxy & the Chosen People

The requirements and transcendent possibilities of Jewish law are the bases of Jewish distinctness.

JOFA's Torch

Judaism After Orthodoxy: Insights into the “OTD” Movement

Many of us have read some of the recent memoirs written by people who have left their Orthodox community of ...

Library of Congress

Exhibitions.

• Ask a Librarian
• Digital Collections
• Library Catalogs

• Exhibitions Home
• Current Exhibitions
• All Exhibitions
• Loan Procedures for Institutions
• Special Presentations

From Haven to Home: 350 Years of Jewish Life in America A Century of Immigration, 1820-1924

Albert Potter (1903-1937) Eastside New York , between 1931 and 1935. Woodcut print. Ben and Beatrice Goldstein Foundation Collection. Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (67)

In the century spanning the years 1820 through 1924, an increasingly steady flow of Jews made their way to America, culminating in a massive surge of immigrants towards the beginning of the twentieth century. Impelled by economic hardship, persecution, and the great social and political upheavals of the nineteenth century--industrialization, overpopulation, and urbanization--millions of Europe's Jews left their towns and villages and embarked on the arduous journey to the "Golden Land" of America.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Jewish immigrants came mostly, though not exclusively, from Central Europe. In addition to settling in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, groups of German-speaking Jews made their way to Cincinnati, Albany, Cleveland, Louisville, Minneapolis, St. Louis, New Orleans, San Francisco, and dozens of small towns across the United States. During this period there was an almost hundred-fold increase in America's Jewish population from some 3,000 in 1820 to as many as 300,000 in 1880.

Between 1881 and 1924, the migration shifted from Central Europe eastward, with over two-and- one-half million East European Jews propelled from their native lands by persecution and the lack of economic opportunity. Most of those who arrived as part of this huge influx settled in cities where they clustered in districts close to downtowns, joined the working class, spoke Yiddish, and built strong networks of cultural, spiritual, voluntary, and social organizations. This period of immigration came to an end with the passage of restrictive laws in 1921 and 1924. Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe to the United States never again reached the levels that it did before 1920.

Prayer Book for Travelers to America

This miniature daily prayer book was printed in Germany in 1842, "especially for travelers by sea to the nation of America." It is the first of three editions of this tiny prayer book published between 1840 and 1860--a period when Jews from German lands immigrated to this country in the tens-of-thousands. Between 1840 and 1860 the Jewish population of this country ballooned from 15,000 to 150,000. Political unrest and economic hardship were primary motivating factors for this migration.

Tefilah mi-kol ha-shanah: Minhah Ketanah [Prayers of the Entire Year: Minor Offering]. Fürth: Zurndorffer & Sommer, 1842. Hebraic Section , Library of Congress (40)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj0

"Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor…"

Emma Lazarus, who had worked with East European immigrants through her association with the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society, composed "The New Colossus" in 1883 as part of a fundraising campaign for erecting the Statue of Liberty. In 1903, a tablet with her words--"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"--was affixed to the statue's base. These words remain the quintessential expression of America's vision of itself as a haven for those denied freedom and opportunity in their native lands. Shown here is a copy of the sonnet in the author's own hand.

Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) "The New Colossus" [titled "Sonnet" in notebook] 1883. Manuscript poem, bound in journal. Courtesy of the American Jewish Historical Society, New York and Newton Centre, Massachusetts (41)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj1

Back to top

Deed to the Statue of Liberty

This deed, dated July 4, 1884, marks the presentation of Frederic Auguste Bartholdi's colossal statue, "Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World" to the people of the United States from the "people of the Republic of France . . . attesting to their abiding friendship." In 1886, the Statue of Liberty was erected on its pedestal at Bedloe's Island in New York Harbor. At the inauguration ceremony on October 28, President Grover Cleveland accepted the statue on behalf of the American people, promising, "we will not forget that Liberty has here made her home; nor shall her chosen altar be neglected."

Deed of Gift for the Statue of Liberty. Document with watercolor, July 4, 1884. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. (44)

Invitation to the inauguration of the Statue of Liberty by the President (Grover Cleveland), Oct 28, 1886 . Printed invitation engraved with gold seal and lithograph of statue. William Maxwell Evarts Papers. Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (45)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj2

Long Live the Land of the Free

Patriotic songs in Yiddish expressing the immigrants' love for America and loyalty to the "Land of the Free," were popular among the new arrivals. This song opens with: "To express loyalty with every/fibre of one's being, to/this Land of Freedom, is the/sacred duty of every Jew." Featured on the cover of "Leben zol Amerika"[Long Live America] are three favored icons of American Jewish immigrant sensibility: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and the Statue of Liberty.

Solomon Smulewitz (1868-1943) and J.M. Rumshisky (1879-1956). "Zei gebensht Du Freie Land" [Long Live the Land of the Free] . New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1911. Sheet music cover. Music Division , Library of Congress (50)

Leo Rosenberg (1879-1963) and M. Rubinstein. "Leben Zol Amerika" [Long Live America] . New York: A. Tores, n.d. Sheet music cover. Hebraic Section , Library of Congress (51)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj3

Irving Berlin's Miss Liberty

Set in 1885, Irving Berlin's Broadway musical Miss Liberty centers on the dedication ceremonies of the Statue of Liberty and the hero's search for the model that posed for Bertholdi's statue. Berlin, himself an immigrant from Russia, set music to Emma Lazarus's iconic poem, "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor." It is the only song in the Irving Berlin canon for which he used someone else's words.

Irving Berlin (1888-1989) and Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) “Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor,” from Miss Liberty , 1949. Piano vocal score. Irving Berlin Collection. Music Division , Library of Congress (48)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj4

Next Year in America!

Under the Imperial Russian coat of arms, traditionally dressed Russian Jews, packs in hand, line Europe's shore as they gaze across the ocean. Waiting for them under an American eagle holding a banner with the legend "Shelter me in the shadow of your wings" (Psalms 17:8), are their Americanized relatives, whose outstretched arms simultaneously beckon and welcome them to their new home.

A Happy New Year . Hebrew Publishing Company, between 1900 and 1920. Offset color lithograph postcard. Alfred and Elizabeth Bendiner Collection. Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (52)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj5

Food Will Win the War!

This World War I poster, published by the United States Food Administration, appeals in Yiddish to the patriotic spirit and gratitude of the new arrivals to America. Its message reads, "Food Will Win the War! You came here seeking freedom, now you must help to preserve it. We must provide the Allies with wheat. Let Nothing Go To Waste!" Versions of this poster were issued in English and Italian as well.

Charles Chambers (1883-1941). Food Will Win the War—You Came Here Seeking Freedom, Now You Must Help Preserve It.… New York: Rusling Wood, Litho., 1917. Color lithograph poster. Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (53)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj6

Lady America Opens the Gates

On this journal cover, published by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Lady Liberty, wearing a cap bearing the legend "America" in Yiddish, holds a key in one hand and opens a gate to waiting immigrants with the other. Two verses from the Hebrew scriptures flank the open gate. On the right, the verse reads: "Open the gates of righteousness for me" (Psalms 118:19) and on the left, "Open the gates and let a righteous nation enter" (Isaiah 26:2).

The Jewish Immigrant . Vol. 2, no. 1. (January 1909). New York: Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, 1909 Hebraic Section , Library of Congress (54)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj7

Boston's Jewish Quarter

This drawing by William Allen Rogers depicts the shops, street peddlers, and bustling street life of Boston's Jewish quarter at the turn of the twentieth century. The drawing illustrated an article by Sylvester Baxter entitled "Boston at Century's End," which appeared in Harper's Magazine .

William Allen Rogers (1854-1931). The Jewish Quarter, Boston. Published in Harpers , 1899. Graphite drawing with wash. Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (56)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj8

Waiting for the “Forwards”

This photograph of newsboys Waiting for the "Forwards," was taken by Lewis Hine at 1:15 a.m. on the steps of the building where the Jewish daily the Forward was produced on New York's Lower East Side. According to Hine, the group included a number of boys as young as ten years-old. The newsboy in the first row is holding copies of Wahrheit [Truth], a Yiddish daily newspaper that stressed Jewish national aspirations.

Lewis Hine (1874-1940) Waiting for the “Forwards”-Jewish paper at 1 A.M. New York, March 1913 Gelatin silver print from photographic album Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (58)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj9

The Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire

Jewish women made up the majority of workers in the garment industry, especially in the dress and shirtwaist trade. Poor working conditions, low wages, and frequent layoffs propelled many into the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union. On March 25, 1911, 146 garment workers lost their lives in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in New York's Greenwich Village. Many were trapped inside because the escape exits had been locked to keep the girls in and the union organizers out. The fire was one of New York's worst industrial accidents and was covered by newspapers across the nation, including the Oklahoma State Capital , which is displayed here.

Bain News Service. Bodies from Washington Place Fire , March 25, 1911. Gelatin silver print. George Grantham Bain Collection. Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (59)

“148 Perished in Fire,” Oklahoma State Capital (March 26, 1911). Newspaper front page. Serial and Government Publications Division , Library of Congress (61)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj10

The Fire Victims

Yiddish American popular song was rooted in Eastern European Jewish minstrelsy, which had long addressed current social, economic, and political themes. "Die Fire Korbunes" [The Fire Victims] is an elegy to the 146 victims, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, who perished in the March 25, 1911 fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory, a New York City garment sweatshop

David Meyrowitz (1867-1943) and Louis Gilrod (1879-1930). Die Fire Korbunes [The Fire Victims] . New York: Theodore Lohr Co., 1911. Sheet music cover. Irene Heskes Collection. Music Division , Library of Congress (62)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj11

The Triangle Waist Company

A salivating demonic figure, labeled the Triangle Waist Company, draws a long line of women into his factory. There they are consumed by the fire's raging inferno and drift upward towards heaven in the smoky aftermath of the fire. Public sympathy and outrage over the tragedy led to the establishment of a Factory Investigating Commission that was instrumental in drafting new legislation that mandated improved working conditions.

Lola [Leon Israel]. Der Groyser Kundes [The Big Stick]. Vol. 3, no. 14 (April 7, 1911). New York: Jewish Publishing and Advertising Co., 1911. Hebraic Section , Library of Congress (63)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj12

New York's Lower East Side

Shown here is a street scene from New York's Lower East Side, which was the center of Jewish immigrant life in the early twentieth century. Congested and bursting with activity and commerce, the crowded streets of the Lower East Side accommodated both a bustling pushcart trade as well as various retail occupations, such as kosher butcher shops, bakeries, and restaurants, which catered to Jewish tastes. The artist, Albert Potter, was born in Russia and grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, where he attended the Rhode Island School of Design.

Albert Potter (1903-1937) Eastside New York , between 1931 and 1935. Woodcut print. Ben and Beatrice Goldstein Foundation Collection, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (67)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj13

Becoming American

A variety of publications were issued to help Americanize the new immigrants. Bi-lingual Yiddish-English versions of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were published for the new Americans, as were phrase books in Yiddish, English, and Ladino (Judeo-Spanish)--all intended to help the immigrants function in their new environment. Alexander Harkavy's English-Yiddish letter writing guides were especially popular, selling thousands of copies in multiple editions. Shown here is Harkavy's American Letter Writer , opened to a sample letter "From a Lady to a Gentleman, Complaining of Faithlossness (sic)."

Konstitushon fun di Fereynigte Shtaten und Deklereyshon of Indipendens [Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence]. New York: Sarasohn and Son, Pub., 1892. Hebraic Section , Library of Congress (72)

Hirsh Vand (b.1847). Der Englisher Tolmatsh . Warsaw: Gebruder Shuldberg, 1891. Hebraic Section , Library of Congress (73)

Alexander Harkavy (1863-1939). Harkavy's Amerikanisher Briefenshteler [Harkavy's American Letter Writer]. New York: Hebrew Publishing Co., 1902. Hebraic Section , Library of Congress (74)

Moise S.Gadol (1874-1941). Libro de Embezar, The Book to Learn How to Speak, Read and Write from Spanish-Jewish Language in English and Yiddish. New York: 1937. Hebraic Section , Library of Congress (75A)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj14

Many Peoples, One Language

These posters announce two initiatives, separated by about two decades but both drawing on a multi-generational approach to teach immigrants the English language. The 1917 poster to the left includes a call to "Invite your parents, brothers and sisters to attend free public school evenings," to encourage the immigrant parents of children in public schools to attend night classes and learn English. The WPA Adult Education program of the 1930s and 40s teamed with New York City's Board of Education to sponsor free English classes to help parents "learn to speak, read, and write the language of your children." In addition, naturalization classes and "special classes for educated foreign born" are advertised on this Yiddish and English poster.

J.H. Donahey (1875-1949) Cleveland, Many Peoples, One language ["Invite your parents, brothers and sisters to attend free public evening schools"]. Color poster 1917. Courtesy of the HUC Skirball Cultural Center Museum Collection, Los Angeles (77)

Free classes in English!: Learn to Speak, Read & Write the Language of our Children. New York City: Federal Art Project, 1936-1941. Silkscreen poster. Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (84)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj15

A Boychik Up-to-date

The subject of this sheet music's title page is a garishly dressed boychick , or dandy, who has become so Americanized that his Jewishness is not outwardly apparent. The song is critical of this boychik and, through him, the American milieu that created him.

David Meyrowitz (1867-1943) and Louis Gilrod (1879-1930) A Boychik Up-to-Date [An Up-to-Date Dandy] . New York: Theodore Lohr, n.d. Sheet music cover Hebraic Section , Library of Congress (78)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj16

A Russian Jewish Colony in Cotopaxi, Colorado

In his report to the board of the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society, which sponsored the colonization activities of a small group of Russian Jewish settlers in Cotopaxi, Colorado, Julius Schwarz wrote: "It is with much satisfaction and justifiable pride that I pronounce the agricultural colony of the Rocky Mountains a full and complete success and the question whether Jews are fit to be farmers, solved and answered in the affirmative."

Julius Schwarz. Report of Mr. Julius Schwarz on the Colony of Russian Refugees at Cotopaxi, Colorado … 1882. New York: Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society of the United States, [1882]. General Collections , Library of Congress (81)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj17

A Wimpel from Colorado

Beginning in southern Germany in the seventeenth century, the custom developed of transforming the linen swaddling cloth used to wrap the eight-day-old baby boy at his circumcision ceremony into a Torah binder. Called a "wimpel," from the German word for binding, the cloth was cut into strips and sewn together to form a long band which was embroidered or painted, usually by the mother or grandmother, with the child's name, birthdate, and the prayer recited at the circumcision ceremony that the child be blessed to grow to study the Torah, to be married, and to do good deeds. The folk art tradition made its way west with German immigrants in the second half of the nineteenth century as seen in this example from Trinidad, Colorado.

Rabbi Freudenthal. Torah Binder (wimpel). Trinidad, Colorado, July 1889 (made in honor of Gilbert Sanders birth). Paint on linen, with silk thread edging. Courtesy of the HUC Skirball Cultural Center Museum Collection, Los Angeles, (81A)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj18

A Little Letter to Father

Pictured on this sheet music cover are two scenes: a father and son parting in the Old World, and the same pair meeting at Ellis Island. Solomon Smulewitz's lyrics recount a familiar tale of woe: "Mother has died in loneliness and poverty. Write a letter to father and send money for him to come to America. Alas, father is too ill to be admitted here. He is permitted to see his son at the gate of Ellis Island, and then will be sent back to Europe."

Solomon Smulewitz (1868-1943) and J.M. Rumshisky (1879-1956). A Brievele dem Taten [A little letter to my father]. New York: Hebrew Publishing Co., 1911. Sheet music cover. Hebraic Section , Library of Congress (82)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj19

What Every Woman Should Know about Citizenship

The Immigration Assistance Section of the National Council of Jewish Women issued this citizenship guide for women in both English and Yiddish. Founded in 1893, the Council focused on helping unmarried women immigrants learn English, secure citizenship, and find employment.

Cecilia Razovsky (1891-1968). Vos Yede Froy Darf Visen Vegen Birgershaft, What Every Woman Should Know about Citizenship. New York: Department of Immigrant Aid, National Council of Jewish Women, 1926. Hebraic Section , Library of Congress (86)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj20

First Yiddish American Cookbook

Written in Yiddish, the language understood by the majority of newly arriving Jewish immigrants, this cookbook served as an introduction to American as well as traditional Jewish cuisine. The recipes, which are based on Hinde Amchanitzki's forty-five years of experience in European and American kitchens, include traditional Jewish dishes as well as American fare. In her introduction, the author promises that using her recipes will prevent stomach aches and other food-related maladies in children. This first American Yiddish cookbook pictures the author on the cover. Displayed on the accompanying page are recipes in Yiddish for two desserts, "Snowballs" and "Rhubarb Pie."

Hinde Amchanitzki. Lehr-bukh vi azoy tsu kokhen un baken [Textbook on How to Cook and Bake]. Lehr-bukh vi azoy tsu kokhen un baken [Textbook on How to Cook and Bake]. Page 2 New York: ca. 1901. Hebraic Section, Library of Congress (88) //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/images/hh0088p2s.jpg ">Page 2 - Lehr-bukh vi azoy tsu kokhen un baken [Textbook on How to Cook and Bake]. Page 3 New York: ca. 1901. Hebraic Section, Library of Congress (88) //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/images/hh0088p3s.jpg ">Page 3 New York: ca. 1901. Hebraic Section , Library of Congress (88)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj21

Awake and Sing!

The Federal Theater Project produced a Yiddish language version of Clifford Odets's groundbreaking depiction of a Jewish family living in the Bronx during the Depression years. Burdened with financial difficulties, the family struggles to survive. In the play's climax, the socialist grandfather delivers the central message of the play, calling his family to action and urging them to "Go out and fight so life shouldn't be printed on dollar bills." The title is from Isaiah (26:19): "Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust."

Clifford Odets (1906-1963). Awake and Sing . Federal Theatre, New York City. Offset lithograph poster. Federal Theatre Project Collection. Music Division , Library of Congress (92)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj22

Europe Stopped with Him

In Patrimony, A True Story , Philip Roth's award-winning memoir of his father's last years, Roth summed up his father's life's work--as well as the work of a whole generation of Jews--in the following moving passage: "I drive him around or I sit with him or I eat with him and I am thinking that the real work, the invisible, huge job that he did all his life, that his whole generation of Jews did, was making themselves American. Europe stopped with him." Displayed here are two pages from a typed draft of the manuscript, with emendations in the author's hand.

Philip Roth (b. 1933). Typed manuscript with emendations, published as Patrimony: A True Story (1996). Page 2. Philip Roth Papers. Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (55)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj23

Houdini: from Budapest to Appleton

The great magician and escape artist, Harry Houdini (originally Eric Weiss), was born in Budapest, Hungary, and was taken to the U. S. when his father became the religious leader of a Jewish congregation in Appleton, Wisconsin. Displayed here is the inside cover of a Bible belonging to his father, Rabbi Samuel Weiss. The two photographs displayed here show Houdini with his "two sweethearts,"--wife Beatrice and mother Cecilia Steiner Weiss--and, in the other, planting a kiss on his mother's cheek.

Fly-leaf and First Page of the Bible of Rabbi Samuel Weiss (1829-1892), father of Harry Houdini (1874-1926) Die Bible oder Die ganze Heilige Schrift des Alten und Neuen Testaments . New York: Amerikanische Bibel-Gesellschaft, 1892. McManus-Young Collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division , Library of Congress (96)

Harry Houdini (1874-1926). Passport application, no.13451, July 25, 1913. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. (95)

"My Two Sweethearts" [Houdini with his wife and mother] Gelatin silver print, ca. 1907 McManus-Young Collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division , Library of Congress (97A)

Harry Houdini with his mother Cecilia Steiner Weiss (d. 1913), Rochester, New York Gelatin silver print, ca. 1907. McManus-Young Collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division , Library of Congress (97)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj24

Albert Einstein: from Berlin to Princeton

In 1933, after Adolf Hitler came to power, Albert Einstein renounced his German citizenship and immigrated to the United States, where he accepted an appointment as Professor of Theoretical Physics at Princeton. In 1936, he completed a "Declaration of Intention" form to become an American citizen, and, in 1940, he received his certificate of American citizenship from federal Judge Phillip Forman in a ceremony held in Trenton, New Jersey.

Robert Kastor. Albert Einstein , January 21, 1922. Pen and ink on paper. Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (98)

Al Aumuller. America Gains a Famous Citizen (Albert Einstein) , October 1, 1940. Gelatin silver print. New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection. Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (100)

Albert Einstein (1879-1955). “Declaration of Intention” to become a U.S. citizen, January 15, 1936. Typescript document and passport photograph. Courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration Northeast Region, New York (99)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj25

Einstein's Theory of Relativity

Displayed here is the first page of a holograph copy of "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Korper," which Einstein described as his first paper concerning the theory of relativity. He had discarded the original manuscript after it had been published in Annalen der Physic in 1905. In November 1943, Einstein rewrote this paper so that it might be presented to the Library of Congress to help promote the sale of U.S. War Bonds.

Albert Einstein. "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Korper," November 1943. Holograph essay. Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (101)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj26

Hannah Arendt: from Berlin to Paris to New York

Author, educator, and political philosopher Hannah Arendt was born into a German Jewish family in Königsberg, now Russian "Kaliningrad." After being arrested in 1933, Arendt fled her homeland, moving from Prague to Geneva then to Paris, and finally to the United States in 1941. In 1946, she wrote that she understood that "the infinitely complex red-tape existence of stateless persons" inhibits freedom of movement. This denial of the right of citizenship led Arendt on an exploration of the origins of totalitarianism that would dominate her intellectual life.

In 1949 Arendt used this well-worn affidavit of identity "in lieu of a passport, which I, a stateless person, cannot obtain at present." Also seen here is Arendt's draft of the introduction to the third edition of Origins Of Totalitarianism , her most famous book.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). Affidavit of Identity in Lieu of Passport, January 18, 1949. //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/images/hh0103p2s.jpg ">Page 2 Typescript with stamps, emendations, and photo. Hannah Arendt Papers. Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (103)

Hannah Arendt. “Introduction to the Third Edition” [Corrected draft of The Origins of Totalitarianism ], 1966. Typescript with author's alterations. Hannah Arendt Papers. Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (104)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html#obj27

Connect with the Library

All ways to connect

Subscribe & Comment

• RSS & E-Mail

Download & Play

• iTunesU (external link)

About | Press | Jobs | Donate Inspector General | Legal | Accessibility | External Link Disclaimer | USA.gov

Globalization, Diasporas, and Transnationalism: Jews in the Americas

• Published: 18 January 2022
• Volume 41 , pages 711–753, ( 2021 )

Cite this article

• Judit Bokser Liwerant   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0771-7154 1  

3993 Accesses

3 Citations

Explore all metrics

This paper analyzes the structures and trends of the establishment, growth, and transformation of the Jewish presence in the Americas. After outlining several fundamental characteristics of the general continental societal environment and its internal differentiation, we critically discuss several theoretical approaches to a comparative assessment of the Jewish experience. Conceptual formulations include globalization, diaspora studies, and transnationalism, aiming to highlight their achievements and drawbacks. Selected sociohistorical aspects relevant to the development of Jewish immigration, settlement, and community formation are analyzed. This is followed by the exploration of more recent patterns, outlining emerging configurations and challenges. The article focuses on the differences and commonalities between the North (United States and Canada) and the diverse Latin American experiences. The conceptual referents imply rethinking the relationship between societies, communities, individuals, territories, and sociopolitical spaces along the changing contours of dispersion. Lessons from the past may help outline future paths.

Similar content being viewed by others

Jewish Populations, Migrations, and Identities in the Americas: The Shared and the Particular

Epilogue: Summary, Discussion, and Looking Beyond

Israel-diaspora relations: latin american continuities and discontinuities.

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Introductory Remarks

Recurrent conceptual concerns raise a primary question—how should the Americas be approached: as one, two, or many? As a reality, an idea, and a concept, the term “the Americas” is not univocal, since it covers very different regions. As a territorial, geopolitical, economic, social, multiethnic, and cultural entity, it can be outlined with a high level of generalization while also paying concrete attention to its components. The Americas are simultaneously a single ideal entity and many realities.

The Jewish experience in different subregions and countries of the Americas is equally pluralistic. Its internal diversity depends on the variety in contexts, time, and modalities with which it was inserted in the international scenario. Still, it is itself a carrier of an inner diversity it has inherited from its long historical and sociological trajectory in and outside the continent. Significant diversity prevails among and within commonalities—convergences and contradictions arising from the globally interconnected continent and the Jewish ethno-national/transnational diaspora.

Under such a conceptual and thematic umbrella, this article develops in a threefold way. First, it addresses the Americas, reviewing theoretical approaches to the continent and the frameworks for studying Jews as a collective that is territorially dispersed and maintains shared symbolic bonds locally and at a distance .

The second part focuses on Jewish communities in North and Latin America in the context of world Jewry. Migration flows were central in the relocation of Jewish life. Specific interactions between particular societal constraints and opportunities in a given country or region and the unique character of Jewish backgrounds and integration patterns are outlined.

The third part analyzes the current changing patterns of collective life and community, addressing old and new trends. The changes in the perimeters and scope of organized communities and the encounters and intersections they favored in the Americas stimulated convergences and divergences under the impact of globalization, transnationalism, and the changing profile of the diaspora.

Significant and inescapable difficulties consistently hinder the goal of integrating the geopolitical with the socio-communal and cultural dimensions of Jews in the Americas. Indeed, while the importance of national, regional, and transnational axes varies across time and space, their contours point to dynamics that exclude reductionist conceptions, emphasizing only one of them. The combination and juxtaposition of the broader regional/continental and global axis and the axis focused on the particular context of the Jewish ethno-religious group can be expressed in numerous ways. Contradictory situations run through the whole range of options, from, at one end, the complete autonomy of the Jewish experience with respect to the general societal sphere to, at the opposite end, total dependence on it; between the Jewish search for legitimacy, equality, and diversity and conformity with the non-Jewish majority; between the sociability of individual lives of Jewish citizens within national societies and gregariousness in their collective institutions; between a sociocultural identity of the Jews in total synchrony with the national ethos of each country and a specific identity and creativity whose symbolic and intellectual center is elsewhere, rooted in a nation/peoplehood/global Jewish collective (Bokser Liwerant et al. 2011).

This paper aims to offer an analytical and critical reflection upon profound links, convergences and divergences, tensions and encounters, and the vitality and richness of the meeting of a continent and its Jewish diaspora. The conceptual referents imply rethinking the relationship between societies, communities, individuals, territories, and sociopolitical spaces along the changing contours of dispersion. At stake are the modes of incorporation and dialogue of minority groups as owners of their particular history and identity within civil societies driven by their foundational principles and explicit agendas. It thus opens, together with Sergio DellaPergola's following article in this issue, the wide parameters that guided the project Jews in the Americas.

The Americas: Identifying the Object

The Americas' foundational experience emerged as an outcome of the expansive trajectory of European modernity, the configuration of the world system, and the globality of the Jewish trajectory fueled by successive waves of immigration. How did these different universes cross and intercept? How was the transnational character of Jewish migration to the Americas conceived? Was the diasporic extraterritoriality of Jewish immigration seen as convergent or conflictive with the particular founding ethos of the Americas?

The Americas may be thought of from a historical perspective, transitioning from their incorporation into the expanded World Order (or into the West) to a new insertion into contemporary globalization. Although there is no agreement among scholars regarding the Americas’ origins or basic characteristics, a convergent approach identifies radical changes that have upset spatial, geographical, and/or territorial references (Giddens 2002 ; Allen et al. 2012 ; Coleman and Underhill 2012 ).

Over the last 500 years, increasingly dense and intense interactions brought about by capitalist labor markets, commodity production, and the political expansion of the nation-state, as well as large-scale migrations, wars of conquest, and the flow of goods and ideas, lie behind globality and globalization. While today the continent is impacted by the contradictory nature of the world configuration, facing differentially new horizons of opportunity and regional and sectoral backlashes, it cannot be forgotten that it was globally constituted and incorporated into the world configuration by an extension of the European experience (Wallerstein 1974 , 2011 ; Eisenstadt 2000 , 2002 ; Preyer 2013 ; Bokser Liwerant 2015b ).

Sustained global dynamics developed through either central or peripheral connections to external centers as sources of its “encounter” or “discovery” genesis, which provided the parameters for the institutional creation and the conceptions of nation-building. These original centers were referents to be either followed or disputed. Different experiences and cultures subjected to global immersion and global awareness were embedded in the ways they built their incorporation into expanded world geography into globality (Roniger and Waisman 2002 ; Bokser Liwerant 2015b ). According to Immanuel Wallerstein, the modern world-system was born in the long sixteenth century, when the Americas as a geo-social construct became its constitutive act. There could not have been a capitalist world economy without the Americas. The destruction of indigenous populations and the importation of the labor force from the peripheries of the world did not imply the reconstruction of economic and political institutions but rather their virtually ex nihilo construction. To fully function, the Americas resulted in a mosaic that reinforced extension and inequality among its fragments. Thus, it entailed structural relations between trans-scale poly-centers and poly-peripheries within the space it encompassed. Indeed, the transatlantic axis between Europe and the newly produced Americas was the first zone of the consolidation of the world system (Wallerstein 1974 , 2011 ).

Shared and differing paths developed in the continent: coloniality in Ibero-America consisted not only of political subordination to the Crown(s) in the metropole, but above all, of European domination over the native populations. On the other hand, in the British-American zone, coloniality meant almost exclusively subordination to the British Crown; that is, the colonies constituted themselves initially as European societies outside of Europe (Quijano 1989 ). The conquest, colonization, and Christianization of America by the Iberians in the late fifteenth century occurred at the beginnings of the world market and capitalism. The arrival of the British to the northern parts of America more than a century later took place when this new historical process was already fully underway. The two Americas began the nineteenth century under unequal conditions and pursued quite distinct paths. The United States followed a pattern of development of the new and unusual Americanness or Americanity , with its inner disjuncture and contradictions—ethnicity, race-racism, the new world. It constituted itself as a nation at the same time as it was developing an imperial role as a hegemonic power. Latin America instead fragmented itself. There were bloody border wars and civil wars all over. Power was organized on a seigneurial–mercantile basis (Quijano 1989 ; Crespo et al. 2018 ). The national boundaries would not prevent the development of a sustained and intense transnationalist path of interaction among them (Roniger 2011 ).

Fernand Braudel devoted important chapters of his work (1982, 1986) to the contrast between the two Americas. Two civilizations: on the one hand, the ensemble of wonderful achievements, “future life,” and the New World par excellence ; on the other, the torn, dramatic ensemble, pitted against itself: the “second America” (Braudel 1986 ). According to him, the North was characterized by strength, activity, independence, and individual initiative; the South by inertia, servitude, the heavy hand of the colonial powers, and all the constraints inherent to the condition of “periphery.”

Indeed, distinct models related to institutional patterns, cultural premises, traditions, and historical experiences developed. Eisenstadt's concept of Multiple Modernities underlies profound tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes arising from the different phases of an emerging interconnected global world and the heterogeneity and contingency of different historical developments. There are two main axes around which two broad configurations crystallized in Europe would be projected in the region: those of hierarchy–equality and relatively pluralistic “ ex parte ” versus a homogeneous “ ex toto ” conception of the social order would be extended to the Americas (Eisenstadt 2000 , 2002 ; Roniger and Waisman 2002 ; Bokser Liwerant 2015b , 2019 ; Ben-Rafael and Sternberg 2016 ). In the North American colonies, this was carried out by dispersed autonomous groups, many of them Protestant sects and various groups of semi-aristocracy gentry like settlers and merchants, with the Anglican Church and the British government playing only a secondary (although certainly not negligible) role (Eisenstadt 2002 ; Katz 2010 ). In the South, the conquerors' power had to come to terms with and, in fact, destroy and replace impressively developed local civilizations. Therefore, facing the modern West and searching after it entailed a confrontation with an alien culture imposed upon these local cultures from the outside. After the first wave of conquest by the conquistadores , changes were carried out under the centralized aegis of the Crown (or Crowns) and the Church, which monopolized access to the major resources of the colonies (land and labor) and in principle denied the settlers any significant degree of self-government beyond the municipal level (Domínguez Ortiz 1976 ).

In the North, the pre-conquest civilizations were much more decentralized, and their de facto destruction left significantly fewer traces in the body of the new colonial order. Hence, the new rulers only had to deploy a reflexive exercise in coming to terms with their own distinct place within the broader framework of European or Western civilization. This historical bifurcation of experiences ended up shaping in structural and ideational spheres the ways in which Jews were seen and conceived: their admittance, incorporation, social integration, and representation as legitimate dwellers of the public sphere. As displayed in Fig.  1 , the multiple levels that framed these processes draw complex and differing scenarios.

Jews in the Americas

Conceptual Approaches: A Promising Albeit Debated Triad

The Americas represent an exemplary case in which historical paths and changing conditions interact. Globality as a foundational element and globalization processes shaped the changes in the Americas' social and communal structures, while the local and the global intertwined. Dynamic patterns of interaction developed historically between Jewish communities and their societal milieux , shaping Jews' changing status as citizens in nation-states, holders of a transnational condition. Both the continent as a whole and its Jewish presence were defined by human displacements—settlers, conquerors, various sorts of migrants—while modernity and modernization marked them differentially over time. Modernity’s structures and layers generated mixed social formations straddling the past and present and imported, translated, and recreated lifestyles and customs from other places and cultures.

Jewish collective life has historically been displayed in multiple arenas—territorial, communal, religious, national, and cultural—and in different political–ecological settings; the Jewish world is shaped by the parameters of globalization, transnationalism, and diaspora. While by globality we mean the incorporation-foundation of the world system, globalization refers to the radical changes that upset spatial, temporal, geographical, and/or territorial references, without which it would be impossible to think of economic, political, social, and cultural relations in the contemporary world (Robertson 1992 ; Waters 1995 ; Scholte, 1998 ). Time and space cease to have the same influence on the way in which social relations and institutions are structured, owing to the conjunction of technical factors that shape the density and speed of cross-border connections, and involve the de-territorialization of economic, social, cultural, and political arrangements; they depend neither on distance nor on borders, and neither do they have the same influence on the final shaping of institutions and social relations (Giddens et al. 1994 ). Globalization processes are not uniform, as they take place in a differentiated manner, with territorial and sectoral inequalities. They are multifaceted, insofar as they bring together economic, social, political, and cultural aspects, as well as the interdependence and influences between these levels, and contradictory, because the processes can be intentional and reflexive, at the same time not intentional, and of international as well as regional, national, or local scope. Globalization implies the widening, intensifying, accelerating, and growing impact of worldwide interconnectedness (Held et al. 1999 ); it links people together across borders more than in the past and confronts them with cultural and ethnic differences (Appadurai 1996 ). It also confronts communities of dispersed people, the Jewish diaspora—a global diaspora, an ethno-national and transnational diaspora—with similar, convergent, and divergent paths, due to the increased circulation of individual and collective social agents and values.

Indeed, globalization processes accelerate migration, owing both to social inequalities and to the opening of opportunities (Urry 2000 ; Kellerman 2006 , 2020 ). Migration and transmigration movements lead to diverse expressions of transnationalism. As a result of the latter’s multidimensional nature, we underscore its contributions to the understanding of past trends, ongoing changes, and of yet uncertain developments (Appadurai 1996 ; Ben-Rafael et al. 2009). The concurrent relevance of transnationalism to the diverse historical times provides a conceptual tool that allows for a better assessment of the social morphology as expressed in the changing character of communal and social formations.

Contemporary social science research in transnationalism focuses mainly on recent migration groups (Glick Schiller et al. 1995 ; Portes et al. 1999 ; Khagram and Levitt 2008 ). Transnational studies examine mainly, if not exclusively, diasporic practices, projects, and attitudes of new diasporas (Moya 2011 ; Bokser Liwerant 2015a ). However, by conceptualizing historical transnational patterns of shared values and norms, social belonging and collective identities, it is possible to recover cultural, religious, social, institutional, and economic linkages of a more permanent nature. Surpassing individual actors on the move, central common aspects of the Jewish experience may be recovered. There is indeed the challenge of analyzing the foundations of a scattered people committed to its continuity and bound through cohesion and solidarity.

Dispersion has been central to Jewish self-understanding for millennia. Modern Jewish historians took a global stance: from Heinrich Graetz in the nineteenth century to Simon Dubnow and Salo Baron in the twentieth, world histories became the parameter, emphasizing the longue durée and a transnational perspective. Their approach came out of the specificity of Jewish historical studies, where a disciplinary, ethno-national focus became dominant within a general, neo-positivist scientific program that analyzed national minorities in Eastern Europe. However, in the social sciences the study of diasporas arrived late. Before the 1960s, immigrant groups were generally expected to shed their ethnic identity and assimilate to local norms. During the 1970s, when assimilation theories based on the meaning of integration models were factually and conceptually questioned, “diaspora” was increasingly used to describe migrant groups maintaining their ethnic tradition and a strong feeling of collectiveness (Bruneau 1995 ; Shuval 2002 , 2003 ; Anteby-Yemini and Berthomière 2005 ).

As its use became extended, the discussion of its applicability to different groups and the singularity of the Jewish diaspora as archetypal took over academic debates. The continued use of the concept of diaspora exclusively for the Jewish people was questioned or branded as a mistake. However, the extension of its historical experience to other groups often disregards the interwoven character of Jews' associational and organizational networks and the historical and symbolic layers of contact with the homeland (Sheffer 1986 ). Robin Cohen ( 2008 ) suggested that the archetypal Jewish diaspora could be a base for reflection even if it couldn't be a transposable model. William Safran considered that diaspora could be seen as a “metaphoric designation” and could apply to various populations: the rapid spread of the term “African diaspora” in the late decades of the twentieth century, expatriates, political refugees… Hence the concept of diasporas as expatriate minority communities that are dispersed from an original “center” to at least two “peripheral” places; that maintain a “memory,” vision or myth about their original homeland; that “believe they are not—and perhaps cannot be—fully accepted by their host country”; that see their ancestral home as a place of eventual return when the time is right; and whose group consciousness and solidarity are “importantly defined” by this continuing relationship with the homeland (Safran 1991 ).

The structures and channels through which continuous relationships are maintained—diaspora building—remained a latent, underdeveloped topic of study. The literature highlighted the dispersion of its members, the orientation toward an ethno-national center—real or imaginary—considered a homeland, and the maintenance of the group's ethno-cultural borders in the host country (Cohen 2008 ; O'Haire 2008 ; Brenner 2008; Esman 2009 ). Sheffer's distinction between state and stateless diasporas and Cohen’s cultural dimension defined diasporas as somewhere between “nation-states” and “traveling cultures.” Long before, Tartakover ( 1958 ) had spoken of “portable states”—dwelling in a nation-state in a physical sense but traveling in an astral or spiritual sense that falls outside the space of the nation-state. Indeed, diaspora was also theorized by James Clifford ( 1994 ) as cultures of circulation, which, on par with de-emphasizing the paradigm of the ancestral home-center , rescued from the Jewish model a “virtual and intangible space” between the center and the periphery of dispersion. Diasporas are conceived as communities dispersed across space yet connected through an intangible connection to another time and place; he emphasized the “lateral axes of diaspora,” the “decentered, partially overlapping networks of communication… that connect the several communities of a transnational people.” Although highly fruitful for the interconnections of Jewish life in the Americas, it displayed some surprising reductionism. Following almost exclusively Boyarin’s paradigm of diasporism—not only as a conceptual formulation, but as a meta-theoretical and political stance—it failed to acknowledge the singularity of the Jewish experience as an ethno-national diaspora with a Center—historical, spiritual, national. The strong links and the mutual influences became part of divaricate networks and multidirectional exchange, involving not only people, capital, and political resources but also ideas and cultural values (Levitt 2001 ; Bauböck and Faist 2010 ; Burla 2015 ; Asscher and Shiff 2019 ). Diasporas’ presence in societies, the multicultural dimension they carry, the relations they create between original and new homelands and their dynamics as interconnected cross-national spaces are part of the transition of societies to a new era (Ben-Rafael 2013a , b ). However, the historical weight of Jewish diaspora's structures that endure both local associations and channels of communication cannot be underestimated.

The necessary mediations between studies on transnationalism, globalization, diaspora and research into contemporary Jewry are still lacking. Despite the plethora of local descriptive studies, Jews are comparatively understudied in contemporary research, where they seem to have lost their historical resonance. Most importantly, there is a relative dearth of discourse about communal foundations in the available literature on national and transnational social relations (Glick Schiller et al. 1995 ; Portes et al. 1999 ; Pries 2008 ; Bokser Liwerant et al. 2010 ).

In contemporary Jewish studies in the Americas, the diasporic experience has been approached mainly from the perspective of historical migration and ethnic studies, frequently disregarding the analytical angle of Jewish diasporic formations, where systems of collective organization have accounted for interconnection and world circulation (Goldscheider and Zuckerman 1984 ). Thus, researchers relying solely on ethnicity cannot account for the necessary articulations of boundary maintenance and the mechanisms that counterbalance the loose nature of the collective. The limits and pitfalls of the ethno-communal paradigm in times of multiculturalism, postmodernity, and porous ethno-religious borders are analyzed, while national frontiers dilute the interconnection among the diaspora, the center, and the lateral axes. In the study of American Jewry, the notion of a stable ethnicity fixed by religion, language, and genealogy has been challenged by the difference outlook, emphasizing the contextualized and personal shaping of this identity category (Hollinger 1998 ; Lederhendler 2011 ; Magid 2013 ). In Latin America, migration studies have been the dominant approach. The conceptualization of a theoretical framework of diasporas and their current moment may be found in studies of postmodernism, oriented principally by the concept of boundary erosion. At the same time, the ethno-national Jewish diasporic experience has been analyzed from the sociocultural and political perspectives of Otherness (Bokser Liwerant, 2013 ).

We suggest that the dyad “being national–being transnational” provides the conceptual tool required to analyze local contexts, while recovering the commonalities and interconnections derived from transnational Jewish history. It critically questions the currents developed by historians and social scientists that focus on Jews as citizens of the nation-state, disregarding the singularity of a people whose traditions, identities, solidarity, commercial, social, and religious connections crossed borders, regions, and states (DellaPergola 2011 ; Avni et al. 2011 ; Bokser Liwerant 2013a ; Kahn and Mendelson 2014 ). This interconnected binary contributes by addressing the current functional imperative of reproduction of local social domains through their interdependent relationship with globalization, implying that the global is localized and the local is generalized, reproduced by significant intercourse among societies and communities.

In the vast Americas, diaspora must be considered at an analytical level that accounts for its strong impact and differing consciousness across Jewish communities. Transnational studies that show an interest in the diasporic practices of new émigré ethnic communities tend to focus on the hybridization of identities and cultural fluidity and religious syncretism, rather than analyzing diasporic patterns derived from the maintenance of ethno-religious borders. They tend to refute diasporic practices that have observed the principle of boundary maintenance . We recognize that efforts to conceptually connect diasporas indeed contribute to outline their commonalities (Ben-Rafael 2016a). However, brought together with diaspora studies, they oscillate between boundary maintenance and boundary erosion (Brubaker 1994 ; Bokser Liwerant 2015a ).

Boundary maintenance, as a systematic process of diaspora-building, should be analyzed through the lens of the vast associational and institutional foundations of organized collective life, which foster certain levels of mobilization and the organization of exchanges between its members. The individual and communal levels interact through dense and stable Jewish national and transnational organizational channels that enhance informal ethnic and family links and networks. At the collective level, however, associative resources re-elaborate and reorient organized Jewish life (Bourdieu 1986 ; Coleman 1988 ). The degree of formalization or institutionalization is characterized by a solid collective historical experience and memories that bring together temporal dimensions expressed by long-term trends, as expressed in Jewish life in the multiple Americas, notwithstanding its sharp differences in organizational patterns and collective awareness. The historical singularity of the different cases contributes to theory precisely in its communal building dimension, that allows scholars to approach and expand conceptual elaborations in transnational social fields as anchored spaces (Bokser Liwerant 2013a ; Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004 ).

Into the Region: Structures, Obstacles, Trends

A crucial distinction between the basic civilizational premises of the United States and those of Europe and many of the Dominions, Upper Canada and Quebec included, has been the strong emphasis on the metaphysical equality of all members of the community, on egalitarian individualism, and on the almost total denial of the symbolic validity of hierarchy (De Tocqueville 2002 ). These conceptions and premises became components of a new collective identity and a new constitutional order. The transformation was such that it constituted the crux of the American Revolution and set it apart from other wars of independence (Restad 2014 ; Katz 2010 ). A vast variety of immigration flows contributed to the national character. In these contexts, conditions were favorable for the historical arrival and incorporation of the Jews: the belief in and value of immigration and of individualism and individual rights.

The United States

From the country's inception, although perhaps not yet fully, Jews enjoyed the status of what later came to be known as a post-emancipation Jewry, just as even in the colonial era, though not yet completely, the country was a post-emancipation country. Indeed, the nation was built on immigration, which meant Jews were welcomed into the plural design of the collective.

The principal elements defining modernity—i.e., liberal, secular, pluralistic politics; diversity in matters of culture and religion; and a competitive capitalist economic system with free, open markets—were salient factors (Wooldridge and Micklethwait 2005 ). Constitutional freedom and cultural pluralism made a tremendous difference to Jews (Eisen 1986 ); it led to the incorporation of the different groups into a collective higher order, while the right to self-fulfillment viewed normative support as part of the national ethos . Society promoted individual gratification, which in fact led to tolerating communal diversity (Sarna 1997 , 2004 ). A singular constellation defined United States Jewry, whose presence was closely related to the process of nation-building and endowed its visibility in the public sphere. Consequently, the collective organization of Jews favored a decentralized congregational model based on denominational pluralism. Until fairly recently, Judaism as a religion was assumed to be the primary axis of distinction, yet the singular dynamics between religion and ethnicity frequently led to the acceptance of the former as a way of expressing the latter. Individualized Jewish religiosity developed around the synagogue-congregation and was gradually embedded in a public Jewish “civil religion” (Bellah 1967 ) understood either as a set of civic tenets or probably also as a Jewish ethno-national solidarity that, in the view of some observers, attained a quasi-sacralized status (Woocher 1986 ; Fischer 2010 ; Fischer and Last Stone 2012 ).

The United States would be described, especially since the mid-twentieth century, as a country with “three religions”: Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism (Herberg 1983 ). Inner religious differentiation, the presence of Reform Judaism, the establishment of the institutions that formed and provided renewed religious personnel, and rabbinical seminaries all cultivated a rich and inner diverse Jewish life.

Society fostered an individualized pattern of incorporation that challenged collective frameworks. Though preceded by the Sephardic presence—individual Sephardic Jewish settlers were recorded in the 1620s preceding the 23 Jews from the Sephardic community in the Netherlands who arrived from Recife, Brazil, in 1654 in what was to become New York—looking at the paradigmatic and exceptional Jewish New York and its foundational organizational pattern, a differentiated subnational/ethnic population was reflected in the patterns of uptown and downtown Jewish immigrants, the former from Germany, the latter from Eastern Europe. The place and role of German Jews on the continent were closely related to their early arrival and the surrounding milieu, both of which reinforced being seen as the epitome of modernity, socioeconomic mobility and assimilation. The term, therefore, didn’t exclusively refer to the territory or the political geographical entity but rather to German culture—immigrants from German-speaking countries were the bearers of the symbology of progressive, acculturated and assimilated Jews (Brinkmann 2014 ). Jewish organizational life outside the synagogue was based largely on local, regional, and national membership associations and social welfare federations, interwoven with the Jews' other associational habits and social connections in a pluralistic and individualized manner (Phillips 2005 ; Waxman 1983 ).

While intense organizations were developed—mainly philanthropic and charitable ones by German and Central European Jews and mutual-aid societies by immigrants from Eastern Europe—the kehillah as a centralized structure developed overseas did not crystallize. (There was a single initiative of this kind; it began in 1915 and only lasted until 1922.) What did succeed—first in Boston, and later in New York—were Federations of Philanthropic Organizations. The Old Home was seen as a past from which to depart. Eastern European Jews did develop a solid Jewish culture brought from and connected to overseas in an intense diasporic dynamic; writers, artists, poets, and a Yiddish press gained strength and simultaneously provided an organizational axis. The strong symbol of the later circulation of culture was epitomized by the YIVO—The Institute for Jewish Research, dedicated to the preservation and study of the East European Jewish culture and history. Located in Vilna from 1925 throught 1940, due to World War II it was relocated to New York. Circa 1928, a branch was established in Buenos Aires, as Fundacion IWO. A global diaspora and its changing geographies and histories!

Immersed in the concrete/ideational tension of allegedly cutting ties with the countries and cultures of origin, the Jewish US community has often been represented as exceptional by its history of success. Concomitantly, its self-understanding and history-writing have been focused within the borders of the country (Kahn and Mendelsohn 2014 ). However, comparative research has shed light on various spheres of strong connection to the regions and towns of origin of US Jews, be they commercial, financial, social, or cultural (Kobrin 2012 ). Certainly, Old World attachments were reconfigured, and texts and contexts redefined through mutable and multiple ways fundamental to the new life.

Narrative and reality, national projects and achievements were mutually shaped. Americanness called for Americanization as the path to follow. Simultaneously, Americanization meant a new way of being Jewish, learning a new code derived and defined by the new society (Sarna 2004 ; Diner 2004 ; Lederhendler 2019 ). US Jewry progressively experienced the growing legitimacy of its ethnic assertiveness that reinforced the cultural referents of its collective identity. Americanization as an ideal and a value—with its strong call for a new identity—also explains that immigrants sought in education the clue for adaptation and integration rather than for continuity. Education in private Jewish communal institutions had, until recent decades, been the exception rather than the rule, as most Jewish families had sent their children to public schools.

As far as the civil incorporation of Jews and its relative success are concerned, much depended on the timeline of their presence. Upon arrival, the ideal was no hierarchy in a nation under God; in practice, there were very structured hierarchies by race, ethnicity, region, and country of origin, marked by the succession of large-scale waves of immigration, each of which found its place within the hierarchy. This, of course, affected the place of Jews, who in most cases entered into the lowest ranks. At the same time, the US allowed for a robust upward mobility.

The positive depictions of Jewish immigrants produced by scholars such as Park, Thomas, Wirth, and Stonequist were not representative of general American attitudes toward Jews in the 1910s and 1920s. As historian Tony Michels ( 2010 ) has pointed out, a considerable body of scholarship “shows that American antisemitism increased in intensity and popularity from the mid-nineteenth century into the mid-twentieth century; it extended beyond the social realm into political and governmental spheres; and it turned violent more frequently than we usually recognize” (p. 212). Only after the Second World War did circumstances improve (Alexander 2006 ; Dash Moore 2009 ). During the postwar era, the Federation system served as the primary fundraising and redistributive body of the American Jewish community and progressively the locus of American Jewish power (Kelner 2013 ; Friedman and Kornfeld 2018 ). This communal system was part of the civil religion that provided extended symbols, rituals, and practices.

Nowhere did the tension between the Center and the diaspora become so early and strongly expressed in the Americas as in the US. Zionism, as an idea and as a movement, had to deal with the challenge to its diagnosis of exile and a diaspora consciousness. Jewish-American intellectuals rejected the equation of the United States with galut and Israel with Zion. While it also provided a collective reference axis, it carried a conflictive dynamic as an identification referent and a principle of legitimization (Eisen 1986 , 2014 ). The impact of the destruction of European Jewry on the general and Jewish political action and agency can be seen in the redefinition of the world Zionist agenda and of US Zionism in its support for a Jewish state. Indeed, the vision of a Jewish state and the possibility of transferring millions of Jews there were the outlines of the program of the Biltmore Conference of May 1942 (Penkower 1985 ; Bokser Liwerant 1991 ; Sasson 2015 ). With the establishment of the state, the core opposition developed into a tacit agreement and collaboration. Gradually, it became a functional referent and a central theme for building the Jewish presence in the public sphere. It influenced the conceptualization of the American civil religion of survivalism (Woocher 1986 ) with secular peoplehood as its main religion; secularization, influenced by Protestantism, equated Jewishness with Americanization (Goldscheider 2003 ; Cohen 2003 ), transformationalism, a vibrant communal life (Goldscheider and Zuckerman 1984 ; Silberman 1985 ).

United States Jewry developed as a center fostering transnational ties and facing overseas needs; it acquired world relevance precisely through the establishment of structural channels: associations and institutions that advanced joint efforts in addressing worldwide Jewish needs.

A Different North: Canada

While conceived as multicultural from its inception, the founding trajectory of Canadian Jewry was binational, bicultural, and bi-religious. Cultural diversity was implied from the country’s origin with British and French settlers, as well as the ever-present need for increasing immigration into their territory. This diversity was, however, based on Anglo-Canadian Protestant values, which were prevalent at the time, and this was reflected as strict migratory regulation with distinctly racial criteria. It wasn’t until after World War II that a transition was enacted from a restrictive immigration policy that favored white European immigrants toward a universalistic policy in accordance with Canada’s international position as the spearhead of human rights advocacy.

Both the organizational pattern and the arenas to build continuity reflect the position of Jews in society. Although it would seem well situated in terms of integration into Canadian society (Brym 2018 ; Weinfeld 2018 ), at the turn of the twentieth century, as their numbers were increasing, Jews were in many ways acknowledging their outsider status in the country and their ethnic or national independence, their existence as “a third solitude” (Greenstein 1989 ). The community endured legally sanctioned discrimination in accommodation, employment, education, and immigrant admission (Troper and Weinfeld 1988 ). In the words of Elazar and Cohen ( 1985 ), Canadian Jewry from the turn of the twentieth century through World War II behaved as largely segregated Jewish communities had for centuries; in many ways, it was an exemplary multicultural community in a country that was imperfectly multicultural.

From the 1960s onward, the Jewish profile adjusted and benefited from the legitimacy of its transnational dimension. Its institutional density combined and overlapped ethnic, religious, and cultural roots, national Jewish allegiances, and a sustained openness to renewed waves of immigration. Therefore, the inner diversified associational map strengthened the different levels of group cohesiveness; no external claim to erase primordial identities competed with this dynamic. The balanced development and stability of Canadian socioeconomic configuration led the country’s Jews to pursue integration into society through entrepreneurial capitalism, advocacy, and nondiscriminatory government policies. Jews followed the strategy of compartmentalizing private and public spheres of the collective, combined with selective cultural synthesis. Jews turned inward and developed a vibrant communal life of their own (Brown 2007 ). Ethnic cohesion, a national identity less demanding in its plurality as a main referent, and a consequent communal institutional density defined the main parameters of Canadian Jewry.

Education—as a central sphere for social-cultural-institutional underpinning—was a space to build both continuity and difference. Before World War I and beyond, Canadian schools were either Protestant or Catholic (in Quebec, French Catholic). At the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews in Quebec were legally deemed Protestants for school purposes. Otherwise, they would have had no right to public schooling at all. In Ontario, Protestant schools became “public” after World War I; the publicly funded Catholic schools remain separate, but tax-supported, to this day. The schooling of children and young adults in comprehensive Jewish educational institutions took priority over other needs of the community. In Toronto neighborhoods with a Jewish majority, Jews could and did run for public school director in the early decades of the twentieth century. More than half of the children receiving Jewish education attend Jewish day schools, a substantially greater percentage than in the United States and in most of the community of Latin America, except Mexico (Pomson and Deitcher 2009 ; Miller et al. 2011 ; Tickton Schuster 2019 ). The Jewish educational system indeed provided the structural substratum for cultural singularity amidst other instances of cultural uniqueness. The traditional and Zionist content of education must be highlighted. Zionism found its roots based on both ethnicity and nationality.

The diversity and richness of sub-ethnicity found expression in the literary work of Yiddish writers—a terrain where it could recover an Old World culture and build a secular creative space. The roots and paths of circulation of cultural creation, seeking to build ethnicity on cultural grounds, crossed the Americas from Canada and the US to Latin America and back, in search of a Jewish culture not reducible to religion. While the latter would not be absent, neither was it regarded as normative (Levinson 2009 ).

Canada’s strong Jewish life can be neither explained nor understood if Israel as a concrete, ideological, and mythical center is not sufficiently analyzed. For Canada, as for Latin America—with differing codes of nationalism—the Zionist idea and Israel have been determinant. Various associational and structural spaces were expressed and shaped by spiritual-national-cultural representations of the Center, paralleling the autonomy and vitality of the lateral axes of the diasporic configuration. Lastly, the Canadian dialectic of particularism and universalism can be paradigmatically seen in the shared struggle for Jewish recognition and human rights (Abella 2006 ). If circulation and diaspora influences are analyzed, its tendency to incorporate the struggle for human rights into its agenda developed in a relatively early phase.

Latin America: The Region’s Diversity and Comparative Remarks

The Jewish presence in the more than 20 Latin American countries draws a global diaspora defined by the diversity of its singular contexts. Differing from the nation-building of Americanness and Americanization as a goal in the US and from the multicultural ethnic saga in Canada, Latin America's distinctive search for national identity rejected diversity as a risk to its recurrent aspiration toward uniformity, understood as synonymous with national integration and therefore interpreted as part of its quest for modernity.

The difficulty in seeing Jews as collective actors, as legitimate inhabitants of the public sphere, was built and narrated differently. In the Southern Cone and in Euro-American countries, where mass migration modified the population profile, it took shape in a public sphere that was allegedly neutral vis-à-vis private differences, consistently with the idea of secular and liberal thought of a national identity constructed on the supposedly integrating foundations that homogeneity provides. The national subject was not understood in its diversity; the Latin American liberal narrative turned its back to the latter. In Indo-America, diversity remained a referent and bastion for the mestizos —whose indigenous ancestors interbred with the Catholic Spaniards—who became the essential national subject. The way Jews perceived and internalized this goal became part of the interplay between self-adscription and their social representation (Bokser Liwerant 2008 , 2009 ).

In the Americas, societies offered different structural and legal frames and models of social interaction to ethnic minorities, influencing the integration and continuity of Jewish life. The ideational conception of the nation and the search for the collective were expressed in the foundational constitutional law of the countries, and thus settled the normative profile of the nation. It is important to assess under which general principles—as stated in the national constitutions of the different countries of the Americas—Jews could or could not be allowed to become an integral part of national society. In this regard, North and Latin America adopted entirely different approaches, whose relevance, however, was more symbolic than practical in terms of the effective societal integration of Jews and of their ability to have access to socioeconomic mobility and political participation.

In Argentina, the preamble to the Constitution mentions union, guaranteeing justice, securing domestic peace, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty to citizens, to posterity, and to all men of the world who wish to dwell on Argentine soil: “Invoking the protection of God, source of all reason and justice: do ordain, decree, and establish this Constitution for the Argentine Nation.” Immediately it decreed that “the Federal Government supports the Roman Catholic Apostolic religion” (adopts it as the state religion). Massive immigration altered the goal of one uniform society; civil society had its own margins of tolerance to diversity, but the ideal representation of the Argentine nation—hence the expectation that Jews would integrate-assimilate to form part of the nation—was deeply rooted.

The Mexican Constitution proclaimed that the Mexican Nation is unique and indivisible. The Nation has a multicultural composition originally based on its indigenous peoples, “who retain their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions, or part of them promoting the awareness of their indigenous identity should be a fundamental criterion in determining to whom the provisions on indigenous peoples apply.” Since the restrictive concept of mestizaje excluded Jews, their enclave character, as stated, excluded them as legitimate components of the national we .

As seen in our previous analysis, these two cases are distant from the Canadian and US constitutions. The former, facing both immigration and multiculturalism (or rather, binationalism) declared that Canada is founded upon the principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law, establishing for its plural minorities the freedom of religion as among the fundamental liberties.

As for the US, it approached immigration through the aspiration to unity, to “the need for oneness,” to become “one People” as conditioned by its past (“to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.” Immigration policies were another matter. In the twentieth century the quotas of the 1920s were clearly—although not explicitly—crafted to contain Jewish (and Italian) immigration. Canada followed suit (Abella and Troper 1982 ).

In Latin America, Jewish Otherness was embedded in the conception of the nation and in the policies concerning immigration and exile policy. Otherness was socially represented as foreignness amid debates that resulted in restrictive policies toward Jewish immigration and Jewish refugees and became a prominent sphere in which different hostile and rejectionist expressions were articulated. Their impact on the social representation of the Jew as the Other framed the arrival of Jewish immigration during the 1920–1940s .

Despite the transnational nature of immigration, the diasporic extraterritoriality of immigrant Jews was conflictive for Latin American countries, even for the founding liberalism of the national states that stimulated European migration. The regional institutions of the great ethno-national collectivities of Spanish, Italian, French, and German immigrants, notwithstanding their transnational imprint in the Rio de la Plata or Mexico, were not perceived as diasporas but as legitimate colonies of their motherland protected by the consuls and embassies. The transnational modality of these collectivities was perceived differently—and was different—from the case of the diasporic transnationalism of the Jewish immigrants. It certainly needs to be seen in comparison with the enclave modality of the integration of colonies of foreigners that did not require the “mestization” of white immigrants as happened with the model of the white European-Creole melting pot. The robust hypothesis concerning the Southern Cone is that Italian or Spanish transnationalism was not only legitimized in those transplanted immigration countries but was paradoxically used to legitimize their xenophobic nationalism against other minorities, inside and outside. Furthermore, the Jewish minority was questioned for having managed to organize communally as an ethno-national diaspora-colony, but an extraterritorial one (Senkman 2005 ; Bokser Liwerant et al. 2010 ).

The Jewish presence was built in the framework of strong interconnected communal boundaries. Latin American Jewry shaped its communal life along strong transnational solidarity connections and with a dependent or peripheral character. Jews from Eastern Europe succeeded in establishing transnational relations between the original centers of Jewish life and the new periphery that powerfully influenced its construction as a new, though connected, ethno-transnational diaspora. They gave rise to differing models of Jewish kehillot in the region as replicas of original experiences overseas, not seen or interpreted as a referent to be overcome.

A common matrix nourished the Jewish identity of its members: a feeling of ethno-cultural and transnational belonging. Despite associational fragmentation and its ideological, cultural, and socio-occupational heterogeneity, an ethnic diasporic matrix was shared by Jews ideologically identified with a variety of political orientations: Bundists, communists, or Zionists. Its objective was to raise an organic community that would offer services of religious worship, social and medical welfare, burial in a Jewish cemetery, and, fundamentally, formal Jewish education. The kehillah framework transcended the borders of local ethnic association in order to encompass both the will for integration in the country and, simultaneously, the transnational bonds among the entire Jewish people both scattered throughout the diaspora and concentrated in Israel. The Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) became paradigmatic of collective Jewish life.

As in Argentina, the transnational relations that the Jewish community of Mexico forged significantly marked the construction of a new ethno-transnational diaspora that reaffirmed the paths of the old kehillah model. Thus, the diasporic matrix with its changing centers and collateral axes regenerated itself in its traditional models and practices. Continuity seemed to be the overall choice, and integration mediated by communal life was the strategy.

Contrary to what happened in the United States, the collective overshadowed the individual. Differing from the traditionalist-religious imprint of the northern communities, founded by secularists but seeking to answer communal and religious needs, communities were forged in the mold of modern European diaspora nationalism, emphasizing their inner ideological struggles, and organizing as political parties and social and cultural movements. The communal domain, while prompting continuity, became the basic framework for the permanent debates between world visions, convictions, strategies, and instrumental needs.

World Jewish developments gradually turned the Zionist idea and the State of Israel into central axes around which communal life developed and identity was built (Bokser Liwerant 2016c ). Partly convergent with Canadian and US Jewry, and partly singular in its meaning and intensity, Israel brought to the forefront both the feeling and the objective reality of a transnational shared mission and commitment to an ideological, political, and cultural-spiritual center. It also represented a new chapter in solidarity efforts as well as ambiguities surrounding the true meaning of this evolving relationship between an ideological, political, and public center and Latin American Jewish communities. It expressed the inherent tension between the idea of a national project for renewing Jewish national life in a Jewish homeland and that of acting as a spur to foster Jewish life in the circumstances of the diaspora. Being Zionist in Latin America provided Jews with the possibility of having a homeland- madre patria too, either just as other groups of immigrants to the country had or as a substitute for the previous ones that rejected them. It can be defined as a diasporic condition and consciousness that reinforced an ideal one-center (Jerusalem) model with a dependent periphery. Latin America was alternatively seen as undefined and not clearly part of the West, or as part of a peripheral region; a shared perception of a temporary sui generis diaspora called to play a central role in the changing Jewish dispersion. Zionist sectors invigorated the center with both the “national home” and “refuge” qualities that simultaneously nourished and reinforced their own diaspora profile (Avni 1976 ; Bokser Liwerant 1991 , 2016b ).

In comparatively accentuated collective patterns, while Eastern European Jews, as hegemonic community builders, established the old/new communal structures, the Sephardic geo-cultural world developed communities of its own based on different countries or even different cities of origin, such as Damascus and Aleppo. This reflected the character of a complex Jewish ethnic group textured by different subgroups, communal links, and family networks. The maintenance of Sephardic trade networks, the circulation of knowledge, marriages contracted or dissolved transnationally, and the other networks of communication, relation, and interaction explored herein enabled the perpetuation of a modern Sephardic diaspora (Mays 2020 ). Sub-ethnicity provided vital inner interactions.

Similar to the case of Canada, education reflected and reinforced political and organizational diversity and a highly developed structural base that became the main domain to transmit, create, and project the cultural profile of Jewish communities; to construct differences between the communities and their host societies as well as inside the communities themselves. It acted as a central field for displaying Jewish collective life while negotiating the challenges of incorporation and integration. The role Israel played in its development gradually expanded, as the center that aimed to set itself as a focus to legitimately influence Jewish life outside its borders.

As in the rest of the Jewish world, the June 1967 Six-Day War may be seen as a watershed in terms of solidarity, cohesion, and mutual recognition in world Jewry (Lederhendler 2000 ). The responses it elicited illustrate the way in which a moment in history can become a “foundational event” where different dimensions converge: reality, symbolism, and the imaginary. Discourse and social action came together and stretched the boundaries that define the scope and meaning of us . The threat to the state was seen as a threat to the entire Jewish people—the people of Israel were defined as one undivided entity. Paradoxically, this turning point was progressively and radically reversed by an extreme expression of religious revival and de-secularization. While the “miraculous” experience of the Six-Day War enhanced the links with Israel as the state of the Jewish people, it also reinforced the connection of the Jewish people with the land of Israel—a link recovered and channeled by the Orthodox world (Danzger 1989 ). Religious Zionism and the settlers were also nourished by this experience that led to strengthening biblical-mythical beliefs, connections, and symbols (Aran 1991 ; Dieckhoff 2003 ; Don-Yehiya 2014 ; Sagi and Schwartz 2018 ). Over time, this trend grew and reached in the early twenty-first century its utmost expression, in which religious allegiances, ideological worldviews, and instrumental considerations interact in interwoven and complex ways (DellaPergola 2020a ).

Israeli internal discourse shifted its focus from the diaspora to new critical topics: the Occupied Territories and the Palestine question, but also religion-state relations. This political shift not only removed the inherent subject of Israel-Diaspora links from the forefront of the Israeli agenda, but it created inherent tensions because of the different political outlooks and institutional interests at both ends of the dyad.

Further transformations concern the concrete and potential cleavages over patterns of private/public developments and expressions of collective identity that cross both Israel and the diaspora communities in light of the diversified nature of the dimensions, actors, and institutions that interact and divergent political stands. Whereas communal political behavior related to transnational links and support for Israel and the capacity to influence decision-making intensified due to globalization processes, the latter generated new constraints derived from regionalization and the inner differentiation and geopolitical positions of the countries. In this respect, it reflects the complex interplay between a wider public sphere, the prevalence of traditional mechanisms for negotiation, the internationalization of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the presence of divisions within the Jewish communities.

Surpassing a binary understanding of the diaspora-center relationship, coexistent and even competing cultural, religious, and political referents favor its conceptualization as a pluri-centered or even de-centered matrix that carries intense dynamics of convergences and divergences (Alroey 2008 ; Asscher and Shiff 2019 ).

The Triad Today: Selected Snapshots

Over recent decades, strong transformative trends crosscut the continent. The Americas lay the groundwork for observing the growing scope and intensity of globalization and transnationalism and their impact on the Jewish Diaspora’s changing profile.

Transnational links became reinforced. Although the country/state of residence continues to be the frame of reference for everyday life, experiences are no longer exhausted in that space. Both the territory and the symbolic horizons of the nation have lost vigor through the multiplication and diffusion of cognitive and normative maps. Introjected globalizing trends in the national spheres have been combined with similar processes at the community level, generating competition between normative guidelines and interpretative schemes and making a single collective frame of reference challenging if not irrelevant. Thus, in the South as in the North, the idea of cultural diversity has distanced itself from assimilationist pretensions.

Jewish culture, as does culture in general, far from being compact and homogeneous, acts as a conductive thread for new scenarios of transnational fluxes of all kinds—immigration, transmigration, tourism; information technology (IT) and electronically transmitted images; postmodern ideas that call into question central educational institutions. The demarcating function of culture has been diluted, causing transfigurations of the traditional “behavioral genders” that kept the social world “in its place” (Yudice 2006 ).

Changes occur in broader foci that encompass emerging civic commonalities and particular transnational links. The Americas are experiencing differentiated transformations in the public sphere, in the criteria of membership, in the spaces and dynamics of identity-building, and in their political expressions. Sociocultural/political parameters and limits to diversity are subject to changes, namely potential xenophobic and antisemitic expressions. Political pluralism, the acknowledgment of difference, and the emphasis on heterogeneity act as a substratum that stimulates and reinforces diversity.

In Latin America, through local differences, citizen participation has broadened, seeking to promote democratic integration, including minorities. Although the project of a civic community and the strengthening of civil society were cemented after the political transitions to democracy, the latter were characterized more by variability in the degrees of achievement than by their full implementation. The region’s changing reality reflects both the increasingly expansive force of democracy and its recessions, regressions, and reconfigurations. Latin America has incorporated global cycles of political opportunities and social conflicts in contradictory ways, as evidenced in democratization and de-democratization processes, centralization of power, civic citizenship and ethnic allegiances, and the simultaneity, as well, of individualization of rights and collective affirmation. Multiculturalism and new claims for recognition of primordial identities seek inclusion based on essentialism, which previously dominated at the national level.

Canada, after the 1970s and 1980s, following the intense mobilization of ethnic minorities, proclaimed a multiculturalist policy; although it did not lack criticism (Guo and Wong 2015 ; Bannerji 2020 ) or inner ethno-national tensions, it followed a path of stability. A variety of elements enrich multiculturalism. Like other minorities, Jews continue to find expressions of their collective life while maintaining their internal ethnic cohesion.

In contrast, in the United States, the very idea of the nation was built upon history, both ideological and material, with a solid racial division that was deeply ingrained in the social structure of the country. Access to the public space (and even the territory) was hierarchized on a racial basis. Nonetheless, one of the ideas that prevailed was that of assimilation, the melting pot, and at least nominally equal opportunity. Changes began slowly in the 1960s, when the Civil Rights movement gained impetus and the Civil Rights Act was famously passed in 1964, and they developed in different directions. The sustained increase in the recognition of diversity also faced discriminatory nationalist reactions.

Outlined in terms of general trends, the impact of the context may be discerned in the interactions with Jewish community transformations, oscillating between boundary maintenance and boundary erosion. Frontiers bear witness to an epoch defined by underlying complexity. Important sectors have abandoned communal belonging while others have seen a flourishing and resurgence of collective Jewish life. Communal institutional foundations face new equations between being and belonging, religiosity and ethnicity, peoplehood and social stratification, changing hegemonies in the leadership and sources of power and consequent disputes. But scarcity of resources—real or perceived—underlies all of these dualities.

The perimeters of Jewish life have been (and are still being) modified. The limits and traditional functions of the organized Jewish communities evolve both in the rate of conventional affiliation and in the new spaces that emerged or were strengthened as a response to the increasingly integrated profile of Jews in society. In light of changing necessities, a significant turn in the financing of collective life has also taken place. Perhaps a paradigmatic example was the transition to new forms of privatized resources. Partially as an outcome and as a vigorous internalization of the dominant neoliberal patterns in society, US Jewry saw the growth of powerful private funds competing with, and even displacing, the Federations (Kelner 2013 ; Friedman and Korenfeld 2018 ). The behavior of private funds and banks supporting Jewish institutions shows differing patterns of responsibility. The common denominator of many institutions was the transformation of their past profiles to become similar to nongovernmental organizations, through innovative policies of social support. Both ex ante and ex post, these policies developed as internal fragmentations that reflect the socioeconomic and occupational stratification of the communities.

Simultaneously, the communal dimension is also perceived as just one of the possibilities of the existence of the social subject, whose self-construction takes many forms: as an individual, as a member of civil society, or as a participant in temporary frameworks that create contingent associative identities (Cohen and Eisen 2000 ). The transition from communal models based on a shared past to associative models based on changing shared interests gained impetus, defined by multiple belonging and increased integration, making it necessary for Jews to redefine their organizational axes. The private sphere is growing as a space for experiencing Judaism. While this is significantly marked in the US, it seems to bring the Latin American and the North American experiences closer, in the sense of re-dimensioning the individual realm for the construction of Jewish life. Are collective spheres seen as a guarantee of continuity? And how and where is continuity defined? (Kurtzer and Sufrin 2020 ) The individual-community binary constitutes, indeed, a clue to the alternate referents of structural cohesion and identity-building, even though the two elements differ in dominance. While in Latin America and Canada the community was the grounds for building Jewish life, in the US it emerged as an entity whose centrality was recognized as an alternative resource to religious practices and a means for enhancing Jewish identity precisely when its loosening was enunciated (Cohen 1988 ).

The collective associational dimension is correlated with differing indexes of ethnic cohesiveness such as community affiliation or Jewish schooling. While in the US the main indicators are closer to the Brazilian and Argentine communities at medium intensity, Mexico stands closer to Canada at higher intensity. Institutional orders, national cultures, and socioeconomic structures are projected in it. While the affiliation rate in Canada (70%) and Mexico (85%) is similar, Argentina, Brazil, and the US run between 45 and 50%. Enrollment in day schools accounts for Mexican exceptionality (93%) among the similar rates in Canada, Argentina, and Brazil (45%), while the US oscillates around 25% (DellaPergola 2011 ; Bokser Liwerant et al. 2015 ; Brym et al. 2018 ; Besser 2020 ).

The structural and functional changes highlighted here take place amidst the porosity of borders which paved the way for the emergence of religion, closely related to the weakening of the culture of its traditional boundaries, and its reconnection to new spatial and temporal configurations. Religion enhanced its role as a resource to address other social problems and as a means to a public ethical discourse (Voyé 2000 ). In parallel to reinstating the normative validity of the public sphere (Casanova 1994 ), the responses of orthodoxy and fundamentalism have become stronger, defending the enclave nature of the collective condition and taking positions as ethical referents in a context of credibility crisis. For its part, and defined by its historical trajectory as a circulation culture, the Jewish religious world in the Americas intensified and widened. The Conservative Movement expanded from the US to the South as a shift away from the original religious models of the immigrant generation. Its Northern congregational character was redefined, and the synagogue was relocated as a community space, which meant new options for building a Jewish identity committed to local society. In the South, specifically in Argentina, it allowed for an interesting de-secularization with no rejection of Zionism, while encouraging a concern for human rights—even preceding or paralleling the agenda of Canadian Jewry. The establishment of the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary in Buenos Aires and its role in training Conservative rabbis, a pattern that reversed the previous absence of religious officials, reinforced the community’s structural foundations. The flux of rabbis from the South to the rest of the continent, particularly to the United States, pioneered a pattern of new transnationalism—the movement of religious personnel as actors and agents of social change (Bokser Liwerant 2013b ).

Subsequently, the Haredi presence expanded both in the North and in the South, in consonance with Israel. The Chabad Lubavitch movement and the opening of its centers across the continent exemplify how changing socioeconomic and cultural conditions were catalysts to the development of social support networks and the reaffirmation of identity borders, addressing the need to reconstruct social tissue. The movement spread an alternative paradigm anchored in belonging and discipline, proposing an ideal moral code and expressing the quest for expectations unfulfilled by the prevailing organized communal life. It further developed following migration movements (Limonic 2019 ).

The modified interplay between historical ethno-national patterns and religious and transnational flows also found expression in new channels and social actors. While the Israeli religious scene has singular traits associated with its national milieu, including the pervasive phenomenon of vicarious religious belonging without necessarily believing and delegated functions (Bokser Liwerant 2002 ; Davie 2007 ; Fischer 2010 ), parallel manifestations of autonomous expression of the religious experience emerge both in Israel and in the diaspora. Religious transnational networks across communities and Israel are erasing the traditional spaces and mechanisms of interaction defined by borders between the voluntary collectives and the sovereign state. Religious frameworks provide the networks through which communities build agreements. Mexico City, New York, Buenos Aires, Paris, and Jerusalem are all nodes and fluent borderless spaces that define religious and ethnic interactions. Religious revitalization is not just a regional phenomenon: it can be characterized as articulating local and regional communities with a transnational community of believers/practicing Jews under the hegemonic centers located in the US or Israel.

These changes pose several questions, among which the matter of the institutions and their officials' financing is neither marginal nor tangential. Who is paying for them? Who has gradually approached this sort of spiritual framework and why? How and why have phenomena of a magical nature and an oracular character regarding the direction of personal affairs expanded? We could venture a parallelism of paradoxical combinations of the privatization of religious orientations and sensitivities, the weakening of the institutional dimension of religion, and the re-emergence of religious components, orientations, and sensibilities. In turn, movements (and orthodoxies) have been transformed and transposed at the center of national and transnational activities (DellaPergola 2008 ; Bokser Liwerant 2008b ). Thus, America’s communities and Israel need to be seen in their inner and cross-border diversification. Undoubtedly, this connection between competing centers and lateral axes redefined the diaspora matrix.

The complexity of these trends becomes apparent in the parallel growth of cultural or secular patterns of identification and organizational belonging, thereby moving and fixing old/new definition and membership criteria. More than the synagogue, other fields and activities of identity-building have received new impetus. It is worth underscoring literature, theater, and film as privileged terrains where the new trends, expectations, and claims regarding the social imaginary are expressed. They became a meaningful part of social discourse, expressing meanings, narratives, images, and tropes of the changing historical experiences and new social constellations. Paradigmatic of it has been contemporary cultural production, where gender and the search for identity converge. It could even be defined as an extraordinary literary boom of being Jewish in the Americas—the individual problematic of collective belonging, the existential queries derived from the tension between the efforts of privatizing the historical dimension of identity, and the diachronic density of the subjectivity of Jews.

South to North and Beyond

Decades after the founding migrations to the Americas, renewed migration waves became central factors of social change for those who move and those who stay, for the communities in the countries of origin and for the new communities built abroad. The new interconnections are marked by the relocations in the lateral axes and the center(s) of Jewish life. Partly convergent with other ethnic diasporas and partly in their uniqueness, Jews are engaged today in a renewed geography of dispersion and concentration. A complex logic of interdependence between the new homes, the previous ones, and the historical ideational ones widens Jewish social experiences.

The Americas entered the twenty-first century with differing experiences, as part of a single world order in which the US still occupied a top place and Latin America a subordinate one. A more systematic articulation of the Americas emerged under the hegemony of the US, including Canada in a secondary role. Among the visible and significant manifestations of this development is the growing migratory flux from South to North, especially to the US. Latin American migration expresses the interconnection between globalization, diasporas, and transnationalism.

The emigration of Jews from Latin America to the United States is part of this larger, global phenomenon of unexpected scope: the international migrant stock has grown from 153 million in 1990 to 271 million in 2019 (United Nations–Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2019 ). In 2017, about 37 million Latin Americans lived outside their country of birth (compared to 35 million in 2010) (Pew Research Center 2019 ). Latin American Jews are part of the cohort of qualified migrants who increasingly move to OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries. Over the past few decades, close to 250,000 Jews from Latin American countries have undertaken cross-border migrations. Given the global estimates, it appears that close to 36 or 37% now live outside the region (DellaPergola 2020c ).

Indeed, Latin America has become an exit region for broad social sectors. Societal crises and individual choices converge, determining timing and characteristics (Bokser Liwerant et al. 2010 ; Bokser Liwerant 2015c ). As a result, in complex and interrelated ways, Latin American Jews have transitioned from communities of immigrants to communities of citizens and, simultaneously, of emigrants.

Contemporary international and regional migration, integration, and distinctive mobility account for the new scaling of spaces where collective Jewish life is relocated. Diversified waves of migration both reflect and create diverse territorial, cultural, sub-ethnic, and social paths (Sassen 1998 ; Castles 2000 ; United Nations Development Programme 2019 , 2020 ).

The collective dimension implicit in this relocation and the new profile of communities in the making might be analyzed in light of the “migration crises” of the Latin American region, i.e. the worldwide emigration, dispersal, and regrouping of migrant communities generated by macro-level forces of a political and economic nature (Van Hear 1998 ). Successive migration crises affecting Latin Americans took place during the second half of the twentieth century. The first phase began with the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and continued intermittently, chiefly during the 1970s in Chile under Salvador Allende’s socialist government and later under the authoritarian regime of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990). Emigration also ensued during the era of military dictatorships in Brazil (1964–1985), Argentina (1976–1983), and Uruguay (1973–1985). The later phases (mid-1980s and 1990s) were caused by the combined effects of neoliberal economic policies and globalization affecting Argentina on two occasions, as well as Uruguay. Colombian Jews emigrated during that period due to a generalized atmosphere of violence within the country. More recently (mainly since 2000), the Jews of Venezuela have emigrated under the impact of the populist regime initiated by Hugo Chávez. Emigration from Mexico was relatively more stable, with peaks in the mid-1990s, in 2010, and at the end of the 2010s. The ways in which streams of migration change shed light on moments of transition. Sharp declines in the Jewish population have occurred since the mid-1980s in Central American countries. However, in the case of Guatemala, more than half of its Jewish population decided to stay in their homeland. Neighboring Costa Rica increased its Jewish population by two thirds since 1967 while Panama became a relocation country for Jews fleeing from other Central American countries. Argentina has experienced some of the most acute political and economic crises, yet still hosts the largest Jewish population in the continent (Bokser Liwerant et al. 2010 ).

Contemporary American Jewry and the encounters that take place within it may be better understood when considering the challenges of integrating newly arrived groups: multiple dynamics of joining/receiving, of being/belonging into the extant reality of the veterans dominated by prevailing self-images and discourses (See Fig.  2 ).

Diversity of transnational processes and its implications

Jews migrating across and out of Latin America simultaneously disperse and regroup. We are witnessing the recovery of the historic trajectory of ethnic and ethno-national patterns of migration and the pluralization of migrant populations. This conjunction between two interrelated aspects implies both an enhancement of Jewish globalization and the reinforcement of particular, local aspects of the Jewish experience. This requires a dual terminology: diaspora and transnationalism are related concepts that are applicable to the contemporary itinerary of Jewish dispersion in the “new global ethnic landscape,” as Appadurai ( 1996 ) calls it. Mobility and relocation set the stage for the potential reconstitution of an enlarged, redefined ethno-religious and national/transnational collective.

Latin American Jews do not simply replicate social relations transferred from country of origin to destination society (Levitt 2001 ; Nonini 2002 ); rather, their subjective and socially expressed experiences are quite diverse. Boundary maintenance between origin groups may be complicated (undercut, refracted, blurred) by interactions and by the plausibility of multiple identities: a sense of being Latin American may thus coexist with a sense of being Jewish, Colombian, Mexican or Venezuelan, Latino or Hispanic, or perhaps a more general awareness of “being immigrant Jews on their way to becoming Americans.”

Jews in the United States live in “stacked social spaces” characterized by high levels of foreign-born residents. These spaces, which share sociodemographic and ethnic-racial contexts, extend over the noncontiguous geographic spaces in American society, hence questioning what Ludger Pries ( 2008 ) calls the past predominance of “mutual embeddedness of social practices, symbols and artifacts in uni-local geographic containers” and the “complete conjunction of the social and the spatial.” We can thus conceive of these communities as the territorialization of a differential net of diasporic spaces (Brah 2011) which comprise a large number of multiple realities, intertwined with its local, national, and regional circumstances, and still maintain the communication thread through the experience of diaspora in and of itself.

The Latin American Jewish case is an apt choice in that regard, since Latin American Jewish immigrants in the United States have invested strongly in establishing the institutional support structures for a collective identity. The relatively high degree of formalization and institutionalization is supra-local, as it was when establishing Jewish life in the South; that is, group organizations and institutions embrace far more than local communal needs and attachments. Jewish communal life is thus characterized by strong collective historical bonds that transcend national borders and find expression in diasporic and transnational practices. The case at hand can mediate between discourses of national (nation-state and political) migration studies, on the one hand, and individual or family-based migration and transmigration studies, on the other (Portes et al. 1999 ; Beck 2007 ; Amelina et al. 2012 ).

Several paradigmatic fields and patterns can be identified in locations with a strong collective Latin American Jewish presence, where agency and structure interact in a differentiated scenario of places and actors. Their relocation takes place in existing and reconfigured spaces of American Jewry. It occurs largely because unique and shared Jewish dimensions allow for sociocultural embeddedness amidst inner diversity. Paradigmatic of this trend is the array of educational choices. Social integration and encounters between the different and the similar often entail new cultural trade-offs. Social boundaries are maintained, though bifurcation and overlapping occur—as expressed through a revised articulation of social and cultural markers, as in the case of family unity, ideational connectedness with the State of Israel, memorialization of the Shoah, and sensitivity to antisemitism. These values—once perceived as stemming from the Latin American Jewish experience—may now come to be regarded by some as more universally Jewish. Others, to be true, would assertively oppose such an importation of paramount Jewish diasporic values into American Jewish discourse. The institutional map of the educational system accounts for both cultural and socioeconomic factors.

The sub-ethnic axis shapes the strong connectedness among migrants independently of their country of origin and across global cities. Simultaneously, religious differentiation acts as a hard divide in providing affiliation and spaces that also crosscut place of origin. The way national origin overlaps with religious origin is deserving of attention. The inner religious divisions in Judaism and a Latino pan-ethnic identity develop together with both a Jewish comprehensive ethnic belonging and a fragmentary religious one. Countries of origin, cities of destination, and sociodemographic and ethnic-racial contexts and time frames are variables that influence and shape a diversified world.

Redefining and reconnecting their attachments, migrants are involved in processes of diaspora-making and diaspora-unmaking . Various scenarios emerge as they experience de-socialization from their country and community of origin and re-socialization in the country and community of destination (Van Hear 1998 ). Variability, complexity, and heterogeneity seem to be the rule. Thus, Greater Miami mirrors the cycles of migration crises in the region, starting with the first Jewish Cuban collective migratory/exiled wave and successive crises in the region. The expansion of a transnational community took place in new frontier areas such as Caribbean Florida or the American Southwest where complex dynamics developed, grounded in patterns that are particular to each national group but are generalized also within a large population. A shared sense of living in a community with other Latin Americans, the existence of communal organized spaces that represent group continuity, and the presence of a critical mass enhance new social regrouping by allowing migrants to establish and bolster formal and informal networks based on their common origins.

In San Diego, an ethno-national enclave with a transnational character developed among Mexican Jews, leading to what may be termed a secondary diaspora. The migrant experience in the North-East-Midwest triangle and its counterpart in Texas represent individual-professional cases, rather than collective migration patterns. Age, gender, and household composition—selectively younger and nuclear—provide interesting doors of entry and mapping routes into associational connections. It is thus possible to further question and analyze a scenario of de-diasporization that could lead to either individual integration or new prevailing criteria and axes of regrouping.

The US opened a wide spectrum of the legacy Latin Americans bring with them and accounts for the increasing transnationalism of the Jewish world. American Jewish life has been transformed by general social and communal patterns with distinct implications for continued collective communal life: transitions from individualization to collective affirmation, and their subsequent reversal; from congregational to communal models, albeit simultaneously witnessing a growing role for synagogues; from secularization to rising expressions of new forms of religiosity, even as secularism appears to be gaining ground; from privatization to communal revival. These trends are not linear but rather reflect changing moments, fluctuations, and interacting paths and are both cause and effect of a transnational overall interconnection.

Such dynamics may be approached as encounters between peripheral alterities and central alterities. Latin American Jews in particular may be seen as bearers of peripheral identities vis-à-vis the Anglo-Protestant core culture. On their side, American Jews face a certain degree of dissonance between their subjective sense of being “insiders” and those aspects of the Jewish experience that reflect their difference as “outsiders” (Biale et al. 1998 ; Rohrbacher 2016 ). Along a chain of “ otherness ” in American Jewish social spaces, recent immigrants may serve as reminders that American Jewry is to some extent being steadily reconstituted, and thus has not completed its processes of integration . The interplay between “otherness,” distinctiveness, and integration partly reflects previous experiences and partly marks new challenges.

A node in which these different dimensions converge may be seen is the ongoing question of “Jews of Color .” The overlapping of racial, ethnic, and national criteria and their socioeconomic, cultural, and religious connections raises fundamental questions as to the way the inclusion–exclusion dyad in community life is conceptually and practically approached (DellaPergola 2020b ). The undifferentiated incorporation of Hispanic, Sephardic, Mizrachi, Asian, and Middle Eastern—if it occurs—homogenizes an otherwise distinctive population, with its various trajectories and cultures. It may be read as a counterreaction to the racialized ethnicity for Hispanic/Latino which largely excluded Latin American Jews. A twofold dilemmatic ascription of identity and identification emerges—that of Latinos, who are generally seen as non-white in the US, and that of Jews, who are viewed as white (Bokser Liwerant 2015c ).

The initial questions of whether these immigrants should be classified primarily as Jewish, hence white, or whether their national identities as Argentine, Mexican, or Cuban weaken their Jewish ethno-religious identity must be weighed against the more complex issue of equating tout court Jews with whites, equivocally phrased as Ashkenazi hegemony or “whiteness.” Should social scientists show some hesitation at applying categories taken from a racialized reality vis-à-vis universalizing narratives and ethnic divisions? How does the equation of Jews with whites fit into a social and political context that shows signs of white supremacy and antisemitism?

The subjective and socially expressed experiences of Latin American Jews are quite diverse. Boundary maintenance between origin groups may increase in complexity by interactions and by the plausibility of multiple identities and corresponding organizational structures. Various permutations take place, including reaffirmation, intermingling, and disentanglement, as variegated subgroups deploy in and around concurrent ethno-cultural-national (country of origin) boundaries in common spaces, intergenerational and communal (Brubaker 2006 , 2015c).

Latin American Jewish migration to the US implies an altered stance vis-à-vis the connection to Israel; a geographically diverse transnationalism replaces older binary connections. That does not necessarily imply the weakening of attachments, but rather their re-signification. Israel was historically perceived by Latin American Jews as a vital space for those in need, in addition to its role as a sovereign political center and a focal axis of structural development. In the US, this amalgam may be readjusted as the “need” element makes way for other expressions of attachment and identification. Moreover, North American Jewish institutions become for their country of origin an important source of direct political support and a model for collective organization. This change must also be pondered considering the hypothesis of American Jewish self-distancing from Israel, which has elicited much debate (Cohen and Kelman 2009 ; DellaPergola 2010 ; Goldscheider 2010 ; Sasson et al. 2010 ). New data throw light both on meaningful attachment and on the age differentiation—an expression of prevailing changing dynamics (Pew Research Center 2021 ).

Latin American Jewish youth in the US increasingly participate in Birthright ( Taglit ), which has become an alternative to the study trips and intensive youth programs ( hakhsharot ) common in their countries of origin (Sasson et al. 2010 ). In this context, educational trips to Israel may be seen as fragments of the cultural and institutional practices for which Israel is conceived of as a site for the symbolic encoding of meanings and the formation of a sense of belonging while the awareness of an interconnected Jewish world is strengthened. Interactions between Israel and diaspora Jewish communities and their role in building Jewish identities exhibit complex dynamics—plural meanings of center-home (spiritual, symbolic, material) and transnational ideational motives. In this regard, youth trips may be conceptualized as a praxis that reveals the unique convergence of modern nationalism with the growing practical and conceptual presence of transnationalism in the Jewish world, thus shedding light on the changing role of the center or homeland in guaranteeing the continuity of the diaspora (Kelner 2010 ; Bokser Liwerant 2016b ). Thus, trips oscillate between links and bonds to the nation-state and diaspora-building as two interdependent pillars of the continuity of the collective. This interaction becomes challenging in the light of the rise of new identities with different levels of aggregation—both primordial and elective—and their renewed importance in the shaping of global, national, and local communal spheres.

A Global Memory

The multiplication, pluralization, and diversification of semantic-ideological and institutional connections between major arenas of Jewish life that develop between community and society—between the public and the private arenas—, as well as the components of collective identities, are defined by Eisenstadt ( 2010 ) as the crystallization of a new civilizational constellation. In this context, new relations between identity referents emerge. As such, the memory of the Shoah has progressively become an identification focus. It can be interpreted as located at the crossroads between collective memory—the memory of personal experiences or those of the group of belonging—and historical memory—which is mediated by its representations, symbols, and sites—as proposed by Halbwachs ( 1980 ). Besides its inherent and essential weight, it implies the culture of circulation, oscillating between Israel and the Shoah. Political developments within the Jewish state initially projected the Shoah as an identity referent, an iconic one, often above even the contents of the national state project. Israel gradually took on the role of collective memory keeper and shares it today with a reconfigured Jewish and non-Jewish world. Indeed, successive wars brought the recovery of its memory; the risk implied reinforced the conception of existential threat. Gradually, the increasing emergence of critical stands against Zionism and the Jewish state led to stripping the Jewish condition of its refugee profile and replacing it with a transfiguration that turned the victim into a victimizer, the refugee into the origin and cause of new exiles.

However, the transformation of the memory of the Shoah into a new identity paradigm was built inside the Jewish world not only as the road traced by the search of the past, but also as a counter-reference to the Jewish nation-state, as part of the claim for its universal over its particular meaning. The ideal of a cosmopolitan Judaism that seeks to construct a common human consciousness based on reducing ethnic or territorial barriers was constructed through the state–exile binomial. Its extreme conception questioned the Jewish national paradigm, seeing it as a threat that could “eradicate the certainty of uprooting, the mere entrenchment of the word, the legacy of the Prophets and the custodians of the books” (Steiner, 1985 ; Butler 2004 ). Exile and memory of destruction thus come together in a simultaneously tragic and heroic exiled figure. Head-on questioning of the State of Israel has emerged from this approach in the most pivotal moments of the Palestinian conflict. Yet, the paradoxical reversal of the centrality and meaning of the memory of the Shoah today finds expression in central arguments of representatives of post- and de-colonial thought, questioning and condemning it as part of the Western effort to displace and reject other genocides. Colonial racism is analyzed within the framework of the Holocaust and colonialism remembrance, and thus represents the Western, Eurocentric remembrance paradigm (Mignolo 2009 ; Grosfogel 2009 ).

The memory of the Shoah has also sought to explain its similarity to other genocides (Bokser Liwerant, Gleizer and Siman, 2016 ). In a world where globalization trends intensify antisemitic expressions, the idea of a universalizing memory sought to counter them. In Argentina, for instance, in light of the repression and antisemitic attacks starting in the late 1980s, the Shoah emerged as the axis of a new paradigm of memory and remembrance which sought to recover a thread of linkages between the traumatic episodes of Argentine reality and the Shoah. The latter connected with the repressive military dictatorship, the desaparecidos, the impunity and lack of justice. The 1994 bombing of the iconic building of AMIA—and two years earlier, the Israeli Embassy—were interpreted as one more link in the long chain of historical hate. They were also incorporated as part of a broad movement that fought for memory and justice, aiming to reconstruct the public sphere and redefine the place of a minority in the legitimate frame of full citizenship (Senkman 2005 , 2008 ). Simultaneously, universalizing the memory of the Shoah also meant shifting emphasis from the mass destruction of a people to the understanding of individual suffering and its moral consequences, as shown by the perspective of the American ethos and the Jewish present of integration.

A full circle of changing patterns of cultural representations and social relations has a direct impact on associational dynamics and institutional formations that shape the structural underpinnings of Jewish life, enhanced by the digitalization of world communications, which has favored transnational ethnic and religious associations and virtual communities. The interpretation of belonging is less ideologically homogeneous while, paradoxically, the emergence of new nationalisms take place. These processes interact with the reconfiguration of communities that are exposed to social and cultural frameworks subject both to boundary erosion and to the organized spheres for boundary maintenance.

Concluding Remarks

The central trends and issues analyzed shed light on the Americas as a diverse territorial, geopolitical, economic, social, multiethnic, and cultural entity—ideally one, in reality diverse. The global Jewish world, for its part, was the carrier of its own diversity: its life parameters in the national and regional spaces were built on commonalities and inner differences that, as analyzed here, found expression on several spheres—from education and communal patterns of organization to the place of Jewish individuals and communities in the public sphere, as well as the role of and links with Israel.

Solid substrata of various forms of associational and institutional underpinnings provided the ground for common challenges and collective cohesion. Diaspora-building emerged as the territory where the collective became shaped and reshaped. Differing interactions between primordial and elective identities—accelerated by globalization processes—varied between North and South and within each region and country. Changes over time and the pluralization and diversification of social life posed new challenges that led to the redefinition of the spaces where collective and individual possibilities develop.

Having analyzed the main conceptual and empirical lenses to account for the experience of Jews in the Americas, several questions emerge before us. We need to cross the national borders where Jewish diasporas dwell in an effort to understand the globality of the Jewish condition and also to understand the current dynamics of transnationalism. Are we going to see more convergence or divergence between the North and the South? Will globalization trends reach a maximum limit, followed by regression? Are the Jewish Americas moving toward a position of isolation or one of continued participation with world Jewry and Israel? Will the Americas and Israel build together a new poly-centered or de-centered matrix, or will fragmentation and antagonism overcome consensus-building? Will our broad field of knowledge—its theoretical, methodological formulations and our epistemic communities—be receptive to the changes required to face increased complexity and uncertainty?

Regarding our first query, no easy assumption or one-dimensional approach seems adequate to produce a serious answer. We may broadly affirm that convergences and divergences display differentially within the economic, political, social, and cultural spheres. While the social sciences have studied the achievements of globalization processes—the growing interconnection between countries, economies and societies, collaboration in science, the circulation of cultures and human mobility itself—new expressions point to increased differentiation and inequalities between regions and countries, as well as within societies and communities. These processes are made evident by the growing paradox of the dynamics of integration–fragmentation, inclusion–exclusion, and dispersion–concentration (Cicchelli 2018 ).

Furthermore, globalization today is confronted by nationalist and isolationist trends. While not only the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic (and its resulting disruptions and imbalances) but also its possible solutions enhance the need for collaboration and global governance, peaks of nationalism are simultaneously looming. Both moments are seen as irreconcilable: the different governments tried to respond in the short term, each with its own profile and capabilities, while at the same time they lost legitimacy within their societies. The picture differed in the US, in Canada, and in the various Latin American societies. It may become enhanced by the fact that the differing scales of poverty and social inequality will probably deepen the gap between the regions, leading to the intensification of migration and bringing new migration crises and movement from the South to the North and from the North elsewhere.

While the Americas are more interdependent than in the past, we are witnessing different paths of restructuring regional and national processes. Democracies in the North and democratization in the South may further lead Jews and Jewish life to a shift from the focus on differences of a center-linked diaspora to a broader focus that encompasses emerging civic commonalities and transnational links as well. However, both this tendency and the renewal of collective affirmation draw challenging scenarios. The prevailing inner divisions are expressed in differing institutional capabilities by the various sectors. Indeed, the sectorialization of Jewish life has seriously challenged the existing forms of organization and of leadership and underlines the need for appropriate spaces where inner differences may be negotiated.

We may think of a scenario of a world Jewish network-society articulated between diverse focal places of Jewish life. A Jewish world might coalesce in global and integral terms based on networks and relationships, links, and interactions that include voluntary and compulsory frameworks, primordial and elective foci of identities, associative and institutionalized structures. It would be a world in which plural identities would claim differentiated approaches to individuals and institutional orders as agents of changes.

However, we must question whether the inner divisions of Jewish life—religious, political, cultural, and socioeconomic—will lead to cross-national and overlapping sectorial relations blurring but not necessarily bringing the diaspora communities and Israel closer. The continental dynamics have been, although differentially, connected to Israel. Will American diaspora communities continue to maintain changing but strong links with Israel, or will the divergences lead to fragmentation?

And again, while the US, Canadian, and Latin American communities developed, as analyzed, differential bilateral functionalities, the importance attributed to the center-home duality by various sectors reflects the changing profile of an ethno-national diaspora entering new transnational dynamics. Future patterns of migration, geographical mobility, and its implications, the reshaping of existing and newly created communities, the expansion of material and symbolic boundaries, and their redefinition in a mobile context are all processes that will influence and modify the links with Israel. The interdependence between the nation-state-home (concrete, ideational, putative) and diaspora-building—strongly conditioned by varying Jewish models of collective life—develops along a diversified world of identities and religious and political allegiances.

The potential dynamics of interdependence, disjuncture, and convergences among these axes are closely related to the developments in Israel. While in the US the liberal sectors’ increased criticism of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and its lack of official recognition of all the Jewish religious streams have acted as dispute referents vis-à-vis Israel, the latter has maintained its centrality and unavoidability in the public conversation. How distancing and disaffiliation from the organized Jewish community will interact with the nexus with Israel is an open question. Will it be defined by political and cultural dissent?

Canadian Jewry has been homogeneously closer to Israel, and Latin American Jewish communities may well be able to continue to develop their relation at the crossroads of ideology and needs.

Our triad—globalization, transnationalism, and diaspora—highlights singular patterns defined by the stability and plasticity of the Jewish historical trajectory. However, regarding the epistemic challenges we posed, understanding the triad in the Americas demands that we work on the conceptual and methodological mediations and in-depth complementary relations between differing analytical levels and disciplines.

The former has been approached by Hartman’s analytical model. Though focused on the individual and the family, it may be projected to wider comparative Jewish populations. It characterizes different levels of ecological factors influencing Jewish life cycles and populations at different times in history and in different geographical contexts— microsystem , mesosystem , macrosystem , chronosystem , and exosystem (Hartman 2020 ).

Approaching the challenge from the perspective of the disciplinary interaction, the question arises of which is the space where these articulations are to be formulated in order to favor encounters between various disciplinary logics, each with its own specialized language, methodological resources, topical focuses, and cognitive identity. How do we transition from community to society, from homeland to diaspora, from individual to group, from community to nation and state, from country to region, and from there to new centers of existence or interaction?

We do move from social territory to the de-territorialization of culture; from the everyday existence inside and out of institutions; from the de-privatization of religion to new circuits of circulation, personal forms of lending meaning and significance to belonging; from past to present; and, above all, from concrete particularity to concrete universality between disciplines (see Fig.  3 ).

Epistemological shift

Further conceptual elaborations and research will stimulate the need to transition from the individual Jewish identity focus to the current challenges of continuity. The new individual turn needs to be theoretically connected to the interdisciplinarity of what social sciences call the subjective turn and its intersection with collective memory and values, not just individual but shared, public, and historical as well, and the concrete orders where memory and values are recreated and transmitted.

Abella, Isabella, and Harold Troper. 1982. None is too many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933–1948 . Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys.

Google Scholar  

Abella, Irving. 2006. Presidential address: Jews, human rights and the making of a new Canada. Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 11 (1): 3–15.

Article   Google Scholar  

Alexander, Jeffrey. 2006. The Civil sphere . New York: Oxford University Press.

Book   Google Scholar  

Allen, Robert, Tommy Murphy, and Eric Schneider. 2012. The colonial origins of the divergence in the Americas: A labor market approach. The Journal of Economic History 72 (4): 863–894.

Alroey, Gur. 2008. Aliya to America? A Comparative Look at Jewish Mass Migration, 1881–1914. Modern Judaism 28 (2): 109–133.

Amelina, Anna, Devrimsel Nergiz, Thomas Faist, and Nina Glick Schiller (eds.). 2012. Beyond methodological nationalism: research methodologies for cross-border studies . Abingdon: Routledge

Anteby-Yemini, Lisa, and William Berthomière. 2005. Diaspora: A look back on a concept. Bulletin Du Centre De Recherche Français à Jérusalem 16: 262–270.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at large. Cultural dimension of globalization . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Aran, Gideon. 1991. Jewish fundamentalism: The block of the faithful in Israel (Gush Emunim). In Fundamentalism Observed , ed. Martin Marty and Scott Appleby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Asscher, Omri, and Offer Shiff. 2019. Diasporic stances, homeland prisms: Representing diaspora in the homeland as internal negotiation of national identity. Diaspora Studies 13 (1): 1–15.

Avni, Haim., Judit Bokser Liwerant, Margalit Bejarano, Sergio DellaPergola. (eds.). 2011. Pertenencia y alteridad. Judíos en/de América Latina: Cuarenta años de cambios . Madrid/Frankfurt/Mexico City: Iberoamericana/Vervuert/Bonilla Artigas Editores.

Avni, Haim. 1976. El sionismo y su arraigo en América Latina . Jerusalem: The Hebrew University.

Bannerji, Himani. 2020. The ideological condition Selected essays on history, race and gender . Boston/Leiden: Brill.

Bauböck, Rainer, and Thomas Faist. 2010. Diaspora and transnationalism concepts, theories and methods . Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Beck, Ulrich. 2007. La condition cosmopolite et le piège du nationalisme méthodologique. In Les sciences sociales en mutation , ed. M. Wieviorka, 223–236. Auxerre: Éditions Sciences Humaines.

Bellah, Robert. 1967. Civil Religion in America. Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 96 (1): 1–21.

Ben-Rafael, Eliezer, Yitzhak Sternberg, Judit Bokser Liwerant, & Yosef Gorni. (eds.). 2009. Transnationalism: Diasporas and the advent of a new (dis)order . Boston/Leiden: Brill.

Ben-Rafael, E. 2013. Diaspora. Current Sociology.

Ben-Rafael, Eliezer. 2013b. Las Diasporas Transnacionales: Una nueva era o un nuevo mito? Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales . México, UNAM, (LVIII 219):189–224.

Ben-Rafael, Eliezer, and Yitzhak Sternberg. 2016a. With and beyond Shmuel N Eisenstadt: Transglobality. In Varieties of Multiple Modernities: New research design , ed. Gerhard Preyer and Michael Sussman. Boston/Leiden: Brill.

Besser, Mordechai. 2020. A census of Jewish day schools in the United States 2018–2019 . New York: Avi Chai.

Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 1991. El movimiento nacional judío. El sionismo en México, 1922–1947 . Mexico: Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, UNAM.

Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 2002. Globalization and collective identities. Social Compass 49: 253–271.

Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 2008b. Latin American Jewish Identities: Past and present challenges. The Mexican Case in a Comparative Perspective . ed. J. Bokser Liwerant, 81–105. Boston/Leiden: Brill.

Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 2009. Latin American Jews. A transnational diaspora. In Transnationalism: diasporas and the advent of a new (dis)order , eds. Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Yitzhak Sternberg, Judit Bokser Liwerant, 351–374. Boston/Leiden: Brill.

Bokser Liwerant, Judit, Sergio DellaPergola, and Leonardo Senkman (eds.). 2010. Latin American Jews in a transnational world. Redefining and relocating Jewish experience and identities on four continents [Research project report]. Jerusalem/Mexico City: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem/UNAM

Bokser Liwerant, Judit 2013. Diásporas y transnacionalismo. Nuevas indagaciones sobre los judíos latinoamericanos hoy. In Judaica latinoamericana VII, 11–71. Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem/AMILAT.

Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 2013a. Being national, being transnational: Snapshots of belonging and citizenship. In Shifting frontiers of citizenship: The Latin America experience , eds. Mario Sznajder, Luis Roniger, & Carlos Forment, 343–365. Boston/Leiden: Brill.

Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 2013b. Latin American Jews in the United States: community and belonging in times of transnationalism. Contemporary Jewry 33(1-2): 121-143.

Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 2015. El educador judío latinoamericano en un mundo transnacional . México/Jerusalem: Bonilla Artigas/Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 2015a. Globalization and transnationalism: facing new realities, narratives and conceptual challenges. In Penser global. Internationalization et globalization des sciences humaines et sociales , eds. Michel Wieviorka, Laurent Lévi-Strauss and Gwenaëlle Lieppe, 309–336. Paris: Maison des Sciences de L’Homme.

Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 2015b. Thinking Multiple Modernities from Latin America’s perspective: complexity, periphery and diversity. In Varieties of Multiple Modernities. New Research Design , eds. Michael Sussman and Gerhard Preyer, 177–205. Boston/Leiden: Brill.

Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 2015c. Transnational expansions of Latin American Jewish life in times of migration: A mosaic of experiences in the United States. In Research in Jewish demography and identity , eds. Eli Lederhendler, & Uzi Rebhun, 198–240. Brighton: Academic Studies Press

Bokser Liwerant, Judit, Daniella Gleizer and Yael Siman. 2016a. Conceptual and methodological clues 
for approaching the connections between Mexico and the Holocaust: Separate or Interconnected Histories? Contemporary Review of the Middle East 3(3), 1–37, 2016, SAGE Publications

Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 2016b. Expanding frontiers and affirming belonging: Youth travel to Israel - A view from Latin America. Hagira –Israel Journal of Migration , 122–158.

Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 2016c. The changing status of Zionism and Israel in Latin American Jewry. In Handbook of Israel: The major debates , eds. Eliezer Ben Rafael, Julius Schoeps, Yitzhak Sternberg and Olag Glokner, 998–1027. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 2019. Acercamientos conceptuales y socio-históricos a Múltiples Modernidades: secularización, laicidad e identidades colectivas. In Escenarios actuales de la laicidad en América Latina , eds. Pauline Capdeville and Fernando Arletazzen, 31–65. Mexico: IIJ-UNAM.

Biale, David, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel. 1998. Insider/outsider: American Jews and multiculturalism . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. The forms of capital. In Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education , ed. J.G. Richardson, 241–258. New York: Greenwood Press.

Brah, Avtar. 1996. Cartographies of diaspora: Contesting identities . London: Routledge.

Braudel, Fernand. 1986. Las civilizaciones actuales: Estudio de historia económica y social . Madrid: Tecnos.

Brenner, Frederic. 2003. Diaspora: Homelands in exile . London: Bloomsbury.

Brinkmann, Tobias. 2014. “German Jews?” Reassessing the history of nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants in the United States. In Transnational traditions , eds. Ava F. Kahn and Adam D. Mendelsohn, 144–164. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Brown, Michael. 2007. Canadian Jews and multiculturalism: Myths and realities. Jewish Political Studies Review 19 (3/4): 57–75.

Brubaker, Rogers. 1994. Diasporas. Cultural Anthropology 9 (3): 302–338.

Brubaker, Rogers. 2006. Ethnicity without groups . Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Bruneau, Michel. 1995. Diasporas . Montpellier: GIP Reclus.

Brym, Robert (ed.). 2018. The future of Canada's territorial borders and personal boundaries: proceedings of the third S.D. Clark symposium on the future of Canadian society. Oakville: Rock's Mills Press.

Brym, Robert, Keith Neuman, and Rhonda Lenton. 2018. 2018 survey of Jews in Canada . Toronto: Environics Institute for Survey Research.

Burla, Shahar. 2015. The Diaspora and the homeland: Political goals in the construction of Israeli narratives to the Diaspora. Israel Affairs 21: 602–619.

Butler, Judith. 2004. Jews and the bi-national State. Logos 3(1). http://www.logosjournal.com/butler.htm

Casanova, Jose. 1994. Public religions in the modern world . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Castles, Stephen. 2000. International migration at the beginning of the twenty-first century: Global trends and issues. International Social Science Journal 165: 269–281.

Cicchelli, Vincenzo. 2018. Plural and shared: The sociology of a cosmopolitan world . Boston/Leiden: Brill.

Clifford, James. 1994. Diasporas. Cultural Anthropology 9 (3): 302–338.

Cohen, Steven. 1988. American Assimilation or Jewish Revival? Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Cohen, Naomi. 2003. The Americanization of Zionism, 1987–1948 . Boston: Brandeis University Press.

Cohen, Robin. 2008. Global diasporas: An introduction . London/New York: Routledge.

Cohen, Steven, and Arnold M. Eisen. 2000. The Jew within: Self, family and community in America . Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Cohen, Steven, and Ari Kelman. 2009. Beyond distancing: Young adult American Jews and their Alienation from Israel . New York: Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies.

Coleman, James. 1988. Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology 94: S95–S120.

Coleman, William, and Geoffrey Underhill. 2012. Regionalism and global economic integration: Europe, Asia and the Americas . London: Routledge.

Crespo Gaggioti, Horacio Alberto, Gabriel A. Kozel, and Alexander Betancourt Mendieta. 2018. ¿Tienen las Américas una historia común? Herbert E. Bolton, las fronteras y la “Gran América” . Cuernavaca: Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos.

Danzger, Herbert. 1989. Returning to tradition: The contemporary revival of orthodox Judaism . New Haven/London: Yale University Press.

Davie, Grace. 2007. Vicarious religion: A methodological challenge. In Everyday religion: Observing modern religious lives , ed. N. Ammerman, 21–36. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter   Google Scholar  

De Tocqueville, Alexis. 2002. Democracy in America . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1835).

DellaPergola, Sergio. 2010. Distancing, yet one. Contemporary Jewry 30 (2–3): 183–190.

DellaPergola, Sergio. 2020c. World Jewish population, 2019 American Jewish Year Book . Berlin: Springer.

DellaPergola, S. 2008. Jewish autonomy and dependency: Latin America in global perspective. In Identities in an era of globalization and multiculturalism, ed. E. Ben-Rafael, J. Bokser Liwerant, Y. Gorny and R. Rein. Boston/Leiden: Brill.

DellaPergola, S. 2011. ¿Cuántos somos hoy? Investigación y narrativa sobre población judía en América Latina. In Pertenencia y alteridad. Judíos en/de América Latina: cuarenta años de cambios , eds. A. Haim, J. Bokser Liwerant, S. DellaPergola, M. Bejarano and L. Senkman, 305–340. Madrid/Frankfurt/Mexico City: Iberoamericana/Vervuert/Bonilla Artigas Editores.

DellaPergola, Sergio. 2020a. Diaspora vs. Homeland: Development, unemployment and ethnic migration to Israel. 1991–2019. Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

DellaPergola, Sergio. 2020b. Jews of Color. A Memo. Association for Social Scientific Study of Jewry.

Dieckhoff, Alain. 2003. Israël: Une nation en armes entre dynamiques individualistes et permanence du nationalisme. In Guerres et sociétés États et violence après la Guerre froide , eds. Pierre Hassner and Roland Marchal, 229–256. Paris: Éditions Karthala.

Diner, Hasia. 2004. The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000 . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Domínguez Ortiz, Antonio. 1976. Sociedad y Estado en el siglo XVIII español . México: Ariel.

Don-Yehiya, Eliezer. 2014. Messianism and politics: The ideological transformation of religious Zionism. Israel Studies 19 (2): 239–263.

Eisen, Arnold. 1986. Galut: Modern Jewish reflection on homelessness and homecoming . Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Eisen, Arnold. 2014. Zionism, American Jewry, and the ‘Negation of Diaspora.’ In Between Jewish tradition and Modernity: Rethinking an Old Opposition, Essays in Honor of David Ellenson , ed. Michael A. Meyer and David N. Myers, 175–191. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Eisenstadt, Shmuel Noah. 2000. Multiple modernities. Daedalus 129 (1): 1–29.

Eisenstadt, Shmuel Noah. 2002. The first multiple modernities: Collective identity, public spheres and political order in the Americas. In Globality and multiple modernities , eds. Luis Roniger and Carlos Waisman, 7–28. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press.

Eisenstadt, Shmuel Noah. 2010. The new religious constellations in the frameworks of contemporary globalization and civilizational transformation. In World religions and multiculturalism: A dialectical relation, eds. Eliezer Ben Rafael and Yitzhak Shterenberg, World Religions and multiculturalism, 21–41. Boston/Leiden: Brill.

Elazar, Daniel, and Stuart Cohen. 1985. The Jewish Polity: Jewish political organizations from Biblical times to the present . Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Esman, Milton. 2009. Diasporas in the contemporary world . Cambridge: Polity.

Fischer, Shlomo. 2010. Judaism and global religious trends: Some contemporary developments. In World religions and multiculturalism A dialectical relation , eds. Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg, 263–294. Boston/Leiden: Brill.

Fischer, Shlomo, and Suzanne Last Stone. 2012. Jewish identity and identification: new patterns, meanings and networks . Jerusalem: Jewish People Policy Institute.

Friedman, Joshua, and Moshe Kornfeld. 2018. Identity projects: Philanthropy, neoliberalism, and Jewish cultural production. American Jewish History 102 (4): 537–561.

Gaggioti C., Horacio Alberto, Gabriel Andrés Kozel, and Alexander Betancourt Mendieta. 2018. ¿Tienen las Américas una historia común? Herbert E. Bolton, las fronteras y la “Gran América”. Cuernavaca: Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos.

Giddens, Anthony, Ulrich Beck, and Scott Lash. 1994. Reflexive modernization Politics, tradition and aesthetics in the modern social order . Cambridge: Polity.

Giddens, Anthony. 2002. Runaway world: How globalization is reshaping our lives . London: Profile Books.

Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton. 1995. From immigrant to transmigrant: theorizing transnational migration. Anthropological quarterly 68(1): 48–63.

Goldscheider, Calvin and Alan Zuckerman. 1984. The transformation of the Jews . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Goldscheider, Calvin. 2003. Are American Jews vanishing again? Contexts 2 (1): 18–24.

Goldscheider, Calvin. 2010. American and Israeli Jews: Oneness and distancing. Contemporary Jewry 30 (2): 205–211.

Greenstein, Michael. 1989. Third solitudes: Tradition and discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian literature . Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Grosfogel, Ramon. 2009. Human rights and anti-semitism after Gaza. Universitas Humanística 68: 157–177.

Guo, Shibao, and Lloyd Wong. 2015. Revisiting multiculturalism in Canada: Theories, policies and debates . Berlin: Springer.

Halbwachs, Maurice. 1980. The collective memory . New York: Harper and Row.

Hartman, Harriet. 2020. The 2019 Sklare Address: How gender and family still matter for contemporary Jewry. Contemporary Jewry 40: 161–185.

Held, David, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton. 1999. Global transformations Politics, economics, culture . Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Herberg, Will. 1983. Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An essay in American religious sociology . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hollinger, David. 1998. Jewish Identity, assimilation, and multiculturalism. In Creating American Jews , ed. Karen Mittelman, 52–59. Philadelphia: National Museum of American Jewish History.

Kahn, Ava F., and Adam D. Mendelsohn, eds. 2014. Transnational traditions . Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Katz, Steven. 2010. Why is America different? American Jewry on its 350th anniversary . Lanham: University Press of America.

Kellerman, Aharon. 2006. Personal mobilities . New York: Routledge.

Kellerman, Aharon. 2020. Globalization and spatial mobilities: Commodities and people, capital, information and technology . Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Kelner, Shaul. 2010. Tours that bind Diaspora, pilgrimage and Israeli birthright tourism . New York: New York University Press.

Kelner, Shaul. 2013. Religious ambivalence in Jewish American philanthropy. In Family, friend, foe? The relationship of religion and philanthropy in religious philanthropic organizations , ed. T.J. Davis, 28–49. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Khagram, Sanjeev, and Peggy Levitt. 2008. The transnational studies reader. Intersections and innovations . Abingdon: Routledge.

Kobrin, Rebecca. (ed.). 2012. Chosen capital: The Jewish encounter with American capitalism . New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Kurtzer, Yehuda and Claire E. Sufrin. 2020. The new Jewish canon . Brighton: Academic Studies Press.

Lederhendler, Eli (ed.). 2000. The Six-Day War and world Jewry. Bethesda: University Press of Maryland.

Lederhendler, Eli. 2011. Studies in contemporary Jewry: Ethnicity and beyond: Theories and dilemmas of Jewish group demarcation . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lederhendler, Eli. 2019. Israel and America in Jewish American writing. In The New Jewish American literary studies , ed. V. Aarons, 59–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Levinson, Julian Arnold. 2009. People of the (Secular) book: literary Anthologies and the making of Jewish identity in Postwar America. In Religion or ethnicity? Jewish Identities in evolution , ed. Zvi Gitelman, 132–150. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Levitt, Peggy. 2001. Transnational migration: Taking stock and future directions. Global Networks 1 (3): 195–216.

Levitt, Peggy, and Nina Glick Schiller. 2004. Conceptualizing simultaneity: A transnational social perspective on society. International Migration Review XXXVII I (145): 595–629.

Limonic, Laura. 2019. Kugel and frijoles. Latino Jews in the United States . Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Magid, Shaul. 2013. American post-Judaism: Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society . Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mays, Devi. 2020. Forging ties, forging passports: Migration and the modern Sephardi diaspora . Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Michels, Tony. 2010. Is America “different?” A critique of American Jewish exceptionalism. American Jewish History 96 (3): 201–224.

Mignolo, Walter. 2009. Dispensable and bare lives Coloniality and the hidden political/economic agenda of Modernity. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge. VII (2): 69–88.

Miller, Helena,  Lisa D. Grant, and Adam Pomson. 2011. International handbook of Jewish education . Berlin: Springer.

Moore, Deborah Dash. 2009. GI Jews: How World War II changed a generation . Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Moya, Jose. 2011. Estudios sobre la diáspora: ¿Nuevos conceptos, enfoques y realidades? In Diásporas . In Reflexiones teóricas , ed. N. Golubov, 205–225. Mexico: CISAN-UNAM.

Nonini, Donald. 2002. Transnational migrants, globalization processes, and regimes of power and knowledge. Critical Asian Studies 34 (1): 3–17.

O’Haire, Daniel. 2008. Diaspora . Charleston: BookSurge Publishing.

Penkower, Monty Noam. 1985. American Jewry and the Holocaust: from Biltmore to the American Jewish Conference. Jewish Social Studies 47 (2): 95–114.

Pew Research Center. 2019. Latin America, Caribbean no longer world’s fastest growing source of international migrants. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/25/latin-america-caribbean-no-longer-worlds-fastest-growing-source-of-international-migrants/ . Accessed June 15 2020.

Pew Research Center. 2021. Jewish Americans in 2020. Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center.

Phillips, Bruce. 2005. American Judaism in the twenty-first century. In The Cambridge companion to American Judaism , ed. Dana Eva Kaplan, 397–416. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pomson, Alex, and Howard Deitcher. 2009. Jewish day schools, Jewish communities: A reconsideration . Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Portes, Alejandro, Luis Guarnizo, and Patricia Landolt. 1999. The study of transnationalism: Pitfalls and promise of an emergent research field. Ethnic and Racial Studies 22 (2): 217–237.

Preyer, Gerhard. 2013. The perspective of multiple modernities on S. N. Eisenstadt’s sociology. Science and Society: Journal of Political and Moral Theory 30: 187–225.

Pries, Ludger. 2008. Transnational societal spaces: Which units of analysis, reference and measurement. In Rethinking transnationalism: The meso-link of organization , ed. L. Pries, 1–20. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis.

Quijano, Anibal. 1989. Paradoxes of Modernity in Latin America. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 3 (2): 147–177.

Restad, Hilde. 2014. American exceptionalism: An idea that made a nation and remade the world . Abingdon: Routledge.

Robertson, Roland. 1992. Globalization: Social theory and global culture . New York: SAGE.

Rohrbacher, Angelika. 2016. Invisible fences: The construction of “insiders” and “outsiders” in Jewish historiography. Method & Theory of the Study of Religion 28 (4/5): 337–364.

Roniger, Luis, and Carlos Waisman, eds. 2002. Globality and Multiple Modernities: Comparative North American and Latin American perspectives . Brighton: Sussex Academic Press.

Roniger, Luis. 2011. Transnational politics in Central America . Gainesville: University of Florida Press.

Safran, William. 1991. Diasporas in modern societies: Myths of homeland and return. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1 (1): 83–99.

Sagi, Avi, and Dov Schwartz. 2018. Religious Zionism and the Six day war: From realism to messianism . Abingdon: Routledge.

Sarna, Jonathan, ed. 1997. The American Jewish experience . New York: Holmes & Meier.

Sarna, Jonathan. 2004. American Judaism: A history . New Haven: Yale University Press.

Sassen, Saskia. 1998. Globalization and its discontents: Essays on the new mobility of people and money . New York: The New Press.

Sasson, Theodore, Charles Kadushin, and Leonard Saxe. 2010. Trends in American Jewish attachment to Israel: An assessment of the “distancing” hypothesis. Contemporary Jewry 30 (2–3): 297–319.

Sasson, Theodore. 2015. The New American Zionism . New York: NYU Press.

Schiller, G., L.B. Nina, and C. Blanc-Szanton. 1995. From immigrant to transmigrant: Theorizing transnational migration. Anthropological Quarterly 68 (1): 48–63.

Scholte, Jan Aart. 1998. The globalization or world politics. In The globalization of world politics An introduction to International Relations , eds. John Baylis, Steve Smith, and Patricia Owens, 13–32. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Senkman, L. 2005. Citizenship and Jewish identity: an experiment of the Argentinean Jewish community. Paper presented at Dinur Canter for Research in Jewish History, Jerusalem.

Senkman, L 2008. Klal Yisrael at the frontiers: the transnational Jewish experience in Argentina. In Identities in an era of globalization and multiculturalism. Latin America in the Jewish world, eds. Bokser Liwerant, J., E. Ben-Rafael, Y. Gorni and R. Rein, 125–150. Boston/Leiden: Brill.

Sheffer, G. 1986. A new field of study: modern diasporas in international politics. In Modern diasporas in international politics, ed. Gabriel Sheffer, 1–15. London: Croom Helm.

Shuval, Judith. 2002. Diaspora migration: Definitional ambiguities and a theoretical paradigm. Migration Pages 38 (5): 41–56.

Shuval, Judith. 2003. The dynamics of diaspora: theoretical implications of ambiguous concepts. In Diasporas and ethnic migrants: Germany, Israel and Russia in comparative perspective , ed. R. Münz and R. Ohliger. London: Frank Cass.

Silberman, Charles. 1985. A certain people: American Jews and their lives today . New York: Simon & Schuster.

Steiner, George. 1985. Our homeland, the text. Salmagundi 66: 4–25.

Tartakover, Arie. 1958. Israeli Society . Ramat Gan: Massada.

Tickton Schuster, Diane. 2019. Portraits of Jewish learning: Viewing contemporary Jewish education close-in . Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers.

Troper, Harold, and Morton Weinfeld. 1988. Old wounds . New York: Viking/Penguin.

United Nations Development Programme. 2009. Human Development Report 2009. Overcoming barriers: Human mobility and development. New York: United Nations.

United Nations - Department of Economic and Social Affairs. 2019. International Migrant Stock 2019 . https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/data/estimates2/estimates19.asp . Accessed October 23 2020.

United Nations - Human Development Programme. 2009. Human Development Report 2009. Overcoming barriers: Human mobility and development. New York: United Nations.

United Nations Development Programme. 2020. Human Development Report 2009. Overcoming barriers: Human development and the Anthropocene. New York: United Nations.

Urry, John. 2000. Sociology beyond societies. Mobilities for the twenty-first century . Abingdon: Routledge.

Van Hear, Nicholas. 1998. New Diasporas: The Mass Exodus, Dispersal and Regrouping of Migrant Communities . London: Taylor and Francis Group.

Voyé, Liliane. 2000. Secularization in a context of advanced modernity. In The secularization debate , eds. William. Swatos and Daniel V.A. Olson, 67–75. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The modern world-system capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world-economy in the sixteenth century , vol. I. New York: Academic Press.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2011. The modern world-system III: Mercantilism and the consolidation of the European world-economy, 1600–1750 . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Waters, Malcolm. 1995. Globalization . Abingdon: Routledge.

Waxman, Chaim. 1983. American Jews in transition . Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Weinfeld, Morton. 2018. Like everyone else but different: The paradoxical success of Canadian Jews . Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Woocher, Jonathan. 1986. Sacred survival. The civil religion of American Jews . Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Woocher, Jonathan. 2005. “Sacred survival” revisited: American Jewish civil religion in the new millennium. In The Cambridge companion to American Judaism , ed. Dana Eva Kaplan, 283-297. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Wooldridge, Adrian, and John Micklethwait. 2005. The right nation: Why America is different . New York: Penguin.

Yudice, George. 2006. ¿Una o varias identidades? Cultura, globalización y migraciones. Nueva Sociedad 201: 106–116.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico

Judit Bokser Liwerant

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Judit Bokser Liwerant .

Additional information

Publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Bokser Liwerant, J. Globalization, Diasporas, and Transnationalism: Jews in the Americas. Cont Jewry 41 , 711–753 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-021-09405-y

Download citation

Received : 21 October 2021

Accepted : 06 November 2021

Published : 18 January 2022

Issue Date : December 2021

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-021-09405-y

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Latin America
• Immigration and emigration
• Ethno-religious minorities
• Jewish community
• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Springer Nature - PMC COVID-19 Collection

Globalization, Diasporas, and Transnationalism: Jews in the Americas

Judit bokser liwerant.

Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico

This paper analyzes the structures and trends of the establishment, growth, and transformation of the Jewish presence in the Americas. After outlining several fundamental characteristics of the general continental societal environment and its internal differentiation, we critically discuss several theoretical approaches to a comparative assessment of the Jewish experience. Conceptual formulations include globalization, diaspora studies, and transnationalism, aiming to highlight their achievements and drawbacks. Selected sociohistorical aspects relevant to the development of Jewish immigration, settlement, and community formation are analyzed. This is followed by the exploration of more recent patterns, outlining emerging configurations and challenges. The article focuses on the differences and commonalities between the North (United States and Canada) and the diverse Latin American experiences. The conceptual referents imply rethinking the relationship between societies, communities, individuals, territories, and sociopolitical spaces along the changing contours of dispersion. Lessons from the past may help outline future paths.

Introductory Remarks

Recurrent conceptual concerns raise a primary question—how should the Americas be approached: as one, two, or many? As a reality, an idea, and a concept, the term “the Americas” is not univocal, since it covers very different regions. As a territorial, geopolitical, economic, social, multiethnic, and cultural entity, it can be outlined with a high level of generalization while also paying concrete attention to its components. The Americas are simultaneously a single ideal entity and many realities.

The Jewish experience in different subregions and countries of the Americas is equally pluralistic. Its internal diversity depends on the variety in contexts, time, and modalities with which it was inserted in the international scenario. Still, it is itself a carrier of an inner diversity it has inherited from its long historical and sociological trajectory in and outside the continent. Significant diversity prevails among and within commonalities—convergences and contradictions arising from the globally interconnected continent and the Jewish ethno-national/transnational diaspora.

Under such a conceptual and thematic umbrella, this article develops in a threefold way. First, it addresses the Americas, reviewing theoretical approaches to the continent and the frameworks for studying Jews as a collective that is territorially dispersed and maintains shared symbolic bonds locally and at a distance .

The second part focuses on Jewish communities in North and Latin America in the context of world Jewry. Migration flows were central in the relocation of Jewish life. Specific interactions between particular societal constraints and opportunities in a given country or region and the unique character of Jewish backgrounds and integration patterns are outlined.

The third part analyzes the current changing patterns of collective life and community, addressing old and new trends. The changes in the perimeters and scope of organized communities and the encounters and intersections they favored in the Americas stimulated convergences and divergences under the impact of globalization, transnationalism, and the changing profile of the diaspora.

Significant and inescapable difficulties consistently hinder the goal of integrating the geopolitical with the socio-communal and cultural dimensions of Jews in the Americas. Indeed, while the importance of national, regional, and transnational axes varies across time and space, their contours point to dynamics that exclude reductionist conceptions, emphasizing only one of them. The combination and juxtaposition of the broader regional/continental and global axis and the axis focused on the particular context of the Jewish ethno-religious group can be expressed in numerous ways. Contradictory situations run through the whole range of options, from, at one end, the complete autonomy of the Jewish experience with respect to the general societal sphere to, at the opposite end, total dependence on it; between the Jewish search for legitimacy, equality, and diversity and conformity with the non-Jewish majority; between the sociability of individual lives of Jewish citizens within national societies and gregariousness in their collective institutions; between a sociocultural identity of the Jews in total synchrony with the national ethos of each country and a specific identity and creativity whose symbolic and intellectual center is elsewhere, rooted in a nation/peoplehood/global Jewish collective (Bokser Liwerant et al. 2011).

This paper aims to offer an analytical and critical reflection upon profound links, convergences and divergences, tensions and encounters, and the vitality and richness of the meeting of a continent and its Jewish diaspora. The conceptual referents imply rethinking the relationship between societies, communities, individuals, territories, and sociopolitical spaces along the changing contours of dispersion. At stake are the modes of incorporation and dialogue of minority groups as owners of their particular history and identity within civil societies driven by their foundational principles and explicit agendas. It thus opens, together with Sergio DellaPergola's following article in this issue, the wide parameters that guided the project Jews in the Americas.

The Americas: Identifying the Object

The Americas' foundational experience emerged as an outcome of the expansive trajectory of European modernity, the configuration of the world system, and the globality of the Jewish trajectory fueled by successive waves of immigration. How did these different universes cross and intercept? How was the transnational character of Jewish migration to the Americas conceived? Was the diasporic extraterritoriality of Jewish immigration seen as convergent or conflictive with the particular founding ethos of the Americas?

The Americas may be thought of from a historical perspective, transitioning from their incorporation into the expanded World Order (or into the West) to a new insertion into contemporary globalization. Although there is no agreement among scholars regarding the Americas’ origins or basic characteristics, a convergent approach identifies radical changes that have upset spatial, geographical, and/or territorial references (Giddens 2002 ; Allen et al. 2012 ; Coleman and Underhill 2012 ).

Over the last 500 years, increasingly dense and intense interactions brought about by capitalist labor markets, commodity production, and the political expansion of the nation-state, as well as large-scale migrations, wars of conquest, and the flow of goods and ideas, lie behind globality and globalization. While today the continent is impacted by the contradictory nature of the world configuration, facing differentially new horizons of opportunity and regional and sectoral backlashes, it cannot be forgotten that it was globally constituted and incorporated into the world configuration by an extension of the European experience (Wallerstein 1974 , 2011 ; Eisenstadt 2000 , 2002 ; Preyer 2013 ; Bokser Liwerant 2015b ).

Sustained global dynamics developed through either central or peripheral connections to external centers as sources of its “encounter” or “discovery” genesis, which provided the parameters for the institutional creation and the conceptions of nation-building. These original centers were referents to be either followed or disputed. Different experiences and cultures subjected to global immersion and global awareness were embedded in the ways they built their incorporation into expanded world geography into globality (Roniger and Waisman 2002 ; Bokser Liwerant 2015b ). According to Immanuel Wallerstein, the modern world-system was born in the long sixteenth century, when the Americas as a geo-social construct became its constitutive act. There could not have been a capitalist world economy without the Americas. The destruction of indigenous populations and the importation of the labor force from the peripheries of the world did not imply the reconstruction of economic and political institutions but rather their virtually ex nihilo construction. To fully function, the Americas resulted in a mosaic that reinforced extension and inequality among its fragments. Thus, it entailed structural relations between trans-scale poly-centers and poly-peripheries within the space it encompassed. Indeed, the transatlantic axis between Europe and the newly produced Americas was the first zone of the consolidation of the world system (Wallerstein 1974 , 2011 ).

Shared and differing paths developed in the continent: coloniality in Ibero-America consisted not only of political subordination to the Crown(s) in the metropole, but above all, of European domination over the native populations. On the other hand, in the British-American zone, coloniality meant almost exclusively subordination to the British Crown; that is, the colonies constituted themselves initially as European societies outside of Europe (Quijano 1989 ). The conquest, colonization, and Christianization of America by the Iberians in the late fifteenth century occurred at the beginnings of the world market and capitalism. The arrival of the British to the northern parts of America more than a century later took place when this new historical process was already fully underway. The two Americas began the nineteenth century under unequal conditions and pursued quite distinct paths. The United States followed a pattern of development of the new and unusual Americanness or Americanity , with its inner disjuncture and contradictions—ethnicity, race-racism, the new world. It constituted itself as a nation at the same time as it was developing an imperial role as a hegemonic power. Latin America instead fragmented itself. There were bloody border wars and civil wars all over. Power was organized on a seigneurial–mercantile basis (Quijano 1989 ; Crespo et al. 2018 ). The national boundaries would not prevent the development of a sustained and intense transnationalist path of interaction among them (Roniger 2011 ).

Fernand Braudel devoted important chapters of his work (1982, 1986) to the contrast between the two Americas. Two civilizations: on the one hand, the ensemble of wonderful achievements, “future life,” and the New World par excellence ; on the other, the torn, dramatic ensemble, pitted against itself: the “second America” (Braudel 1986 ). According to him, the North was characterized by strength, activity, independence, and individual initiative; the South by inertia, servitude, the heavy hand of the colonial powers, and all the constraints inherent to the condition of “periphery.”

Indeed, distinct models related to institutional patterns, cultural premises, traditions, and historical experiences developed. Eisenstadt's concept of Multiple Modernities underlies profound tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes arising from the different phases of an emerging interconnected global world and the heterogeneity and contingency of different historical developments. There are two main axes around which two broad configurations crystallized in Europe would be projected in the region: those of hierarchy–equality and relatively pluralistic “ ex parte ” versus a homogeneous “ ex toto ” conception of the social order would be extended to the Americas (Eisenstadt 2000 , 2002 ; Roniger and Waisman 2002 ; Bokser Liwerant 2015b , 2019 ; Ben-Rafael and Sternberg 2016 ). In the North American colonies, this was carried out by dispersed autonomous groups, many of them Protestant sects and various groups of semi-aristocracy gentry like settlers and merchants, with the Anglican Church and the British government playing only a secondary (although certainly not negligible) role (Eisenstadt 2002 ; Katz 2010 ). In the South, the conquerors' power had to come to terms with and, in fact, destroy and replace impressively developed local civilizations. Therefore, facing the modern West and searching after it entailed a confrontation with an alien culture imposed upon these local cultures from the outside. After the first wave of conquest by the conquistadores , changes were carried out under the centralized aegis of the Crown (or Crowns) and the Church, which monopolized access to the major resources of the colonies (land and labor) and in principle denied the settlers any significant degree of self-government beyond the municipal level (Domínguez Ortiz 1976 ).

In the North, the pre-conquest civilizations were much more decentralized, and their de facto destruction left significantly fewer traces in the body of the new colonial order. Hence, the new rulers only had to deploy a reflexive exercise in coming to terms with their own distinct place within the broader framework of European or Western civilization. This historical bifurcation of experiences ended up shaping in structural and ideational spheres the ways in which Jews were seen and conceived: their admittance, incorporation, social integration, and representation as legitimate dwellers of the public sphere. As displayed in Fig.  1 , the multiple levels that framed these processes draw complex and differing scenarios.

Jews in the Americas

Conceptual Approaches: A Promising Albeit Debated Triad

The Americas represent an exemplary case in which historical paths and changing conditions interact. Globality as a foundational element and globalization processes shaped the changes in the Americas' social and communal structures, while the local and the global intertwined. Dynamic patterns of interaction developed historically between Jewish communities and their societal milieux , shaping Jews' changing status as citizens in nation-states, holders of a transnational condition. Both the continent as a whole and its Jewish presence were defined by human displacements—settlers, conquerors, various sorts of migrants—while modernity and modernization marked them differentially over time. Modernity’s structures and layers generated mixed social formations straddling the past and present and imported, translated, and recreated lifestyles and customs from other places and cultures.

Jewish collective life has historically been displayed in multiple arenas—territorial, communal, religious, national, and cultural—and in different political–ecological settings; the Jewish world is shaped by the parameters of globalization, transnationalism, and diaspora. While by globality we mean the incorporation-foundation of the world system, globalization refers to the radical changes that upset spatial, temporal, geographical, and/or territorial references, without which it would be impossible to think of economic, political, social, and cultural relations in the contemporary world (Robertson 1992 ; Waters 1995 ; Scholte, 1998 ). Time and space cease to have the same influence on the way in which social relations and institutions are structured, owing to the conjunction of technical factors that shape the density and speed of cross-border connections, and involve the de-territorialization of economic, social, cultural, and political arrangements; they depend neither on distance nor on borders, and neither do they have the same influence on the final shaping of institutions and social relations (Giddens et al. 1994 ). Globalization processes are not uniform, as they take place in a differentiated manner, with territorial and sectoral inequalities. They are multifaceted, insofar as they bring together economic, social, political, and cultural aspects, as well as the interdependence and influences between these levels, and contradictory, because the processes can be intentional and reflexive, at the same time not intentional, and of international as well as regional, national, or local scope. Globalization implies the widening, intensifying, accelerating, and growing impact of worldwide interconnectedness (Held et al. 1999 ); it links people together across borders more than in the past and confronts them with cultural and ethnic differences (Appadurai 1996 ). It also confronts communities of dispersed people, the Jewish diaspora—a global diaspora, an ethno-national and transnational diaspora—with similar, convergent, and divergent paths, due to the increased circulation of individual and collective social agents and values.

Indeed, globalization processes accelerate migration, owing both to social inequalities and to the opening of opportunities (Urry 2000 ; Kellerman 2006 , 2020 ). Migration and transmigration movements lead to diverse expressions of transnationalism. As a result of the latter’s multidimensional nature, we underscore its contributions to the understanding of past trends, ongoing changes, and of yet uncertain developments (Appadurai 1996 ; Ben-Rafael et al. 2009). The concurrent relevance of transnationalism to the diverse historical times provides a conceptual tool that allows for a better assessment of the social morphology as expressed in the changing character of communal and social formations.

Contemporary social science research in transnationalism focuses mainly on recent migration groups (Glick Schiller et al. 1995 ; Portes et al. 1999 ; Khagram and Levitt 2008 ). Transnational studies examine mainly, if not exclusively, diasporic practices, projects, and attitudes of new diasporas (Moya 2011 ; Bokser Liwerant 2015a ). However, by conceptualizing historical transnational patterns of shared values and norms, social belonging and collective identities, it is possible to recover cultural, religious, social, institutional, and economic linkages of a more permanent nature. Surpassing individual actors on the move, central common aspects of the Jewish experience may be recovered. There is indeed the challenge of analyzing the foundations of a scattered people committed to its continuity and bound through cohesion and solidarity.

Dispersion has been central to Jewish self-understanding for millennia. Modern Jewish historians took a global stance: from Heinrich Graetz in the nineteenth century to Simon Dubnow and Salo Baron in the twentieth, world histories became the parameter, emphasizing the longue durée and a transnational perspective. Their approach came out of the specificity of Jewish historical studies, where a disciplinary, ethno-national focus became dominant within a general, neo-positivist scientific program that analyzed national minorities in Eastern Europe. However, in the social sciences the study of diasporas arrived late. Before the 1960s, immigrant groups were generally expected to shed their ethnic identity and assimilate to local norms. During the 1970s, when assimilation theories based on the meaning of integration models were factually and conceptually questioned, “diaspora” was increasingly used to describe migrant groups maintaining their ethnic tradition and a strong feeling of collectiveness (Bruneau 1995 ; Shuval 2002 , 2003 ; Anteby-Yemini and Berthomière 2005 ).

As its use became extended, the discussion of its applicability to different groups and the singularity of the Jewish diaspora as archetypal took over academic debates. The continued use of the concept of diaspora exclusively for the Jewish people was questioned or branded as a mistake. However, the extension of its historical experience to other groups often disregards the interwoven character of Jews' associational and organizational networks and the historical and symbolic layers of contact with the homeland (Sheffer 1986 ). Robin Cohen ( 2008 ) suggested that the archetypal Jewish diaspora could be a base for reflection even if it couldn't be a transposable model. William Safran considered that diaspora could be seen as a “metaphoric designation” and could apply to various populations: the rapid spread of the term “African diaspora” in the late decades of the twentieth century, expatriates, political refugees… Hence the concept of diasporas as expatriate minority communities that are dispersed from an original “center” to at least two “peripheral” places; that maintain a “memory,” vision or myth about their original homeland; that “believe they are not—and perhaps cannot be—fully accepted by their host country”; that see their ancestral home as a place of eventual return when the time is right; and whose group consciousness and solidarity are “importantly defined” by this continuing relationship with the homeland (Safran 1991 ).

The structures and channels through which continuous relationships are maintained—diaspora building—remained a latent, underdeveloped topic of study. The literature highlighted the dispersion of its members, the orientation toward an ethno-national center—real or imaginary—considered a homeland, and the maintenance of the group's ethno-cultural borders in the host country (Cohen 2008 ; O'Haire 2008 ; Brenner 2008; Esman 2009 ). Sheffer's distinction between state and stateless diasporas and Cohen’s cultural dimension defined diasporas as somewhere between “nation-states” and “traveling cultures.” Long before, Tartakover ( 1958 ) had spoken of “portable states”—dwelling in a nation-state in a physical sense but traveling in an astral or spiritual sense that falls outside the space of the nation-state. Indeed, diaspora was also theorized by James Clifford ( 1994 ) as cultures of circulation, which, on par with de-emphasizing the paradigm of the ancestral home-center , rescued from the Jewish model a “virtual and intangible space” between the center and the periphery of dispersion. Diasporas are conceived as communities dispersed across space yet connected through an intangible connection to another time and place; he emphasized the “lateral axes of diaspora,” the “decentered, partially overlapping networks of communication… that connect the several communities of a transnational people.” Although highly fruitful for the interconnections of Jewish life in the Americas, it displayed some surprising reductionism. Following almost exclusively Boyarin’s paradigm of diasporism—not only as a conceptual formulation, but as a meta-theoretical and political stance—it failed to acknowledge the singularity of the Jewish experience as an ethno-national diaspora with a Center—historical, spiritual, national. The strong links and the mutual influences became part of divaricate networks and multidirectional exchange, involving not only people, capital, and political resources but also ideas and cultural values (Levitt 2001 ; Bauböck and Faist 2010 ; Burla 2015 ; Asscher and Shiff 2019 ). Diasporas’ presence in societies, the multicultural dimension they carry, the relations they create between original and new homelands and their dynamics as interconnected cross-national spaces are part of the transition of societies to a new era (Ben-Rafael 2013a , b ). However, the historical weight of Jewish diaspora's structures that endure both local associations and channels of communication cannot be underestimated.

The necessary mediations between studies on transnationalism, globalization, diaspora and research into contemporary Jewry are still lacking. Despite the plethora of local descriptive studies, Jews are comparatively understudied in contemporary research, where they seem to have lost their historical resonance. Most importantly, there is a relative dearth of discourse about communal foundations in the available literature on national and transnational social relations (Glick Schiller et al. 1995 ; Portes et al. 1999 ; Pries 2008 ; Bokser Liwerant et al. 2010 ).

In contemporary Jewish studies in the Americas, the diasporic experience has been approached mainly from the perspective of historical migration and ethnic studies, frequently disregarding the analytical angle of Jewish diasporic formations, where systems of collective organization have accounted for interconnection and world circulation (Goldscheider and Zuckerman 1984 ). Thus, researchers relying solely on ethnicity cannot account for the necessary articulations of boundary maintenance and the mechanisms that counterbalance the loose nature of the collective. The limits and pitfalls of the ethno-communal paradigm in times of multiculturalism, postmodernity, and porous ethno-religious borders are analyzed, while national frontiers dilute the interconnection among the diaspora, the center, and the lateral axes. In the study of American Jewry, the notion of a stable ethnicity fixed by religion, language, and genealogy has been challenged by the difference outlook, emphasizing the contextualized and personal shaping of this identity category (Hollinger 1998 ; Lederhendler 2011 ; Magid 2013 ). In Latin America, migration studies have been the dominant approach. The conceptualization of a theoretical framework of diasporas and their current moment may be found in studies of postmodernism, oriented principally by the concept of boundary erosion. At the same time, the ethno-national Jewish diasporic experience has been analyzed from the sociocultural and political perspectives of Otherness (Bokser Liwerant, 2013 ).

We suggest that the dyad “being national–being transnational” provides the conceptual tool required to analyze local contexts, while recovering the commonalities and interconnections derived from transnational Jewish history. It critically questions the currents developed by historians and social scientists that focus on Jews as citizens of the nation-state, disregarding the singularity of a people whose traditions, identities, solidarity, commercial, social, and religious connections crossed borders, regions, and states (DellaPergola 2011 ; Avni et al. 2011 ; Bokser Liwerant 2013a ; Kahn and Mendelson 2014 ). This interconnected binary contributes by addressing the current functional imperative of reproduction of local social domains through their interdependent relationship with globalization, implying that the global is localized and the local is generalized, reproduced by significant intercourse among societies and communities.

In the vast Americas, diaspora must be considered at an analytical level that accounts for its strong impact and differing consciousness across Jewish communities. Transnational studies that show an interest in the diasporic practices of new émigré ethnic communities tend to focus on the hybridization of identities and cultural fluidity and religious syncretism, rather than analyzing diasporic patterns derived from the maintenance of ethno-religious borders. They tend to refute diasporic practices that have observed the principle of boundary maintenance . We recognize that efforts to conceptually connect diasporas indeed contribute to outline their commonalities (Ben-Rafael 2016a). However, brought together with diaspora studies, they oscillate between boundary maintenance and boundary erosion (Brubaker 1994 ; Bokser Liwerant 2015a ).

Boundary maintenance, as a systematic process of diaspora-building, should be analyzed through the lens of the vast associational and institutional foundations of organized collective life, which foster certain levels of mobilization and the organization of exchanges between its members. The individual and communal levels interact through dense and stable Jewish national and transnational organizational channels that enhance informal ethnic and family links and networks. At the collective level, however, associative resources re-elaborate and reorient organized Jewish life (Bourdieu 1986 ; Coleman 1988 ). The degree of formalization or institutionalization is characterized by a solid collective historical experience and memories that bring together temporal dimensions expressed by long-term trends, as expressed in Jewish life in the multiple Americas, notwithstanding its sharp differences in organizational patterns and collective awareness. The historical singularity of the different cases contributes to theory precisely in its communal building dimension, that allows scholars to approach and expand conceptual elaborations in transnational social fields as anchored spaces (Bokser Liwerant 2013a ; Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004 ).

Into the Region: Structures, Obstacles, Trends

A crucial distinction between the basic civilizational premises of the United States and those of Europe and many of the Dominions, Upper Canada and Quebec included, has been the strong emphasis on the metaphysical equality of all members of the community, on egalitarian individualism, and on the almost total denial of the symbolic validity of hierarchy (De Tocqueville 2002 ). These conceptions and premises became components of a new collective identity and a new constitutional order. The transformation was such that it constituted the crux of the American Revolution and set it apart from other wars of independence (Restad 2014 ; Katz 2010 ). A vast variety of immigration flows contributed to the national character. In these contexts, conditions were favorable for the historical arrival and incorporation of the Jews: the belief in and value of immigration and of individualism and individual rights.

The United States

From the country's inception, although perhaps not yet fully, Jews enjoyed the status of what later came to be known as a post-emancipation Jewry, just as even in the colonial era, though not yet completely, the country was a post-emancipation country. Indeed, the nation was built on immigration, which meant Jews were welcomed into the plural design of the collective.

The principal elements defining modernity—i.e., liberal, secular, pluralistic politics; diversity in matters of culture and religion; and a competitive capitalist economic system with free, open markets—were salient factors (Wooldridge and Micklethwait 2005 ). Constitutional freedom and cultural pluralism made a tremendous difference to Jews (Eisen 1986 ); it led to the incorporation of the different groups into a collective higher order, while the right to self-fulfillment viewed normative support as part of the national ethos . Society promoted individual gratification, which in fact led to tolerating communal diversity (Sarna 1997 , 2004 ). A singular constellation defined United States Jewry, whose presence was closely related to the process of nation-building and endowed its visibility in the public sphere. Consequently, the collective organization of Jews favored a decentralized congregational model based on denominational pluralism. Until fairly recently, Judaism as a religion was assumed to be the primary axis of distinction, yet the singular dynamics between religion and ethnicity frequently led to the acceptance of the former as a way of expressing the latter. Individualized Jewish religiosity developed around the synagogue-congregation and was gradually embedded in a public Jewish “civil religion” (Bellah 1967 ) understood either as a set of civic tenets or probably also as a Jewish ethno-national solidarity that, in the view of some observers, attained a quasi-sacralized status (Woocher 1986 ; Fischer 2010 ; Fischer and Last Stone 2012 ).

The United States would be described, especially since the mid-twentieth century, as a country with “three religions”: Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism (Herberg 1983 ). Inner religious differentiation, the presence of Reform Judaism, the establishment of the institutions that formed and provided renewed religious personnel, and rabbinical seminaries all cultivated a rich and inner diverse Jewish life.

Society fostered an individualized pattern of incorporation that challenged collective frameworks. Though preceded by the Sephardic presence—individual Sephardic Jewish settlers were recorded in the 1620s preceding the 23 Jews from the Sephardic community in the Netherlands who arrived from Recife, Brazil, in 1654 in what was to become New York—looking at the paradigmatic and exceptional Jewish New York and its foundational organizational pattern, a differentiated subnational/ethnic population was reflected in the patterns of uptown and downtown Jewish immigrants, the former from Germany, the latter from Eastern Europe. The place and role of German Jews on the continent were closely related to their early arrival and the surrounding milieu, both of which reinforced being seen as the epitome of modernity, socioeconomic mobility and assimilation. The term, therefore, didn’t exclusively refer to the territory or the political geographical entity but rather to German culture—immigrants from German-speaking countries were the bearers of the symbology of progressive, acculturated and assimilated Jews (Brinkmann 2014 ). Jewish organizational life outside the synagogue was based largely on local, regional, and national membership associations and social welfare federations, interwoven with the Jews' other associational habits and social connections in a pluralistic and individualized manner (Phillips 2005 ; Waxman 1983 ).

While intense organizations were developed—mainly philanthropic and charitable ones by German and Central European Jews and mutual-aid societies by immigrants from Eastern Europe—the kehillah as a centralized structure developed overseas did not crystallize. (There was a single initiative of this kind; it began in 1915 and only lasted until 1922.) What did succeed—first in Boston, and later in New York—were Federations of Philanthropic Organizations. The Old Home was seen as a past from which to depart. Eastern European Jews did develop a solid Jewish culture brought from and connected to overseas in an intense diasporic dynamic; writers, artists, poets, and a Yiddish press gained strength and simultaneously provided an organizational axis. The strong symbol of the later circulation of culture was epitomized by the YIVO—The Institute for Jewish Research, dedicated to the preservation and study of the East European Jewish culture and history. Located in Vilna from 1925 throught 1940, due to World War II it was relocated to New York. Circa 1928, a branch was established in Buenos Aires, as Fundacion IWO. A global diaspora and its changing geographies and histories!

Immersed in the concrete/ideational tension of allegedly cutting ties with the countries and cultures of origin, the Jewish US community has often been represented as exceptional by its history of success. Concomitantly, its self-understanding and history-writing have been focused within the borders of the country (Kahn and Mendelsohn 2014 ). However, comparative research has shed light on various spheres of strong connection to the regions and towns of origin of US Jews, be they commercial, financial, social, or cultural (Kobrin 2012 ). Certainly, Old World attachments were reconfigured, and texts and contexts redefined through mutable and multiple ways fundamental to the new life.

Narrative and reality, national projects and achievements were mutually shaped. Americanness called for Americanization as the path to follow. Simultaneously, Americanization meant a new way of being Jewish, learning a new code derived and defined by the new society (Sarna 2004 ; Diner 2004 ; Lederhendler 2019 ). US Jewry progressively experienced the growing legitimacy of its ethnic assertiveness that reinforced the cultural referents of its collective identity. Americanization as an ideal and a value—with its strong call for a new identity—also explains that immigrants sought in education the clue for adaptation and integration rather than for continuity. Education in private Jewish communal institutions had, until recent decades, been the exception rather than the rule, as most Jewish families had sent their children to public schools.

As far as the civil incorporation of Jews and its relative success are concerned, much depended on the timeline of their presence. Upon arrival, the ideal was no hierarchy in a nation under God; in practice, there were very structured hierarchies by race, ethnicity, region, and country of origin, marked by the succession of large-scale waves of immigration, each of which found its place within the hierarchy. This, of course, affected the place of Jews, who in most cases entered into the lowest ranks. At the same time, the US allowed for a robust upward mobility.

The positive depictions of Jewish immigrants produced by scholars such as Park, Thomas, Wirth, and Stonequist were not representative of general American attitudes toward Jews in the 1910s and 1920s. As historian Tony Michels ( 2010 ) has pointed out, a considerable body of scholarship “shows that American antisemitism increased in intensity and popularity from the mid-nineteenth century into the mid-twentieth century; it extended beyond the social realm into political and governmental spheres; and it turned violent more frequently than we usually recognize” (p. 212). Only after the Second World War did circumstances improve (Alexander 2006 ; Dash Moore 2009 ). During the postwar era, the Federation system served as the primary fundraising and redistributive body of the American Jewish community and progressively the locus of American Jewish power (Kelner 2013 ; Friedman and Kornfeld 2018 ). This communal system was part of the civil religion that provided extended symbols, rituals, and practices.

Nowhere did the tension between the Center and the diaspora become so early and strongly expressed in the Americas as in the US. Zionism, as an idea and as a movement, had to deal with the challenge to its diagnosis of exile and a diaspora consciousness. Jewish-American intellectuals rejected the equation of the United States with galut and Israel with Zion. While it also provided a collective reference axis, it carried a conflictive dynamic as an identification referent and a principle of legitimization (Eisen 1986 , 2014 ). The impact of the destruction of European Jewry on the general and Jewish political action and agency can be seen in the redefinition of the world Zionist agenda and of US Zionism in its support for a Jewish state. Indeed, the vision of a Jewish state and the possibility of transferring millions of Jews there were the outlines of the program of the Biltmore Conference of May 1942 (Penkower 1985 ; Bokser Liwerant 1991 ; Sasson 2015 ). With the establishment of the state, the core opposition developed into a tacit agreement and collaboration. Gradually, it became a functional referent and a central theme for building the Jewish presence in the public sphere. It influenced the conceptualization of the American civil religion of survivalism (Woocher 1986 ) with secular peoplehood as its main religion; secularization, influenced by Protestantism, equated Jewishness with Americanization (Goldscheider 2003 ; Cohen 2003 ), transformationalism, a vibrant communal life (Goldscheider and Zuckerman 1984 ; Silberman 1985 ).

United States Jewry developed as a center fostering transnational ties and facing overseas needs; it acquired world relevance precisely through the establishment of structural channels: associations and institutions that advanced joint efforts in addressing worldwide Jewish needs.

A Different North: Canada

While conceived as multicultural from its inception, the founding trajectory of Canadian Jewry was binational, bicultural, and bi-religious. Cultural diversity was implied from the country’s origin with British and French settlers, as well as the ever-present need for increasing immigration into their territory. This diversity was, however, based on Anglo-Canadian Protestant values, which were prevalent at the time, and this was reflected as strict migratory regulation with distinctly racial criteria. It wasn’t until after World War II that a transition was enacted from a restrictive immigration policy that favored white European immigrants toward a universalistic policy in accordance with Canada’s international position as the spearhead of human rights advocacy.

Both the organizational pattern and the arenas to build continuity reflect the position of Jews in society. Although it would seem well situated in terms of integration into Canadian society (Brym 2018 ; Weinfeld 2018 ), at the turn of the twentieth century, as their numbers were increasing, Jews were in many ways acknowledging their outsider status in the country and their ethnic or national independence, their existence as “a third solitude” (Greenstein 1989 ). The community endured legally sanctioned discrimination in accommodation, employment, education, and immigrant admission (Troper and Weinfeld 1988 ). In the words of Elazar and Cohen ( 1985 ), Canadian Jewry from the turn of the twentieth century through World War II behaved as largely segregated Jewish communities had for centuries; in many ways, it was an exemplary multicultural community in a country that was imperfectly multicultural.

From the 1960s onward, the Jewish profile adjusted and benefited from the legitimacy of its transnational dimension. Its institutional density combined and overlapped ethnic, religious, and cultural roots, national Jewish allegiances, and a sustained openness to renewed waves of immigration. Therefore, the inner diversified associational map strengthened the different levels of group cohesiveness; no external claim to erase primordial identities competed with this dynamic. The balanced development and stability of Canadian socioeconomic configuration led the country’s Jews to pursue integration into society through entrepreneurial capitalism, advocacy, and nondiscriminatory government policies. Jews followed the strategy of compartmentalizing private and public spheres of the collective, combined with selective cultural synthesis. Jews turned inward and developed a vibrant communal life of their own (Brown 2007 ). Ethnic cohesion, a national identity less demanding in its plurality as a main referent, and a consequent communal institutional density defined the main parameters of Canadian Jewry.

Education—as a central sphere for social-cultural-institutional underpinning—was a space to build both continuity and difference. Before World War I and beyond, Canadian schools were either Protestant or Catholic (in Quebec, French Catholic). At the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews in Quebec were legally deemed Protestants for school purposes. Otherwise, they would have had no right to public schooling at all. In Ontario, Protestant schools became “public” after World War I; the publicly funded Catholic schools remain separate, but tax-supported, to this day. The schooling of children and young adults in comprehensive Jewish educational institutions took priority over other needs of the community. In Toronto neighborhoods with a Jewish majority, Jews could and did run for public school director in the early decades of the twentieth century. More than half of the children receiving Jewish education attend Jewish day schools, a substantially greater percentage than in the United States and in most of the community of Latin America, except Mexico (Pomson and Deitcher 2009 ; Miller et al. 2011 ; Tickton Schuster 2019 ). The Jewish educational system indeed provided the structural substratum for cultural singularity amidst other instances of cultural uniqueness. The traditional and Zionist content of education must be highlighted. Zionism found its roots based on both ethnicity and nationality.

The diversity and richness of sub-ethnicity found expression in the literary work of Yiddish writers—a terrain where it could recover an Old World culture and build a secular creative space. The roots and paths of circulation of cultural creation, seeking to build ethnicity on cultural grounds, crossed the Americas from Canada and the US to Latin America and back, in search of a Jewish culture not reducible to religion. While the latter would not be absent, neither was it regarded as normative (Levinson 2009 ).

Canada’s strong Jewish life can be neither explained nor understood if Israel as a concrete, ideological, and mythical center is not sufficiently analyzed. For Canada, as for Latin America—with differing codes of nationalism—the Zionist idea and Israel have been determinant. Various associational and structural spaces were expressed and shaped by spiritual-national-cultural representations of the Center, paralleling the autonomy and vitality of the lateral axes of the diasporic configuration. Lastly, the Canadian dialectic of particularism and universalism can be paradigmatically seen in the shared struggle for Jewish recognition and human rights (Abella 2006 ). If circulation and diaspora influences are analyzed, its tendency to incorporate the struggle for human rights into its agenda developed in a relatively early phase.

Latin America: The Region’s Diversity and Comparative Remarks

The Jewish presence in the more than 20 Latin American countries draws a global diaspora defined by the diversity of its singular contexts. Differing from the nation-building of Americanness and Americanization as a goal in the US and from the multicultural ethnic saga in Canada, Latin America's distinctive search for national identity rejected diversity as a risk to its recurrent aspiration toward uniformity, understood as synonymous with national integration and therefore interpreted as part of its quest for modernity.

The difficulty in seeing Jews as collective actors, as legitimate inhabitants of the public sphere, was built and narrated differently. In the Southern Cone and in Euro-American countries, where mass migration modified the population profile, it took shape in a public sphere that was allegedly neutral vis-à-vis private differences, consistently with the idea of secular and liberal thought of a national identity constructed on the supposedly integrating foundations that homogeneity provides. The national subject was not understood in its diversity; the Latin American liberal narrative turned its back to the latter. In Indo-America, diversity remained a referent and bastion for the mestizos —whose indigenous ancestors interbred with the Catholic Spaniards—who became the essential national subject. The way Jews perceived and internalized this goal became part of the interplay between self-adscription and their social representation (Bokser Liwerant 2008 , 2009 ).

In the Americas, societies offered different structural and legal frames and models of social interaction to ethnic minorities, influencing the integration and continuity of Jewish life. The ideational conception of the nation and the search for the collective were expressed in the foundational constitutional law of the countries, and thus settled the normative profile of the nation. It is important to assess under which general principles—as stated in the national constitutions of the different countries of the Americas—Jews could or could not be allowed to become an integral part of national society. In this regard, North and Latin America adopted entirely different approaches, whose relevance, however, was more symbolic than practical in terms of the effective societal integration of Jews and of their ability to have access to socioeconomic mobility and political participation.

In Argentina, the preamble to the Constitution mentions union, guaranteeing justice, securing domestic peace, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty to citizens, to posterity, and to all men of the world who wish to dwell on Argentine soil: “Invoking the protection of God, source of all reason and justice: do ordain, decree, and establish this Constitution for the Argentine Nation.” Immediately it decreed that “the Federal Government supports the Roman Catholic Apostolic religion” (adopts it as the state religion). Massive immigration altered the goal of one uniform society; civil society had its own margins of tolerance to diversity, but the ideal representation of the Argentine nation—hence the expectation that Jews would integrate-assimilate to form part of the nation—was deeply rooted.

The Mexican Constitution proclaimed that the Mexican Nation is unique and indivisible. The Nation has a multicultural composition originally based on its indigenous peoples, “who retain their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions, or part of them promoting the awareness of their indigenous identity should be a fundamental criterion in determining to whom the provisions on indigenous peoples apply.” Since the restrictive concept of mestizaje excluded Jews, their enclave character, as stated, excluded them as legitimate components of the national we .

As seen in our previous analysis, these two cases are distant from the Canadian and US constitutions. The former, facing both immigration and multiculturalism (or rather, binationalism) declared that Canada is founded upon the principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law, establishing for its plural minorities the freedom of religion as among the fundamental liberties.

As for the US, it approached immigration through the aspiration to unity, to “the need for oneness,” to become “one People” as conditioned by its past (“to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.” Immigration policies were another matter. In the twentieth century the quotas of the 1920s were clearly—although not explicitly—crafted to contain Jewish (and Italian) immigration. Canada followed suit (Abella and Troper 1982 ).

In Latin America, Jewish Otherness was embedded in the conception of the nation and in the policies concerning immigration and exile policy. Otherness was socially represented as foreignness amid debates that resulted in restrictive policies toward Jewish immigration and Jewish refugees and became a prominent sphere in which different hostile and rejectionist expressions were articulated. Their impact on the social representation of the Jew as the Other framed the arrival of Jewish immigration during the 1920–1940s .

Despite the transnational nature of immigration, the diasporic extraterritoriality of immigrant Jews was conflictive for Latin American countries, even for the founding liberalism of the national states that stimulated European migration. The regional institutions of the great ethno-national collectivities of Spanish, Italian, French, and German immigrants, notwithstanding their transnational imprint in the Rio de la Plata or Mexico, were not perceived as diasporas but as legitimate colonies of their motherland protected by the consuls and embassies. The transnational modality of these collectivities was perceived differently—and was different—from the case of the diasporic transnationalism of the Jewish immigrants. It certainly needs to be seen in comparison with the enclave modality of the integration of colonies of foreigners that did not require the “mestization” of white immigrants as happened with the model of the white European-Creole melting pot. The robust hypothesis concerning the Southern Cone is that Italian or Spanish transnationalism was not only legitimized in those transplanted immigration countries but was paradoxically used to legitimize their xenophobic nationalism against other minorities, inside and outside. Furthermore, the Jewish minority was questioned for having managed to organize communally as an ethno-national diaspora-colony, but an extraterritorial one (Senkman 2005 ; Bokser Liwerant et al. 2010 ).

The Jewish presence was built in the framework of strong interconnected communal boundaries. Latin American Jewry shaped its communal life along strong transnational solidarity connections and with a dependent or peripheral character. Jews from Eastern Europe succeeded in establishing transnational relations between the original centers of Jewish life and the new periphery that powerfully influenced its construction as a new, though connected, ethno-transnational diaspora. They gave rise to differing models of Jewish kehillot in the region as replicas of original experiences overseas, not seen or interpreted as a referent to be overcome.

A common matrix nourished the Jewish identity of its members: a feeling of ethno-cultural and transnational belonging. Despite associational fragmentation and its ideological, cultural, and socio-occupational heterogeneity, an ethnic diasporic matrix was shared by Jews ideologically identified with a variety of political orientations: Bundists, communists, or Zionists. Its objective was to raise an organic community that would offer services of religious worship, social and medical welfare, burial in a Jewish cemetery, and, fundamentally, formal Jewish education. The kehillah framework transcended the borders of local ethnic association in order to encompass both the will for integration in the country and, simultaneously, the transnational bonds among the entire Jewish people both scattered throughout the diaspora and concentrated in Israel. The Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) became paradigmatic of collective Jewish life.

As in Argentina, the transnational relations that the Jewish community of Mexico forged significantly marked the construction of a new ethno-transnational diaspora that reaffirmed the paths of the old kehillah model. Thus, the diasporic matrix with its changing centers and collateral axes regenerated itself in its traditional models and practices. Continuity seemed to be the overall choice, and integration mediated by communal life was the strategy.

Contrary to what happened in the United States, the collective overshadowed the individual. Differing from the traditionalist-religious imprint of the northern communities, founded by secularists but seeking to answer communal and religious needs, communities were forged in the mold of modern European diaspora nationalism, emphasizing their inner ideological struggles, and organizing as political parties and social and cultural movements. The communal domain, while prompting continuity, became the basic framework for the permanent debates between world visions, convictions, strategies, and instrumental needs.

World Jewish developments gradually turned the Zionist idea and the State of Israel into central axes around which communal life developed and identity was built (Bokser Liwerant 2016c ). Partly convergent with Canadian and US Jewry, and partly singular in its meaning and intensity, Israel brought to the forefront both the feeling and the objective reality of a transnational shared mission and commitment to an ideological, political, and cultural-spiritual center. It also represented a new chapter in solidarity efforts as well as ambiguities surrounding the true meaning of this evolving relationship between an ideological, political, and public center and Latin American Jewish communities. It expressed the inherent tension between the idea of a national project for renewing Jewish national life in a Jewish homeland and that of acting as a spur to foster Jewish life in the circumstances of the diaspora. Being Zionist in Latin America provided Jews with the possibility of having a homeland- madre patria too, either just as other groups of immigrants to the country had or as a substitute for the previous ones that rejected them. It can be defined as a diasporic condition and consciousness that reinforced an ideal one-center (Jerusalem) model with a dependent periphery. Latin America was alternatively seen as undefined and not clearly part of the West, or as part of a peripheral region; a shared perception of a temporary sui generis diaspora called to play a central role in the changing Jewish dispersion. Zionist sectors invigorated the center with both the “national home” and “refuge” qualities that simultaneously nourished and reinforced their own diaspora profile (Avni 1976 ; Bokser Liwerant 1991 , 2016b ).

In comparatively accentuated collective patterns, while Eastern European Jews, as hegemonic community builders, established the old/new communal structures, the Sephardic geo-cultural world developed communities of its own based on different countries or even different cities of origin, such as Damascus and Aleppo. This reflected the character of a complex Jewish ethnic group textured by different subgroups, communal links, and family networks. The maintenance of Sephardic trade networks, the circulation of knowledge, marriages contracted or dissolved transnationally, and the other networks of communication, relation, and interaction explored herein enabled the perpetuation of a modern Sephardic diaspora (Mays 2020 ). Sub-ethnicity provided vital inner interactions.

Similar to the case of Canada, education reflected and reinforced political and organizational diversity and a highly developed structural base that became the main domain to transmit, create, and project the cultural profile of Jewish communities; to construct differences between the communities and their host societies as well as inside the communities themselves. It acted as a central field for displaying Jewish collective life while negotiating the challenges of incorporation and integration. The role Israel played in its development gradually expanded, as the center that aimed to set itself as a focus to legitimately influence Jewish life outside its borders.

As in the rest of the Jewish world, the June 1967 Six-Day War may be seen as a watershed in terms of solidarity, cohesion, and mutual recognition in world Jewry (Lederhendler 2000 ). The responses it elicited illustrate the way in which a moment in history can become a “foundational event” where different dimensions converge: reality, symbolism, and the imaginary. Discourse and social action came together and stretched the boundaries that define the scope and meaning of us . The threat to the state was seen as a threat to the entire Jewish people—the people of Israel were defined as one undivided entity. Paradoxically, this turning point was progressively and radically reversed by an extreme expression of religious revival and de-secularization. While the “miraculous” experience of the Six-Day War enhanced the links with Israel as the state of the Jewish people, it also reinforced the connection of the Jewish people with the land of Israel—a link recovered and channeled by the Orthodox world (Danzger 1989 ). Religious Zionism and the settlers were also nourished by this experience that led to strengthening biblical-mythical beliefs, connections, and symbols (Aran 1991 ; Dieckhoff 2003 ; Don-Yehiya 2014 ; Sagi and Schwartz 2018 ). Over time, this trend grew and reached in the early twenty-first century its utmost expression, in which religious allegiances, ideological worldviews, and instrumental considerations interact in interwoven and complex ways (DellaPergola 2020a ).

Israeli internal discourse shifted its focus from the diaspora to new critical topics: the Occupied Territories and the Palestine question, but also religion-state relations. This political shift not only removed the inherent subject of Israel-Diaspora links from the forefront of the Israeli agenda, but it created inherent tensions because of the different political outlooks and institutional interests at both ends of the dyad.

Further transformations concern the concrete and potential cleavages over patterns of private/public developments and expressions of collective identity that cross both Israel and the diaspora communities in light of the diversified nature of the dimensions, actors, and institutions that interact and divergent political stands. Whereas communal political behavior related to transnational links and support for Israel and the capacity to influence decision-making intensified due to globalization processes, the latter generated new constraints derived from regionalization and the inner differentiation and geopolitical positions of the countries. In this respect, it reflects the complex interplay between a wider public sphere, the prevalence of traditional mechanisms for negotiation, the internationalization of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the presence of divisions within the Jewish communities.

Surpassing a binary understanding of the diaspora-center relationship, coexistent and even competing cultural, religious, and political referents favor its conceptualization as a pluri-centered or even de-centered matrix that carries intense dynamics of convergences and divergences (Alroey 2008 ; Asscher and Shiff 2019 ).

The Triad Today: Selected Snapshots

Over recent decades, strong transformative trends crosscut the continent. The Americas lay the groundwork for observing the growing scope and intensity of globalization and transnationalism and their impact on the Jewish Diaspora’s changing profile.

Transnational links became reinforced. Although the country/state of residence continues to be the frame of reference for everyday life, experiences are no longer exhausted in that space. Both the territory and the symbolic horizons of the nation have lost vigor through the multiplication and diffusion of cognitive and normative maps. Introjected globalizing trends in the national spheres have been combined with similar processes at the community level, generating competition between normative guidelines and interpretative schemes and making a single collective frame of reference challenging if not irrelevant. Thus, in the South as in the North, the idea of cultural diversity has distanced itself from assimilationist pretensions.

Jewish culture, as does culture in general, far from being compact and homogeneous, acts as a conductive thread for new scenarios of transnational fluxes of all kinds—immigration, transmigration, tourism; information technology (IT) and electronically transmitted images; postmodern ideas that call into question central educational institutions. The demarcating function of culture has been diluted, causing transfigurations of the traditional “behavioral genders” that kept the social world “in its place” (Yudice 2006 ).

Changes occur in broader foci that encompass emerging civic commonalities and particular transnational links. The Americas are experiencing differentiated transformations in the public sphere, in the criteria of membership, in the spaces and dynamics of identity-building, and in their political expressions. Sociocultural/political parameters and limits to diversity are subject to changes, namely potential xenophobic and antisemitic expressions. Political pluralism, the acknowledgment of difference, and the emphasis on heterogeneity act as a substratum that stimulates and reinforces diversity.

In Latin America, through local differences, citizen participation has broadened, seeking to promote democratic integration, including minorities. Although the project of a civic community and the strengthening of civil society were cemented after the political transitions to democracy, the latter were characterized more by variability in the degrees of achievement than by their full implementation. The region’s changing reality reflects both the increasingly expansive force of democracy and its recessions, regressions, and reconfigurations. Latin America has incorporated global cycles of political opportunities and social conflicts in contradictory ways, as evidenced in democratization and de-democratization processes, centralization of power, civic citizenship and ethnic allegiances, and the simultaneity, as well, of individualization of rights and collective affirmation. Multiculturalism and new claims for recognition of primordial identities seek inclusion based on essentialism, which previously dominated at the national level.

Canada, after the 1970s and 1980s, following the intense mobilization of ethnic minorities, proclaimed a multiculturalist policy; although it did not lack criticism (Guo and Wong 2015 ; Bannerji 2020 ) or inner ethno-national tensions, it followed a path of stability. A variety of elements enrich multiculturalism. Like other minorities, Jews continue to find expressions of their collective life while maintaining their internal ethnic cohesion.

In contrast, in the United States, the very idea of the nation was built upon history, both ideological and material, with a solid racial division that was deeply ingrained in the social structure of the country. Access to the public space (and even the territory) was hierarchized on a racial basis. Nonetheless, one of the ideas that prevailed was that of assimilation, the melting pot, and at least nominally equal opportunity. Changes began slowly in the 1960s, when the Civil Rights movement gained impetus and the Civil Rights Act was famously passed in 1964, and they developed in different directions. The sustained increase in the recognition of diversity also faced discriminatory nationalist reactions.

Outlined in terms of general trends, the impact of the context may be discerned in the interactions with Jewish community transformations, oscillating between boundary maintenance and boundary erosion. Frontiers bear witness to an epoch defined by underlying complexity. Important sectors have abandoned communal belonging while others have seen a flourishing and resurgence of collective Jewish life. Communal institutional foundations face new equations between being and belonging, religiosity and ethnicity, peoplehood and social stratification, changing hegemonies in the leadership and sources of power and consequent disputes. But scarcity of resources—real or perceived—underlies all of these dualities.

The perimeters of Jewish life have been (and are still being) modified. The limits and traditional functions of the organized Jewish communities evolve both in the rate of conventional affiliation and in the new spaces that emerged or were strengthened as a response to the increasingly integrated profile of Jews in society. In light of changing necessities, a significant turn in the financing of collective life has also taken place. Perhaps a paradigmatic example was the transition to new forms of privatized resources. Partially as an outcome and as a vigorous internalization of the dominant neoliberal patterns in society, US Jewry saw the growth of powerful private funds competing with, and even displacing, the Federations (Kelner 2013 ; Friedman and Korenfeld 2018 ). The behavior of private funds and banks supporting Jewish institutions shows differing patterns of responsibility. The common denominator of many institutions was the transformation of their past profiles to become similar to nongovernmental organizations, through innovative policies of social support. Both ex ante and ex post, these policies developed as internal fragmentations that reflect the socioeconomic and occupational stratification of the communities.

Simultaneously, the communal dimension is also perceived as just one of the possibilities of the existence of the social subject, whose self-construction takes many forms: as an individual, as a member of civil society, or as a participant in temporary frameworks that create contingent associative identities (Cohen and Eisen 2000 ). The transition from communal models based on a shared past to associative models based on changing shared interests gained impetus, defined by multiple belonging and increased integration, making it necessary for Jews to redefine their organizational axes. The private sphere is growing as a space for experiencing Judaism. While this is significantly marked in the US, it seems to bring the Latin American and the North American experiences closer, in the sense of re-dimensioning the individual realm for the construction of Jewish life. Are collective spheres seen as a guarantee of continuity? And how and where is continuity defined? (Kurtzer and Sufrin 2020 ) The individual-community binary constitutes, indeed, a clue to the alternate referents of structural cohesion and identity-building, even though the two elements differ in dominance. While in Latin America and Canada the community was the grounds for building Jewish life, in the US it emerged as an entity whose centrality was recognized as an alternative resource to religious practices and a means for enhancing Jewish identity precisely when its loosening was enunciated (Cohen 1988 ).

The collective associational dimension is correlated with differing indexes of ethnic cohesiveness such as community affiliation or Jewish schooling. While in the US the main indicators are closer to the Brazilian and Argentine communities at medium intensity, Mexico stands closer to Canada at higher intensity. Institutional orders, national cultures, and socioeconomic structures are projected in it. While the affiliation rate in Canada (70%) and Mexico (85%) is similar, Argentina, Brazil, and the US run between 45 and 50%. Enrollment in day schools accounts for Mexican exceptionality (93%) among the similar rates in Canada, Argentina, and Brazil (45%), while the US oscillates around 25% (DellaPergola 2011 ; Bokser Liwerant et al. 2015 ; Brym et al. 2018 ; Besser 2020 ).

The structural and functional changes highlighted here take place amidst the porosity of borders which paved the way for the emergence of religion, closely related to the weakening of the culture of its traditional boundaries, and its reconnection to new spatial and temporal configurations. Religion enhanced its role as a resource to address other social problems and as a means to a public ethical discourse (Voyé 2000 ). In parallel to reinstating the normative validity of the public sphere (Casanova 1994 ), the responses of orthodoxy and fundamentalism have become stronger, defending the enclave nature of the collective condition and taking positions as ethical referents in a context of credibility crisis. For its part, and defined by its historical trajectory as a circulation culture, the Jewish religious world in the Americas intensified and widened. The Conservative Movement expanded from the US to the South as a shift away from the original religious models of the immigrant generation. Its Northern congregational character was redefined, and the synagogue was relocated as a community space, which meant new options for building a Jewish identity committed to local society. In the South, specifically in Argentina, it allowed for an interesting de-secularization with no rejection of Zionism, while encouraging a concern for human rights—even preceding or paralleling the agenda of Canadian Jewry. The establishment of the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary in Buenos Aires and its role in training Conservative rabbis, a pattern that reversed the previous absence of religious officials, reinforced the community’s structural foundations. The flux of rabbis from the South to the rest of the continent, particularly to the United States, pioneered a pattern of new transnationalism—the movement of religious personnel as actors and agents of social change (Bokser Liwerant 2013b ).

Subsequently, the Haredi presence expanded both in the North and in the South, in consonance with Israel. The Chabad Lubavitch movement and the opening of its centers across the continent exemplify how changing socioeconomic and cultural conditions were catalysts to the development of social support networks and the reaffirmation of identity borders, addressing the need to reconstruct social tissue. The movement spread an alternative paradigm anchored in belonging and discipline, proposing an ideal moral code and expressing the quest for expectations unfulfilled by the prevailing organized communal life. It further developed following migration movements (Limonic 2019 ).

The modified interplay between historical ethno-national patterns and religious and transnational flows also found expression in new channels and social actors. While the Israeli religious scene has singular traits associated with its national milieu, including the pervasive phenomenon of vicarious religious belonging without necessarily believing and delegated functions (Bokser Liwerant 2002 ; Davie 2007 ; Fischer 2010 ), parallel manifestations of autonomous expression of the religious experience emerge both in Israel and in the diaspora. Religious transnational networks across communities and Israel are erasing the traditional spaces and mechanisms of interaction defined by borders between the voluntary collectives and the sovereign state. Religious frameworks provide the networks through which communities build agreements. Mexico City, New York, Buenos Aires, Paris, and Jerusalem are all nodes and fluent borderless spaces that define religious and ethnic interactions. Religious revitalization is not just a regional phenomenon: it can be characterized as articulating local and regional communities with a transnational community of believers/practicing Jews under the hegemonic centers located in the US or Israel.

These changes pose several questions, among which the matter of the institutions and their officials' financing is neither marginal nor tangential. Who is paying for them? Who has gradually approached this sort of spiritual framework and why? How and why have phenomena of a magical nature and an oracular character regarding the direction of personal affairs expanded? We could venture a parallelism of paradoxical combinations of the privatization of religious orientations and sensitivities, the weakening of the institutional dimension of religion, and the re-emergence of religious components, orientations, and sensibilities. In turn, movements (and orthodoxies) have been transformed and transposed at the center of national and transnational activities (DellaPergola 2008 ; Bokser Liwerant 2008b ). Thus, America’s communities and Israel need to be seen in their inner and cross-border diversification. Undoubtedly, this connection between competing centers and lateral axes redefined the diaspora matrix.

The complexity of these trends becomes apparent in the parallel growth of cultural or secular patterns of identification and organizational belonging, thereby moving and fixing old/new definition and membership criteria. More than the synagogue, other fields and activities of identity-building have received new impetus. It is worth underscoring literature, theater, and film as privileged terrains where the new trends, expectations, and claims regarding the social imaginary are expressed. They became a meaningful part of social discourse, expressing meanings, narratives, images, and tropes of the changing historical experiences and new social constellations. Paradigmatic of it has been contemporary cultural production, where gender and the search for identity converge. It could even be defined as an extraordinary literary boom of being Jewish in the Americas—the individual problematic of collective belonging, the existential queries derived from the tension between the efforts of privatizing the historical dimension of identity, and the diachronic density of the subjectivity of Jews.

South to North and Beyond

Decades after the founding migrations to the Americas, renewed migration waves became central factors of social change for those who move and those who stay, for the communities in the countries of origin and for the new communities built abroad. The new interconnections are marked by the relocations in the lateral axes and the center(s) of Jewish life. Partly convergent with other ethnic diasporas and partly in their uniqueness, Jews are engaged today in a renewed geography of dispersion and concentration. A complex logic of interdependence between the new homes, the previous ones, and the historical ideational ones widens Jewish social experiences.

The Americas entered the twenty-first century with differing experiences, as part of a single world order in which the US still occupied a top place and Latin America a subordinate one. A more systematic articulation of the Americas emerged under the hegemony of the US, including Canada in a secondary role. Among the visible and significant manifestations of this development is the growing migratory flux from South to North, especially to the US. Latin American migration expresses the interconnection between globalization, diasporas, and transnationalism.

The emigration of Jews from Latin America to the United States is part of this larger, global phenomenon of unexpected scope: the international migrant stock has grown from 153 million in 1990 to 271 million in 2019 (United Nations–Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2019 ). In 2017, about 37 million Latin Americans lived outside their country of birth (compared to 35 million in 2010) (Pew Research Center 2019 ). Latin American Jews are part of the cohort of qualified migrants who increasingly move to OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries. Over the past few decades, close to 250,000 Jews from Latin American countries have undertaken cross-border migrations. Given the global estimates, it appears that close to 36 or 37% now live outside the region (DellaPergola 2020c ).

Indeed, Latin America has become an exit region for broad social sectors. Societal crises and individual choices converge, determining timing and characteristics (Bokser Liwerant et al. 2010 ; Bokser Liwerant 2015c ). As a result, in complex and interrelated ways, Latin American Jews have transitioned from communities of immigrants to communities of citizens and, simultaneously, of emigrants.

Contemporary international and regional migration, integration, and distinctive mobility account for the new scaling of spaces where collective Jewish life is relocated. Diversified waves of migration both reflect and create diverse territorial, cultural, sub-ethnic, and social paths (Sassen 1998 ; Castles 2000 ; United Nations Development Programme 2019 , 2020 ).

The collective dimension implicit in this relocation and the new profile of communities in the making might be analyzed in light of the “migration crises” of the Latin American region, i.e. the worldwide emigration, dispersal, and regrouping of migrant communities generated by macro-level forces of a political and economic nature (Van Hear 1998 ). Successive migration crises affecting Latin Americans took place during the second half of the twentieth century. The first phase began with the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and continued intermittently, chiefly during the 1970s in Chile under Salvador Allende’s socialist government and later under the authoritarian regime of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990). Emigration also ensued during the era of military dictatorships in Brazil (1964–1985), Argentina (1976–1983), and Uruguay (1973–1985). The later phases (mid-1980s and 1990s) were caused by the combined effects of neoliberal economic policies and globalization affecting Argentina on two occasions, as well as Uruguay. Colombian Jews emigrated during that period due to a generalized atmosphere of violence within the country. More recently (mainly since 2000), the Jews of Venezuela have emigrated under the impact of the populist regime initiated by Hugo Chávez. Emigration from Mexico was relatively more stable, with peaks in the mid-1990s, in 2010, and at the end of the 2010s. The ways in which streams of migration change shed light on moments of transition. Sharp declines in the Jewish population have occurred since the mid-1980s in Central American countries. However, in the case of Guatemala, more than half of its Jewish population decided to stay in their homeland. Neighboring Costa Rica increased its Jewish population by two thirds since 1967 while Panama became a relocation country for Jews fleeing from other Central American countries. Argentina has experienced some of the most acute political and economic crises, yet still hosts the largest Jewish population in the continent (Bokser Liwerant et al. 2010 ).

Contemporary American Jewry and the encounters that take place within it may be better understood when considering the challenges of integrating newly arrived groups: multiple dynamics of joining/receiving, of being/belonging into the extant reality of the veterans dominated by prevailing self-images and discourses (See Fig.  2 ).

Diversity of transnational processes and its implications

Jews migrating across and out of Latin America simultaneously disperse and regroup. We are witnessing the recovery of the historic trajectory of ethnic and ethno-national patterns of migration and the pluralization of migrant populations. This conjunction between two interrelated aspects implies both an enhancement of Jewish globalization and the reinforcement of particular, local aspects of the Jewish experience. This requires a dual terminology: diaspora and transnationalism are related concepts that are applicable to the contemporary itinerary of Jewish dispersion in the “new global ethnic landscape,” as Appadurai ( 1996 ) calls it. Mobility and relocation set the stage for the potential reconstitution of an enlarged, redefined ethno-religious and national/transnational collective.

Latin American Jews do not simply replicate social relations transferred from country of origin to destination society (Levitt 2001 ; Nonini 2002 ); rather, their subjective and socially expressed experiences are quite diverse. Boundary maintenance between origin groups may be complicated (undercut, refracted, blurred) by interactions and by the plausibility of multiple identities: a sense of being Latin American may thus coexist with a sense of being Jewish, Colombian, Mexican or Venezuelan, Latino or Hispanic, or perhaps a more general awareness of “being immigrant Jews on their way to becoming Americans.”

Jews in the United States live in “stacked social spaces” characterized by high levels of foreign-born residents. These spaces, which share sociodemographic and ethnic-racial contexts, extend over the noncontiguous geographic spaces in American society, hence questioning what Ludger Pries ( 2008 ) calls the past predominance of “mutual embeddedness of social practices, symbols and artifacts in uni-local geographic containers” and the “complete conjunction of the social and the spatial.” We can thus conceive of these communities as the territorialization of a differential net of diasporic spaces (Brah 2011) which comprise a large number of multiple realities, intertwined with its local, national, and regional circumstances, and still maintain the communication thread through the experience of diaspora in and of itself.

The Latin American Jewish case is an apt choice in that regard, since Latin American Jewish immigrants in the United States have invested strongly in establishing the institutional support structures for a collective identity. The relatively high degree of formalization and institutionalization is supra-local, as it was when establishing Jewish life in the South; that is, group organizations and institutions embrace far more than local communal needs and attachments. Jewish communal life is thus characterized by strong collective historical bonds that transcend national borders and find expression in diasporic and transnational practices. The case at hand can mediate between discourses of national (nation-state and political) migration studies, on the one hand, and individual or family-based migration and transmigration studies, on the other (Portes et al. 1999 ; Beck 2007 ; Amelina et al. 2012 ).

Several paradigmatic fields and patterns can be identified in locations with a strong collective Latin American Jewish presence, where agency and structure interact in a differentiated scenario of places and actors. Their relocation takes place in existing and reconfigured spaces of American Jewry. It occurs largely because unique and shared Jewish dimensions allow for sociocultural embeddedness amidst inner diversity. Paradigmatic of this trend is the array of educational choices. Social integration and encounters between the different and the similar often entail new cultural trade-offs. Social boundaries are maintained, though bifurcation and overlapping occur—as expressed through a revised articulation of social and cultural markers, as in the case of family unity, ideational connectedness with the State of Israel, memorialization of the Shoah, and sensitivity to antisemitism. These values—once perceived as stemming from the Latin American Jewish experience—may now come to be regarded by some as more universally Jewish. Others, to be true, would assertively oppose such an importation of paramount Jewish diasporic values into American Jewish discourse. The institutional map of the educational system accounts for both cultural and socioeconomic factors.

The sub-ethnic axis shapes the strong connectedness among migrants independently of their country of origin and across global cities. Simultaneously, religious differentiation acts as a hard divide in providing affiliation and spaces that also crosscut place of origin. The way national origin overlaps with religious origin is deserving of attention. The inner religious divisions in Judaism and a Latino pan-ethnic identity develop together with both a Jewish comprehensive ethnic belonging and a fragmentary religious one. Countries of origin, cities of destination, and sociodemographic and ethnic-racial contexts and time frames are variables that influence and shape a diversified world.

Redefining and reconnecting their attachments, migrants are involved in processes of diaspora-making and diaspora-unmaking . Various scenarios emerge as they experience de-socialization from their country and community of origin and re-socialization in the country and community of destination (Van Hear 1998 ). Variability, complexity, and heterogeneity seem to be the rule. Thus, Greater Miami mirrors the cycles of migration crises in the region, starting with the first Jewish Cuban collective migratory/exiled wave and successive crises in the region. The expansion of a transnational community took place in new frontier areas such as Caribbean Florida or the American Southwest where complex dynamics developed, grounded in patterns that are particular to each national group but are generalized also within a large population. A shared sense of living in a community with other Latin Americans, the existence of communal organized spaces that represent group continuity, and the presence of a critical mass enhance new social regrouping by allowing migrants to establish and bolster formal and informal networks based on their common origins.

In San Diego, an ethno-national enclave with a transnational character developed among Mexican Jews, leading to what may be termed a secondary diaspora. The migrant experience in the North-East-Midwest triangle and its counterpart in Texas represent individual-professional cases, rather than collective migration patterns. Age, gender, and household composition—selectively younger and nuclear—provide interesting doors of entry and mapping routes into associational connections. It is thus possible to further question and analyze a scenario of de-diasporization that could lead to either individual integration or new prevailing criteria and axes of regrouping.

The US opened a wide spectrum of the legacy Latin Americans bring with them and accounts for the increasing transnationalism of the Jewish world. American Jewish life has been transformed by general social and communal patterns with distinct implications for continued collective communal life: transitions from individualization to collective affirmation, and their subsequent reversal; from congregational to communal models, albeit simultaneously witnessing a growing role for synagogues; from secularization to rising expressions of new forms of religiosity, even as secularism appears to be gaining ground; from privatization to communal revival. These trends are not linear but rather reflect changing moments, fluctuations, and interacting paths and are both cause and effect of a transnational overall interconnection.

Such dynamics may be approached as encounters between peripheral alterities and central alterities. Latin American Jews in particular may be seen as bearers of peripheral identities vis-à-vis the Anglo-Protestant core culture. On their side, American Jews face a certain degree of dissonance between their subjective sense of being “insiders” and those aspects of the Jewish experience that reflect their difference as “outsiders” (Biale et al. 1998 ; Rohrbacher 2016 ). Along a chain of “ otherness ” in American Jewish social spaces, recent immigrants may serve as reminders that American Jewry is to some extent being steadily reconstituted, and thus has not completed its processes of integration . The interplay between “otherness,” distinctiveness, and integration partly reflects previous experiences and partly marks new challenges.

A node in which these different dimensions converge may be seen is the ongoing question of “Jews of Color .” The overlapping of racial, ethnic, and national criteria and their socioeconomic, cultural, and religious connections raises fundamental questions as to the way the inclusion–exclusion dyad in community life is conceptually and practically approached (DellaPergola 2020b ). The undifferentiated incorporation of Hispanic, Sephardic, Mizrachi, Asian, and Middle Eastern—if it occurs—homogenizes an otherwise distinctive population, with its various trajectories and cultures. It may be read as a counterreaction to the racialized ethnicity for Hispanic/Latino which largely excluded Latin American Jews. A twofold dilemmatic ascription of identity and identification emerges—that of Latinos, who are generally seen as non-white in the US, and that of Jews, who are viewed as white (Bokser Liwerant 2015c ).

The initial questions of whether these immigrants should be classified primarily as Jewish, hence white, or whether their national identities as Argentine, Mexican, or Cuban weaken their Jewish ethno-religious identity must be weighed against the more complex issue of equating tout court Jews with whites, equivocally phrased as Ashkenazi hegemony or “whiteness.” Should social scientists show some hesitation at applying categories taken from a racialized reality vis-à-vis universalizing narratives and ethnic divisions? How does the equation of Jews with whites fit into a social and political context that shows signs of white supremacy and antisemitism?

The subjective and socially expressed experiences of Latin American Jews are quite diverse. Boundary maintenance between origin groups may increase in complexity by interactions and by the plausibility of multiple identities and corresponding organizational structures. Various permutations take place, including reaffirmation, intermingling, and disentanglement, as variegated subgroups deploy in and around concurrent ethno-cultural-national (country of origin) boundaries in common spaces, intergenerational and communal (Brubaker 2006 , 2015c).

Latin American Jewish migration to the US implies an altered stance vis-à-vis the connection to Israel; a geographically diverse transnationalism replaces older binary connections. That does not necessarily imply the weakening of attachments, but rather their re-signification. Israel was historically perceived by Latin American Jews as a vital space for those in need, in addition to its role as a sovereign political center and a focal axis of structural development. In the US, this amalgam may be readjusted as the “need” element makes way for other expressions of attachment and identification. Moreover, North American Jewish institutions become for their country of origin an important source of direct political support and a model for collective organization. This change must also be pondered considering the hypothesis of American Jewish self-distancing from Israel, which has elicited much debate (Cohen and Kelman 2009 ; DellaPergola 2010 ; Goldscheider 2010 ; Sasson et al. 2010 ). New data throw light both on meaningful attachment and on the age differentiation—an expression of prevailing changing dynamics (Pew Research Center 2021 ).

Latin American Jewish youth in the US increasingly participate in Birthright ( Taglit ), which has become an alternative to the study trips and intensive youth programs ( hakhsharot ) common in their countries of origin (Sasson et al. 2010 ). In this context, educational trips to Israel may be seen as fragments of the cultural and institutional practices for which Israel is conceived of as a site for the symbolic encoding of meanings and the formation of a sense of belonging while the awareness of an interconnected Jewish world is strengthened. Interactions between Israel and diaspora Jewish communities and their role in building Jewish identities exhibit complex dynamics—plural meanings of center-home (spiritual, symbolic, material) and transnational ideational motives. In this regard, youth trips may be conceptualized as a praxis that reveals the unique convergence of modern nationalism with the growing practical and conceptual presence of transnationalism in the Jewish world, thus shedding light on the changing role of the center or homeland in guaranteeing the continuity of the diaspora (Kelner 2010 ; Bokser Liwerant 2016b ). Thus, trips oscillate between links and bonds to the nation-state and diaspora-building as two interdependent pillars of the continuity of the collective. This interaction becomes challenging in the light of the rise of new identities with different levels of aggregation—both primordial and elective—and their renewed importance in the shaping of global, national, and local communal spheres.

A Global Memory

The multiplication, pluralization, and diversification of semantic-ideological and institutional connections between major arenas of Jewish life that develop between community and society—between the public and the private arenas—, as well as the components of collective identities, are defined by Eisenstadt ( 2010 ) as the crystallization of a new civilizational constellation. In this context, new relations between identity referents emerge. As such, the memory of the Shoah has progressively become an identification focus. It can be interpreted as located at the crossroads between collective memory—the memory of personal experiences or those of the group of belonging—and historical memory—which is mediated by its representations, symbols, and sites—as proposed by Halbwachs ( 1980 ). Besides its inherent and essential weight, it implies the culture of circulation, oscillating between Israel and the Shoah. Political developments within the Jewish state initially projected the Shoah as an identity referent, an iconic one, often above even the contents of the national state project. Israel gradually took on the role of collective memory keeper and shares it today with a reconfigured Jewish and non-Jewish world. Indeed, successive wars brought the recovery of its memory; the risk implied reinforced the conception of existential threat. Gradually, the increasing emergence of critical stands against Zionism and the Jewish state led to stripping the Jewish condition of its refugee profile and replacing it with a transfiguration that turned the victim into a victimizer, the refugee into the origin and cause of new exiles.

However, the transformation of the memory of the Shoah into a new identity paradigm was built inside the Jewish world not only as the road traced by the search of the past, but also as a counter-reference to the Jewish nation-state, as part of the claim for its universal over its particular meaning. The ideal of a cosmopolitan Judaism that seeks to construct a common human consciousness based on reducing ethnic or territorial barriers was constructed through the state–exile binomial. Its extreme conception questioned the Jewish national paradigm, seeing it as a threat that could “eradicate the certainty of uprooting, the mere entrenchment of the word, the legacy of the Prophets and the custodians of the books” (Steiner, 1985 ; Butler 2004 ). Exile and memory of destruction thus come together in a simultaneously tragic and heroic exiled figure. Head-on questioning of the State of Israel has emerged from this approach in the most pivotal moments of the Palestinian conflict. Yet, the paradoxical reversal of the centrality and meaning of the memory of the Shoah today finds expression in central arguments of representatives of post- and de-colonial thought, questioning and condemning it as part of the Western effort to displace and reject other genocides. Colonial racism is analyzed within the framework of the Holocaust and colonialism remembrance, and thus represents the Western, Eurocentric remembrance paradigm (Mignolo 2009 ; Grosfogel 2009 ).

The memory of the Shoah has also sought to explain its similarity to other genocides (Bokser Liwerant, Gleizer and Siman, 2016 ). In a world where globalization trends intensify antisemitic expressions, the idea of a universalizing memory sought to counter them. In Argentina, for instance, in light of the repression and antisemitic attacks starting in the late 1980s, the Shoah emerged as the axis of a new paradigm of memory and remembrance which sought to recover a thread of linkages between the traumatic episodes of Argentine reality and the Shoah. The latter connected with the repressive military dictatorship, the desaparecidos, the impunity and lack of justice. The 1994 bombing of the iconic building of AMIA—and two years earlier, the Israeli Embassy—were interpreted as one more link in the long chain of historical hate. They were also incorporated as part of a broad movement that fought for memory and justice, aiming to reconstruct the public sphere and redefine the place of a minority in the legitimate frame of full citizenship (Senkman 2005 , 2008 ). Simultaneously, universalizing the memory of the Shoah also meant shifting emphasis from the mass destruction of a people to the understanding of individual suffering and its moral consequences, as shown by the perspective of the American ethos and the Jewish present of integration.

A full circle of changing patterns of cultural representations and social relations has a direct impact on associational dynamics and institutional formations that shape the structural underpinnings of Jewish life, enhanced by the digitalization of world communications, which has favored transnational ethnic and religious associations and virtual communities. The interpretation of belonging is less ideologically homogeneous while, paradoxically, the emergence of new nationalisms take place. These processes interact with the reconfiguration of communities that are exposed to social and cultural frameworks subject both to boundary erosion and to the organized spheres for boundary maintenance.

Concluding Remarks

The central trends and issues analyzed shed light on the Americas as a diverse territorial, geopolitical, economic, social, multiethnic, and cultural entity—ideally one, in reality diverse. The global Jewish world, for its part, was the carrier of its own diversity: its life parameters in the national and regional spaces were built on commonalities and inner differences that, as analyzed here, found expression on several spheres—from education and communal patterns of organization to the place of Jewish individuals and communities in the public sphere, as well as the role of and links with Israel.

Solid substrata of various forms of associational and institutional underpinnings provided the ground for common challenges and collective cohesion. Diaspora-building emerged as the territory where the collective became shaped and reshaped. Differing interactions between primordial and elective identities—accelerated by globalization processes—varied between North and South and within each region and country. Changes over time and the pluralization and diversification of social life posed new challenges that led to the redefinition of the spaces where collective and individual possibilities develop.

Having analyzed the main conceptual and empirical lenses to account for the experience of Jews in the Americas, several questions emerge before us. We need to cross the national borders where Jewish diasporas dwell in an effort to understand the globality of the Jewish condition and also to understand the current dynamics of transnationalism. Are we going to see more convergence or divergence between the North and the South? Will globalization trends reach a maximum limit, followed by regression? Are the Jewish Americas moving toward a position of isolation or one of continued participation with world Jewry and Israel? Will the Americas and Israel build together a new poly-centered or de-centered matrix, or will fragmentation and antagonism overcome consensus-building? Will our broad field of knowledge—its theoretical, methodological formulations and our epistemic communities—be receptive to the changes required to face increased complexity and uncertainty?

Regarding our first query, no easy assumption or one-dimensional approach seems adequate to produce a serious answer. We may broadly affirm that convergences and divergences display differentially within the economic, political, social, and cultural spheres. While the social sciences have studied the achievements of globalization processes—the growing interconnection between countries, economies and societies, collaboration in science, the circulation of cultures and human mobility itself—new expressions point to increased differentiation and inequalities between regions and countries, as well as within societies and communities. These processes are made evident by the growing paradox of the dynamics of integration–fragmentation, inclusion–exclusion, and dispersion–concentration (Cicchelli 2018 ).

Furthermore, globalization today is confronted by nationalist and isolationist trends. While not only the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic (and its resulting disruptions and imbalances) but also its possible solutions enhance the need for collaboration and global governance, peaks of nationalism are simultaneously looming. Both moments are seen as irreconcilable: the different governments tried to respond in the short term, each with its own profile and capabilities, while at the same time they lost legitimacy within their societies. The picture differed in the US, in Canada, and in the various Latin American societies. It may become enhanced by the fact that the differing scales of poverty and social inequality will probably deepen the gap between the regions, leading to the intensification of migration and bringing new migration crises and movement from the South to the North and from the North elsewhere.

While the Americas are more interdependent than in the past, we are witnessing different paths of restructuring regional and national processes. Democracies in the North and democratization in the South may further lead Jews and Jewish life to a shift from the focus on differences of a center-linked diaspora to a broader focus that encompasses emerging civic commonalities and transnational links as well. However, both this tendency and the renewal of collective affirmation draw challenging scenarios. The prevailing inner divisions are expressed in differing institutional capabilities by the various sectors. Indeed, the sectorialization of Jewish life has seriously challenged the existing forms of organization and of leadership and underlines the need for appropriate spaces where inner differences may be negotiated.

We may think of a scenario of a world Jewish network-society articulated between diverse focal places of Jewish life. A Jewish world might coalesce in global and integral terms based on networks and relationships, links, and interactions that include voluntary and compulsory frameworks, primordial and elective foci of identities, associative and institutionalized structures. It would be a world in which plural identities would claim differentiated approaches to individuals and institutional orders as agents of changes.

However, we must question whether the inner divisions of Jewish life—religious, political, cultural, and socioeconomic—will lead to cross-national and overlapping sectorial relations blurring but not necessarily bringing the diaspora communities and Israel closer. The continental dynamics have been, although differentially, connected to Israel. Will American diaspora communities continue to maintain changing but strong links with Israel, or will the divergences lead to fragmentation?

And again, while the US, Canadian, and Latin American communities developed, as analyzed, differential bilateral functionalities, the importance attributed to the center-home duality by various sectors reflects the changing profile of an ethno-national diaspora entering new transnational dynamics. Future patterns of migration, geographical mobility, and its implications, the reshaping of existing and newly created communities, the expansion of material and symbolic boundaries, and their redefinition in a mobile context are all processes that will influence and modify the links with Israel. The interdependence between the nation-state-home (concrete, ideational, putative) and diaspora-building—strongly conditioned by varying Jewish models of collective life—develops along a diversified world of identities and religious and political allegiances.

The potential dynamics of interdependence, disjuncture, and convergences among these axes are closely related to the developments in Israel. While in the US the liberal sectors’ increased criticism of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and its lack of official recognition of all the Jewish religious streams have acted as dispute referents vis-à-vis Israel, the latter has maintained its centrality and unavoidability in the public conversation. How distancing and disaffiliation from the organized Jewish community will interact with the nexus with Israel is an open question. Will it be defined by political and cultural dissent?

Canadian Jewry has been homogeneously closer to Israel, and Latin American Jewish communities may well be able to continue to develop their relation at the crossroads of ideology and needs.

Our triad—globalization, transnationalism, and diaspora—highlights singular patterns defined by the stability and plasticity of the Jewish historical trajectory. However, regarding the epistemic challenges we posed, understanding the triad in the Americas demands that we work on the conceptual and methodological mediations and in-depth complementary relations between differing analytical levels and disciplines.

The former has been approached by Hartman’s analytical model. Though focused on the individual and the family, it may be projected to wider comparative Jewish populations. It characterizes different levels of ecological factors influencing Jewish life cycles and populations at different times in history and in different geographical contexts— microsystem , mesosystem , macrosystem , chronosystem , and exosystem (Hartman 2020 ).

Approaching the challenge from the perspective of the disciplinary interaction, the question arises of which is the space where these articulations are to be formulated in order to favor encounters between various disciplinary logics, each with its own specialized language, methodological resources, topical focuses, and cognitive identity. How do we transition from community to society, from homeland to diaspora, from individual to group, from community to nation and state, from country to region, and from there to new centers of existence or interaction?

We do move from social territory to the de-territorialization of culture; from the everyday existence inside and out of institutions; from the de-privatization of religion to new circuits of circulation, personal forms of lending meaning and significance to belonging; from past to present; and, above all, from concrete particularity to concrete universality between disciplines (see Fig.  3 ).

Epistemological shift

Further conceptual elaborations and research will stimulate the need to transition from the individual Jewish identity focus to the current challenges of continuity. The new individual turn needs to be theoretically connected to the interdisciplinarity of what social sciences call the subjective turn and its intersection with collective memory and values, not just individual but shared, public, and historical as well, and the concrete orders where memory and values are recreated and transmitted.

holds a PhD Cum Laude in Social Sciences (Political Science). She is a Senior Full Time Professor of Political Science at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM); member of the Mexican Academy of Science and of the National Research System, and Distinguished Visiting Professor, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, since 2013. She is the Director and Chief Editor of the Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales , and Co-editor of the series Jewish Identities in a Changing World ( Brill). She has been the recipient of several national and international awards, including the Marshall Sklare Award. She is the author and editor of 14 books, over 100 book chapters, and over 90 scientific articles. In her research, political science, sociology, history, and contemporary Jewry converge. Among her research axes are Latin American Jewry; Modernity in its concurrent dynamics of homogeneity-diversity; Latin American Multiple Modernities; collective identities in the public sphere; globalization, diaspora and transnationalism. Selected publications: Belonging and Otherness. Jews in/of Latin America (2011); Reconsidering Israel-Diaspora Relations (2014); Israel-Diaspora Relations: Continuities and Discontinuities (2021); Antisemitism (and related expressions of prejudice) in a global world. A view from Latin America (2021).

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

• Abella I, Troper H. None is too many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933–1948. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys; 1982. [ Google Scholar ]
• Abella I. Presidential address: Jews, human rights and the making of a new Canada. Journal of the Canadian Historical Association. 2006; 11 (1):3–15. doi: 10.7202/031129ar. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Alexander J. The Civil sphere. New York: Oxford University Press; 2006. [ Google Scholar ]
• Allen R, Murphy T, Schneider E. The colonial origins of the divergence in the Americas: A labor market approach. The Journal of Economic History. 2012; 72 (4):863–894. doi: 10.1017/S0022050712000629. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Alroey G. Aliya to America? A Comparative Look at Jewish Mass Migration, 1881–1914. Modern Judaism. 2008; 28 (2):109–133. doi: 10.1093/mj/kjn001. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Amelina, Anna, Devrimsel Nergiz, Thomas Faist, and Nina Glick Schiller (eds.). 2012. Beyond methodological nationalism: research methodologies for cross-border studies . Abingdon: Routledge
• Anteby-Yemini L, Berthomière W. Diaspora: A look back on a concept. Bulletin Du Centre De Recherche Français à Jérusalem. 2005; 16 :262–270. [ Google Scholar ]
• Appadurai A. Modernity at large. Cultural dimension of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; 1996. [ Google Scholar ]
• Aran G. Jewish fundamentalism: The block of the faithful in Israel (Gush Emunim) In: Marty M, Appleby S, editors. Fundamentalism Observed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1991. [ Google Scholar ]
• Asscher O, Shiff O. Diasporic stances, homeland prisms: Representing diaspora in the homeland as internal negotiation of national identity. Diaspora Studies. 2019; 13 (1):1–15. doi: 10.1080/09739572.2019.1685815. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Avni, Haim., Judit Bokser Liwerant, Margalit Bejarano, Sergio DellaPergola. (eds.). 2011. Pertenencia y alteridad. Judíos en/de América Latina: Cuarenta años de cambios . Madrid/Frankfurt/Mexico City: Iberoamericana/Vervuert/Bonilla Artigas Editores.
• Avni H. El sionismo y su arraigo en América Latina. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University; 1976. [ Google Scholar ]
• Bannerji H. The ideological condition Selected essays on history, race and gender. Boston/Leiden: Brill; 2020. [ Google Scholar ]
• Bauböck R, Faist T. Diaspora and transnationalism concepts, theories and methods. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press; 2010. [ Google Scholar ]
• Beck U. La condition cosmopolite et le piège du nationalisme méthodologique. In: Wieviorka M, editor. Les sciences sociales en mutation. Auxerre: Éditions Sciences Humaines; 2007. pp. 223–236. [ Google Scholar ]
• Bellah R. Civil Religion in America. Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 1967; 96 (1):1–21. [ Google Scholar ]
• Ben-Rafael, Eliezer, Yitzhak Sternberg, Judit Bokser Liwerant, & Yosef Gorni. (eds.). 2009. Transnationalism: Diasporas and the advent of a new (dis)order . Boston/Leiden: Brill.
• Ben-Rafael, E. 2013. Diaspora. Current Sociology.
• Ben-Rafael, Eliezer. 2013b. Las Diasporas Transnacionales: Una nueva era o un nuevo mito? Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales . México, UNAM, (LVIII 219):189–224.
• Ben-Rafael, Eliezer, and Yitzhak Sternberg. 2016a. With and beyond Shmuel N Eisenstadt: Transglobality. In Varieties of Multiple Modernities: New research design , ed. Gerhard Preyer and Michael Sussman. Boston/Leiden: Brill.
• Besser M. A census of Jewish day schools in the United States 2018–2019. New York: Avi Chai; 2020. [ Google Scholar ]
• Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 1991. El movimiento nacional judío. El sionismo en México, 1922–1947 . Mexico: Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, UNAM.
• Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 2002. Globalization and collective identities. Social Compass 49: 253–271.
• Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 2008b. Latin American Jewish Identities: Past and present challenges. The Mexican Case in a Comparative Perspective . ed. J. Bokser Liwerant, 81–105. Boston/Leiden: Brill.
• Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 2009. Latin American Jews. A transnational diaspora. In Transnationalism: diasporas and the advent of a new (dis)order , eds. Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Yitzhak Sternberg, Judit Bokser Liwerant, 351–374. Boston/Leiden: Brill.
• Bokser Liwerant, Judit, Sergio DellaPergola, and Leonardo Senkman (eds.). 2010. Latin American Jews in a transnational world. Redefining and relocating Jewish experience and identities on four continents [Research project report]. Jerusalem/Mexico City: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem/UNAM
• Bokser Liwerant, Judit 2013. Diásporas y transnacionalismo. Nuevas indagaciones sobre los judíos latinoamericanos hoy. In Judaica latinoamericana VII, 11–71. Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem/AMILAT.
• Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 2013a. Being national, being transnational: Snapshots of belonging and citizenship. In Shifting frontiers of citizenship: The Latin America experience , eds. Mario Sznajder, Luis Roniger, & Carlos Forment, 343–365. Boston/Leiden: Brill.
• Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 2013b. Latin American Jews in the United States: community and belonging in times of transnationalism. Contemporary Jewry 33(1-2): 121-143.
• Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 2015. El educador judío latinoamericano en un mundo transnacional . México/Jerusalem: Bonilla Artigas/Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 2015a. Globalization and transnationalism: facing new realities, narratives and conceptual challenges. In Penser global. Internationalization et globalization des sciences humaines et sociales , eds. Michel Wieviorka, Laurent Lévi-Strauss and Gwenaëlle Lieppe, 309–336. Paris: Maison des Sciences de L’Homme.
• Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 2015b. Thinking Multiple Modernities from Latin America’s perspective: complexity, periphery and diversity. In Varieties of Multiple Modernities. New Research Design , eds. Michael Sussman and Gerhard Preyer, 177–205. Boston/Leiden: Brill.
• Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 2015c. Transnational expansions of Latin American Jewish life in times of migration: A mosaic of experiences in the United States. In Research in Jewish demography and identity , eds. Eli Lederhendler, & Uzi Rebhun, 198–240. Brighton: Academic Studies Press
• Bokser Liwerant, Judit, Daniella Gleizer and Yael Siman. 2016a. Conceptual and methodological clues for approaching the connections between Mexico and the Holocaust: Separate or Interconnected Histories? Contemporary Review of the Middle East 3(3), 1–37, 2016, SAGE Publications
• Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 2016b. Expanding frontiers and affirming belonging: Youth travel to Israel - A view from Latin America. Hagira –Israel Journal of Migration , 122–158.
• Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 2016c. The changing status of Zionism and Israel in Latin American Jewry. In Handbook of Israel: The major debates , eds. Eliezer Ben Rafael, Julius Schoeps, Yitzhak Sternberg and Olag Glokner, 998–1027. Berlin: De Gruyter.
• Bokser Liwerant, Judit. 2019. Acercamientos conceptuales y socio-históricos a Múltiples Modernidades: secularización, laicidad e identidades colectivas. In Escenarios actuales de la laicidad en América Latina , eds. Pauline Capdeville and Fernando Arletazzen, 31–65. Mexico: IIJ-UNAM.
• Biale D, Galchinsky M, Heschel S. Insider/outsider: American Jews and multiculturalism. Berkeley: University of California Press; 1998. [ Google Scholar ]
• Bourdieu P. The forms of capital. In: Richardson JG, editor. Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education. New York: Greenwood Press; 1986. pp. 241–258. [ Google Scholar ]
• Brah A. Cartographies of diaspora: Contesting identities. London: Routledge; 1996. [ Google Scholar ]
• Braudel F. Las civilizaciones actuales: Estudio de historia económica y social. Madrid: Tecnos; 1986. [ Google Scholar ]
• Brenner, Frederic. 2003. Diaspora: Homelands in exile . London: Bloomsbury.
• Brinkmann T. “German Jews?” Reassessing the history of nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants in the United States. In: Kahn AF, Mendelsohn AD, editors. Transnational traditions. Detroit: Wayne State University Press; 2014. pp. 144–164. [ Google Scholar ]
• Brown M. Canadian Jews and multiculturalism: Myths and realities. Jewish Political Studies Review. 2007; 19 (3/4):57–75. [ Google Scholar ]
• Brubaker R. Diasporas. Cultural Anthropology. 1994; 9 (3):302–338. doi: 10.1525/can.1994.9.3.02a00040. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Brubaker R. Ethnicity without groups. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; 2006. [ Google Scholar ]
• Bruneau M. Diasporas. Montpellier: GIP Reclus; 1995. [ Google Scholar ]
• Brym, Robert (ed.). 2018. The future of Canada's territorial borders and personal boundaries: proceedings of the third S.D. Clark symposium on the future of Canadian society. Oakville: Rock's Mills Press.
• Brym R, Neuman K, Lenton R. 2018 survey of Jews in Canada. Toronto: Environics Institute for Survey Research; 2018. [ Google Scholar ]
• Burla Shahar. The Diaspora and the homeland: Political goals in the construction of Israeli narratives to the Diaspora. Israel Affairs. 2015; 21 :602–619. doi: 10.1080/13537121.2015.1076181. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Butler, Judith. 2004. Jews and the bi-national State. Logos 3(1). http://www.logosjournal.com/butler.htm
• Casanova J. Public religions in the modern world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1994. [ Google Scholar ]
• Castles S. International migration at the beginning of the twenty-first century: Global trends and issues. International Social Science Journal. 2000; 165 :269–281. doi: 10.1111/1468-2451.00258. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Cicchelli V. Plural and shared: The sociology of a cosmopolitan world. Boston/Leiden: Brill; 2018. [ Google Scholar ]
• Clifford J. Diasporas. Cultural Anthropology. 1994; 9 (3):302–338. doi: 10.1525/can.1994.9.3.02a00040. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Cohen S. American Assimilation or Jewish Revival? Bloomington: Indiana University Press; 1988. [ Google Scholar ]
• Cohen N. The Americanization of Zionism, 1987–1948. Boston: Brandeis University Press; 2003. [ Google Scholar ]
• Cohen R. Global diasporas: An introduction. London/New York: Routledge; 2008. [ Google Scholar ]
• Cohen S, Eisen AM. The Jew within: Self, family and community in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; 2000. [ Google Scholar ]
• Cohen S, Kelman A. Beyond distancing: Young adult American Jews and their Alienation from Israel. New York: Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies; 2009. [ Google Scholar ]
• Coleman J. Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology. 1988; 94 :S95–S120. doi: 10.1086/228943. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Coleman W, Underhill G. Regionalism and global economic integration: Europe, Asia and the Americas. London: Routledge; 2012. [ Google Scholar ]
• Crespo Gaggioti, Horacio Alberto, Gabriel A. Kozel, and Alexander Betancourt Mendieta. 2018. ¿Tienen las Américas una historia común? Herbert E. Bolton, las fronteras y la “Gran América” . Cuernavaca: Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos.
• Danzger H. Returning to tradition: The contemporary revival of orthodox Judaism. New Haven/London: Yale University Press; 1989. [ Google Scholar ]
• Davie G. Vicarious religion: A methodological challenge. In: Ammerman N, editor. Everyday religion: Observing modern religious lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2007. pp. 21–36. [ Google Scholar ]
• De Tocqueville, Alexis. 2002. Democracy in America . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1835).
• DellaPergola S. Distancing, yet one. Contemporary Jewry. 2010; 30 (2–3):183–190. doi: 10.1007/s12397-010-9038-3. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• DellaPergola S. World Jewish population, 2019 American Jewish Year Book. Berlin: Springer; 2020. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• DellaPergola, S. 2008. Jewish autonomy and dependency: Latin America in global perspective. In Identities in an era of globalization and multiculturalism, ed. E. Ben-Rafael, J. Bokser Liwerant, Y. Gorny and R. Rein. Boston/Leiden: Brill.
• DellaPergola, S. 2011. ¿Cuántos somos hoy? Investigación y narrativa sobre población judía en América Latina. In Pertenencia y alteridad. Judíos en/de América Latina: cuarenta años de cambios , eds. A. Haim, J. Bokser Liwerant, S. DellaPergola, M. Bejarano and L. Senkman, 305–340. Madrid/Frankfurt/Mexico City: Iberoamericana/Vervuert/Bonilla Artigas Editores.
• DellaPergola, Sergio. 2020a. Diaspora vs. Homeland: Development, unemployment and ethnic migration to Israel. 1991–2019. Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
• DellaPergola, Sergio. 2020b. Jews of Color. A Memo. Association for Social Scientific Study of Jewry.
• Dieckhoff A. Israël: Une nation en armes entre dynamiques individualistes et permanence du nationalisme. In: Hassner P, Marchal R, editors. Guerres et sociétés États et violence après la Guerre froide. Paris: Éditions Karthala; 2003. pp. 229–256. [ Google Scholar ]
• Diner H. The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000. Berkeley: University of California Press; 2004. [ Google Scholar ]
• Domínguez Ortiz, Antonio. 1976. Sociedad y Estado en el siglo XVIII español . México: Ariel.
• Don-Yehiya E. Messianism and politics: The ideological transformation of religious Zionism. Israel Studies. 2014; 19 (2):239–263. doi: 10.2979/israelstudies.19.2.239. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Eisen A. Galut: Modern Jewish reflection on homelessness and homecoming. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; 1986. [ Google Scholar ]
• Eisen A. Zionism, American Jewry, and the ‘Negation of Diaspora’ In: Meyer MA, Myers DN, editors. Between Jewish tradition and Modernity: Rethinking an Old Opposition, Essays in Honor of David Ellenson. Detroit: Wayne State University Press; 2014. pp. 175–191. [ Google Scholar ]
• Eisenstadt SN. Multiple modernities. Daedalus. 2000; 129 (1):1–29. [ Google Scholar ]
• Eisenstadt SN. The first multiple modernities: Collective identity, public spheres and political order in the Americas. In: Roniger L, Waisman C, editors. Globality and multiple modernities. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press; 2002. pp. 7–28. [ Google Scholar ]
• Eisenstadt, Shmuel Noah. 2010. The new religious constellations in the frameworks of contemporary globalization and civilizational transformation. In World religions and multiculturalism: A dialectical relation, eds. Eliezer Ben Rafael and Yitzhak Shterenberg, World Religions and multiculturalism, 21–41. Boston/Leiden: Brill.
• Elazar D, Cohen S. The Jewish Polity: Jewish political organizations from Biblical times to the present. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; 1985. [ Google Scholar ]
• Esman M. Diasporas in the contemporary world. Cambridge: Polity; 2009. [ Google Scholar ]
• Fischer, Shlomo. 2010. Judaism and global religious trends: Some contemporary developments. In World religions and multiculturalism A dialectical relation , eds. Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg, 263–294. Boston/Leiden: Brill.
• Fischer S, Stone SL. Jewish identity and identification: new patterns, meanings and networks. Jerusalem: Jewish People Policy Institute; 2012. [ Google Scholar ]
• Friedman J, Kornfeld M. Identity projects: Philanthropy, neoliberalism, and Jewish cultural production. American Jewish History. 2018; 102 (4):537–561. doi: 10.1353/ajh.2018.0050. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Gaggioti C., Horacio Alberto, Gabriel Andrés Kozel, and Alexander Betancourt Mendieta. 2018. ¿Tienen las Américas una historia común? Herbert E. Bolton, las fronteras y la “Gran América”. Cuernavaca: Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos.
• Giddens A, Beck U, Lash S. Reflexive modernization Politics, tradition and aesthetics in the modern social order. Cambridge: Polity; 1994. [ Google Scholar ]
• Giddens A. Runaway world: How globalization is reshaping our lives. London: Profile Books; 2002. [ Google Scholar ]
• Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton. 1995. From immigrant to transmigrant: theorizing transnational migration. Anthropological quarterly 68(1): 48–63.
• Goldscheider C, Zuckerman A. The transformation of the Jews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1984. [ Google Scholar ]
• Goldscheider C. Are American Jews vanishing again? Contexts. 2003; 2 (1):18–24. doi: 10.1525/ctx.2003.2.1.18. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Goldscheider C. American and Israeli Jews: Oneness and distancing. Contemporary Jewry. 2010; 30 (2):205–211. doi: 10.1007/s12397-010-9047-2. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Greenstein M. Third solitudes: Tradition and discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press; 1989. [ Google Scholar ]
• Grosfogel R. Human rights and anti-semitism after Gaza. Universitas Humanística. 2009; 68 :157–177. [ Google Scholar ]
• Guo S, Wong L. Revisiting multiculturalism in Canada: Theories, policies and debates. Berlin: Springer; 2015. [ Google Scholar ]
• Halbwachs M. The collective memory. New York: Harper and Row; 1980. [ Google Scholar ]
• Hartman H. The 2019 Sklare Address: How gender and family still matter for contemporary Jewry. Contemporary Jewry. 2020; 40 :161–185. doi: 10.1007/s12397-020-09338-y. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Held D, McGrew A, Goldblatt D, Perraton J. Global transformations Politics, economics, culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press; 1999. [ Google Scholar ]
• Herberg W. Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An essay in American religious sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1983. [ Google Scholar ]
• Hollinger D. Jewish Identity, assimilation, and multiculturalism. In: Mittelman K, editor. Creating American Jews. Philadelphia: National Museum of American Jewish History; 1998. pp. 52–59. [ Google Scholar ]
• Kahn, Ava F., and Adam D. Mendelsohn, eds. 2014. Transnational traditions . Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
• Katz S. Why is America different? American Jewry on its 350 th anniversary. Lanham: University Press of America; 2010. [ Google Scholar ]
• Kellerman A. Personal mobilities. New York: Routledge; 2006. [ Google Scholar ]
• Kellerman A. Globalization and spatial mobilities: Commodities and people, capital, information and technology. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing; 2020. [ Google Scholar ]
• Kelner S. Tours that bind Diaspora, pilgrimage and Israeli birthright tourism. New York: New York University Press; 2010. [ Google Scholar ]
• Kelner Shaul. Religious ambivalence in Jewish American philanthropy. In: Davis TJ, editor. Family, friend, foe? The relationship of religion and philanthropy in religious philanthropic organizations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; 2013. pp. 28–49. [ Google Scholar ]
• Khagram S, Levitt P. The transnational studies reader. Intersections and innovations. Abingdon: Routledge; 2008. [ Google Scholar ]
• Kobrin, Rebecca. (ed.). 2012. Chosen capital: The Jewish encounter with American capitalism . New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
• Kurtzer Y, Sufrin CE. The new Jewish canon. Brighton: Academic Studies Press; 2020. [ Google Scholar ]
• Lederhendler, Eli (ed.). 2000. The Six-Day War and world Jewry. Bethesda: University Press of Maryland.
• Lederhendler Eli. Studies in contemporary Jewry: Ethnicity and beyond: Theories and dilemmas of Jewish group demarcation. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2011. [ Google Scholar ]
• Lederhendler Eli. Israel and America in Jewish American writing. In: Aarons V, editor. The New Jewish American literary studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2019. pp. 59–73. [ Google Scholar ]
• Levinson, Julian Arnold. 2009. People of the (Secular) book: literary Anthologies and the making of Jewish identity in Postwar America. In Religion or ethnicity? Jewish Identities in evolution , ed. Zvi Gitelman, 132–150. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
• Levitt P. Transnational migration: Taking stock and future directions. Global Networks. 2001; 1 (3):195–216. doi: 10.1111/1471-0374.00013. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Levitt Peggy, Schiller Nina Glick. Conceptualizing simultaneity: A transnational social perspective on society. International Migration Review XXXVII. 2004; I (145):595–629. [ Google Scholar ]
• Limonic L. Kugel and frijoles. Latino Jews in the United States. Detroit: Wayne State University Press; 2019. [ Google Scholar ]
• Magid S. American post-Judaism: Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; 2013. [ Google Scholar ]
• Mays Devi. Forging ties, forging passports: Migration and the modern Sephardi diaspora. Stanford: Stanford University Press; 2020. [ Google Scholar ]
• Michels Tony. Is America “different?” A critique of American Jewish exceptionalism. American Jewish History. 2010; 96 (3):201–224. doi: 10.1353/ajh.2011.0007. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Mignolo W. Dispensable and bare lives Coloniality and the hidden political/economic agenda of Modernity. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge. 2009; VII (2):69–88. [ Google Scholar ]
• Miller H, Grant LD, Pomson A. International handbook of Jewish education. Berlin: Springer; 2011. [ Google Scholar ]
• Moore DD. GI Jews: How World War II changed a generation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; 2009. [ Google Scholar ]
• Moya J. Estudios sobre la diáspora: ¿Nuevos conceptos, enfoques y realidades? In Diásporas . In: Golubov N, editor. Reflexiones teóricas. Mexico: CISAN-UNAM; 2011. pp. 205–225. [ Google Scholar ]
• Nonini D. Transnational migrants, globalization processes, and regimes of power and knowledge. Critical Asian Studies. 2002; 34 (1):3–17. doi: 10.1080/146727102760166572. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• O’Haire Daniel. Diaspora. Charleston: BookSurge Publishing; 2008. [ Google Scholar ]
• Penkower MN. American Jewry and the Holocaust: from biltmore to the American Jewish conference. Jewish Social Studies. 1985; 47 (2):95–114. [ Google Scholar ]
• Pew Research Center. 2019. Latin America, Caribbean no longer world’s fastest growing source of international migrants. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/25/latin-america-caribbean-no-longer-worlds-fastest-growing-source-of-international-migrants/ . Accessed June 15 2020.
• Pew Research Center. 2021. Jewish Americans in 2020. Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center.
• Phillips, Bruce. 2005. American Judaism in the twenty-first century. In The Cambridge companion to American Judaism , ed. Dana Eva Kaplan, 397–416. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Pomson Alex, Deitcher Howard. Jewish day schools, Jewish communities: A reconsideration. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press; 2009. [ Google Scholar ]
• Portes Alejandro, Guarnizo Luis, Landolt Patricia. The study of transnationalism: Pitfalls and promise of an emergent research field. Ethnic and Racial Studies. 1999; 22 (2):217–237. doi: 10.1080/014198799329468. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Preyer Gerhard. The perspective of multiple modernities on S. N. Eisenstadt’s sociology. Science and Society: Journal of Political and Moral Theory. 2013; 30 :187–225. [ Google Scholar ]
• Pries Ludger. Transnational societal spaces: Which units of analysis, reference and measurement. In: Pries L, editor. Rethinking transnationalism: The meso-link of organization. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis; 2008. pp. 1–20. [ Google Scholar ]
• Quijano Anibal. Paradoxes of Modernity in Latin America. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. 1989; 3 (2):147–177. doi: 10.1007/BF01387928. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Restad Hilde. American exceptionalism: An idea that made a nation and remade the world. Abingdon: Routledge; 2014. [ Google Scholar ]
• Robertson Roland. Globalization: Social theory and global culture. New York: SAGE; 1992. [ Google Scholar ]
• Rohrbacher Angelika. Invisible fences: The construction of “insiders” and “outsiders” in Jewish historiography. Method & Theory of the Study of Religion. 2016; 28 (4/5):337–364. doi: 10.1163/15700682-12341368. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Roniger Luis, Waisman Carlos., editors. Globality and Multiple Modernities: Comparative North American and Latin American perspectives. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press; 2002. [ Google Scholar ]
• Roniger Luis. Transnational politics in Central America. Gainesville: University of Florida Press; 2011. [ Google Scholar ]
• Safran W. Diasporas in modern societies: Myths of homeland and return. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies. 1991; 1 (1):83–99. doi: 10.1353/dsp.1991.0004. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Sagi Avi, Schwartz Dov. Religious Zionism and the Six day war: From realism to messianism. Abingdon: Routledge; 2018. [ Google Scholar ]
• Sarna Jonathan., editor. The American Jewish experience. New York: Holmes & Meier; 1997. [ Google Scholar ]
• Sarna Jonathan. American Judaism: A history. New Haven: Yale University Press; 2004. [ Google Scholar ]
• Sassen Saskia. Globalization and its discontents: Essays on the new mobility of people and money. New York: The New Press; 1998. [ Google Scholar ]
• Sasson Ted, Kadushin Charles, Saxe Leonard. Trends in American Jewish attachment to Israel: An assessment of the “distancing” hypothesis. Contemporary Jewry. 2010; 30 (2–3):297–319. doi: 10.1007/s12397-010-9056-1. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Sasson Ted. The New American Zionism. New York: NYU Press; 2015. [ Google Scholar ]
• Schiller G, Nina LB, Blanc-Szanton C. From immigrant to transmigrant: Theorizing transnational migration. Anthropological Quarterly. 1995; 68 (1):48–63. doi: 10.2307/3317464. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Scholte JA. The globalization or world politics. In: Baylis J, Smith S, Owens P, editors. The globalization of world politics An introduction to International Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 1998. pp. 13–32. [ Google Scholar ]
• Senkman, L. 2005. Citizenship and Jewish identity: an experiment of the Argentinean Jewish community. Paper presented at Dinur Canter for Research in Jewish History, Jerusalem.
• Senkman, L 2008. Klal Yisrael at the frontiers: the transnational Jewish experience in Argentina. In Identities in an era of globalization and multiculturalism. Latin America in the Jewish world, eds. Bokser Liwerant, J., E. Ben-Rafael, Y. Gorni and R. Rein, 125–150. Boston/Leiden: Brill.
• Sheffer, G. 1986. A new field of study: modern diasporas in international politics. In Modern diasporas in international politics, ed. Gabriel Sheffer, 1–15. London: Croom Helm.
• Shuval Judith. Diaspora migration: Definitional ambiguities and a theoretical paradigm. Migration Pages. 2002; 38 (5):41–56. [ Google Scholar ]
• Shuval J. The dynamics of diaspora: theoretical implications of ambiguous concepts. In: Münz R, Ohliger R, editors. Diasporas and ethnic migrants: Germany, Israel and Russia in comparative perspective. London: Frank Cass; 2003. [ Google Scholar ]
• Silberman Charles. A certain people: American Jews and their lives today. New York: Simon & Schuster; 1985. [ Google Scholar ]
• Steiner G. Our homeland, the text. Salmagundi. 1985; 66 :4–25. [ Google Scholar ]
• Tartakover A. Israeli Society. Ramat Gan: Massada; 1958. [ Google Scholar ]
• Tickton Schuster D. Portraits of Jewish learning: Viewing contemporary Jewish education close-in. Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers; 2019. [ Google Scholar ]
• Troper H, Weinfeld M. Old wounds. New York: Viking/Penguin; 1988. [ Google Scholar ]
• United Nations Development Programme. 2009. Human Development Report 2009. Overcoming barriers: Human mobility and development. New York: United Nations.
• United Nations - Department of Economic and Social Affairs. 2019. International Migrant Stock 2019 . https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/data/estimates2/estimates19.asp . Accessed October 23 2020.
• United Nations - Human Development Programme. 2009. Human Development Report 2009. Overcoming barriers: Human mobility and development. New York: United Nations.
• United Nations Development Programme. 2020. Human Development Report 2009. Overcoming barriers: Human development and the Anthropocene. New York: United Nations.
• Urry J. Sociology beyond societies. Mobilities for the twenty-first century. Abingdon: Routledge; 2000. [ Google Scholar ]
• Van Hear N. New Diasporas: The Mass Exodus, Dispersal and Regrouping of Migrant Communities. London: Taylor and Francis Group; 1998. [ Google Scholar ]
• Voyé L. Secularization in a context of advanced modernity. In: Swatos W, Olson DVA, editors. The secularization debate. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield; 2000. pp. 67–75. [ Google Scholar ]
• Wallerstein I. The modern world-system capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world-economy in the sixteenth century. New York: Academic Press; 1974. [ Google Scholar ]
• Wallerstein I. The modern world-system III: Mercantilism and the consolidation of the European world-economy, 1600–1750. Berkeley: University of California Press; 2011. [ Google Scholar ]
• Waters M. Globalization. Abingdon: Routledge; 1995. [ Google Scholar ]
• Waxman C. American Jews in transition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; 1983. [ Google Scholar ]
• Weinfeld M. Like everyone else but different: The paradoxical success of Canadian Jews. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press; 2018. [ Google Scholar ]
• Woocher, Jonathan. 1986. Sacred survival. The civil religion of American Jews . Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Woocher, Jonathan. 2005. “Sacred survival” revisited: American Jewish civil religion in the new millennium. In The Cambridge companion to American Judaism , ed. Dana Eva Kaplan, 283-297. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Wooldridge A, Micklethwait J. The right nation: Why America is different. New York: Penguin; 2005. [ Google Scholar ]
• Yudice, George. 2006. ¿Una o varias identidades? Cultura, globalización y migraciones. Nueva Sociedad 201: 106–116.

• MPI en Español
• All Publications
• Fact Sheets
• Policy Briefs
• Commentaries
• Press Releases
• Work at MPI
• Intern at MPI
• Contact MPI
• Internships
• International Program
• Migrants, Migration, and Development
• National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy
• U.S. Immigration Policy Program
• Beyond Territorial Asylum
• Building a Regional Migration System
• Global Skills and Talent
• Latin America and Caribbean Initiative
• Migration Data Hub
• Migration Information Source
• Transatlantic Council on Migration
• ELL Information Center

Topics see all >

• Border Security
• Coronavirus
• Employment & the Economy
• Illegal Immigration & Interior Enforcement
• Immigrant Integration
• Immigrant Profiles & Demographics
• Immigration Policy & Law
• International Governance
• Migration & Development
• Refugee & Asylum Policy

Regions see all >

• Africa (sub-Saharan)
• Asia and the Pacific
• Central America & the Caribbean
• Middle East & North Africa
• North America
• South America
• International Data

Featured Publication

A Warm Welcome for Some: Israel Embraces Immigration of Jewish Diaspora, Sharply Restricts Labor Migrants and Asylum Seekers

Box 1. The Law of Return Israel exclusively uses the system of jus sanguinis (law of blood) to determine the citizenship of immigrants and their descendants.

As the Law of Return outlines:

4A. (a) The rights of a Jew under this law …are also vested in a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew, and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew, except for a person who has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his religion.

Source : Jewish Virtual Library, “Israel’s Basic Laws: The Law of Return (July 5, 1950,” accessed January 31, 2020. Available online .

Until the end of the 1980s, most of the arriving immigrants in Israel were of Jewish origin, strengthening the Jewish majority vis-à-vis the native Arab population. Since the middle of the 1990s, however, the ethnic composition of the migration flows has changed. Three groups of non-Jewish migrants have arrived in Israel:

• non-Jewish migrants, primarily from the former Soviet Union (FSU) and Ethiopia, arriving under the auspices of the 1970 amendment of the Law of Return
• temporary labor migrants, chiefly from Asia, who were recruited to replace Palestinian workers after the first Intifada (the Palestinian uprising in 1987), and
• asylum seekers from sub-Saharan Africa crossing the southern Egyptian border without authorization since the middle of the 2000s.

Thus, contemporary Israel provides a particularly illuminating setting to examine changes in the ethnic composition of migration flows and the challenges posed by the arrival of nonethnic migrants to an ethnonational state.

This article describes Israeli society and immigration flows under the Law of Return and examines labor migration and the rise in asylum seekers, reviewing the main challenges that have emerged within the last three decades. These challenges affect the modes in which new patterns of immigration interweave with stratification processes along the lines of nationality, ethnicity, and immigration status.

Israeli Society and Immigration Flows under the Law of Return

The Jewish majority is comprised of two major ethnic groups of distinct origin: those of European or American origin, and those of Middle Eastern or North African origin. Yet the most meaningful ethnic split in Israel is between Jews and Arabs. The Arab population constituted 21 percent of Israeli citizens as of 2017. Arab Israelis are disadvantaged relative to Jews in every aspect of life: education, occupational status and earnings, standard of living, and more.

Israel is a society of immigrants and their offspring: 23 percent of the Jewish majority as of 2018 was foreign born, 32 percent was comprised of the second generation (Israeli born to immigrant parents), and 4 7 percent was third generation (Israeli born to Israeli-born parents). As the self-defined homeland for the Jewish diaspora, Israel is committed to the successful integration of those arriving under the Law of Return. These newcomers not only have privileged access to citizenship and its benefits, but they also have access to specific integration policies and generous programs, including financial assistance during their first year in Israel. Other integration supports include free Hebrew instruction, loans for buying a house, grants for university students, assistance in finding employment, job retraining, and financial support for employers who hire immigrants.

Migration Flows under the Law of Return

The settlement of Jews in Palestine began at the turn of the twentieth century. Since then, Israel’s immigration history has been closely intertwined with the project of nation-state building and the unending conflict between Jews and Palestinians. Political and economic push factors in migrants’ countries of origin rather than pull factors account for most Jewish migration to Israel.

Jewish immigrants arrived in a series of waves: the pre-state era (1880–1948), the first peak of mass immigration shortly after the establishment of Israel (1948–51), and a second peak, mostly from the former Soviet Union after its collapse (1989–95) (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Arrival of Immigrants under the Law of Return by Year, 1919-2017

Note: Labor migrants (officially referred to as foreign workers) and asylum seekers (which the state dubs “infiltrators”) are not counted in overall permanent migration statistics, which encompass only those arriving under the Law of Return. Source: Central Bureau of Statistics, “Immigration - Statistical Abstract of Israel, 2018 – No. 69, Table 4.2,” August 16, 2018, available online .

The first wave of Jewish immigrants arrived at the turn of the twentieth century, with more than three-quarters arriving mainly from European countries, particularly Poland, Romania, Russia and its satellites, and Germany. The second wave came shortly after statehood in May 1948. The years 1948-51 marked what sociologist Yinon Cohen called the “demographic transformation” of Israel. It involved two movements: the forced emigration of an estimated 760,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled, and the immigration of about 678,000 Holocaust survivors as well as Middle Eastern Jews evicted from their homes in Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Yemen. This demographic transformation secured the Jewish majority in the new state, with the proportion of Jews rising from nearly 45 percent in 1947, the year before statehood, to 89 percent at the end of 1951.

Immigration during the 1960s to 1980s was less systematic. It was characterized by a slow but steady stream of immigrants from the Americas, as well as arrivals from South Africa, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, Ethiopia, and Iran.

Winter 1989 marked a turning point, reversing the declining Jewish flows witnessed during the prior decade. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, massive numbers of Jews began leaving the Soviet republics to settle in Israel. A country of 4.5 million residents at the beginning of the 1990s, Israel took in nearly 1.1 million immigrants from the former Soviet Union between 1990 and 2018 (about 400,000 of whom arrived between 1990 and 1991).

Immigrants from the former Soviet bloc (both those arriving in the 1990s as well as the earlier cohort from the 1970s) constitute nearly 16 percent of Israel’s general population and 21 percent of its Jewish population. Although immigrants from FSU countries, especially from the European republics, still comprise the bulk of migration flows today, Western Europe (mainly France), North America (chiefly the United States), and South America (Brazil and Argentina) also rank at the top of the list of source countries for flows arriving under the Law of Return.

Table 1. Top 15 Origin Countries for Immigration to Israel under the Law of Return, 2018

Source: Gilad Nathan, International Migration- Israel 2018-2019 , The OECD Expert Group on Migration. SOPEMI Annual Report (Emek Hefer, Israel: Ruppin Academic Center, Institute for Immigration and Social Integration, 2019), available online .

Non-Jewish Migration under the Law of Return

Immigration during the 1990s included for the first time an increasing number of immigrants who were not Jewish according to Jewish religious law, but who entered under the 1970 amendment of the Law of Return. Since 1995, non-Jewish immigrants have been labeled "Other" (non-Jews) in official statistics to differentiate them from the native Arab population. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, the "Other" share increased from 1.5 percent of the overall population in 1995 to 4.6 percent in 2017, decreasing the Jewish share from 80.6 percent to 74.5 percent.

Paradoxically, the 1970 amendment to the Law of Return created a new oxymoronic category of “non-Jewish olim ” (with olim meaning Jewish immigrants, from the Hebrew word aliya , literally “ascent”). The percentage of non-Jewish olim has risen over time, especially among those from the FSU and Ethiopia. While most FSU immigrants arriving in the early 1990s met the halakha definition of Jewishness, their share dropped from 96 percent in 1989 to 44 percent by 2006. High rates of out-marriage among Jews in the FSU might help account for rising non-Jewish migration. Also, most of the Ethiopians arriving since 1993 were converted Falas Mura , who are not considered Jews according to halakhic law.

Box 2. The Falas Mura

The Falas Mura are the descendants of Beta Israel communities in Ethiopia and Eritrea that converted to Christianity, either voluntarily or by force, during the 19 th and 20 th centuries. While the Falas Mura view themselves as belonging ethnically to the Beta Israel community, with many practicing Jewish faith rituals and seeking to rejoin the Jewish people in Israel, they are not recognized as Jews under the halakha definition of Jewishness.

Because their ancestors converted out of Judaism to Christianity, the Falas Mura do not enjoy the right of return, but are allowed to immigrate under the 1952 Entry into Israel Law that regulates the right of non-nationals who are not olim to enter and reside in Israel. Source: Joseph Feit, “Are the Falas Mura Jews? A View from Tradition,” Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Ideas , April 2000, www.bjpa.org/content/upload/bjpa/feit/Feit30.pdf .

Non-Jewish migrants arriving under the Law of Return and the Falas Mura are encouraged by the state to convert to Judaism. Yet just 5 percent of FSU migrants have undergone conversion, which is long, difficult, and monopolized by the Orthodox rabbinical authorities. By contrast, rates of conversion are high among Ethiopians, as it is a condition for immigrating to Israel.

Several findings suggest that most non-Jews arriving under the Law of Return are socially integrated. Asher Cohen and Bernard Susser coined the term “sociological conversion” to describe the integration of non-Jewish FSU olim in Israeli society that is not dependent on adopting the Jewish religion but on embrace of the culture, identity, and practices of the Jewish majority at varying paces and degrees.

Non-Jewish Labor Migration

The first noncitizen workers in Israel were Palestinians from the occupied territories (in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank), who came under Israeli military rule after the 1967 Six Day War. Noncitizen Palestinians were recruited for jobs mainly in construction, agriculture, and services. These workers—mostly daily commuters—comprised about 8 percent of the Israeli labor force by the end of the 1980s. As a distinct social group, they were clearly located at the bottom of the Israeli labor market and the ethnic system.

The deterioration of the political and security situation with the first Intifada in the occupied territories in 1987 resulted in a severe labor shortage in construction and agriculture. The entry of Palestinian workers was impeded by periodic strikes organized by the Palestinian leadership and the systematic border closures imposed by the Israeli government as a reaction to attacks. The government’s unwillingness to improve wages and introduce technological changes in construction and agriculture, the increasing demand for housing due to massive immigration flows at the beginning of the 1990s, and rising violence between Palestinians and Israelis all set the stage for the government’s decision in 1993 to recruit overseas labor migrants in sizeable numbers.

Temporary labor migrants are formally recruited mainly for three main sectors: agriculture, construction, and domestic caregiving. Unlike the construction and agriculture sectors, where labor migrants replaced Palestinian workers, the recruitment of foreign workers for the domestic caregiving sector created an entirely new employment niche staffed exclusively by non-nationals. The Long-Term Care Insurance Act, implemented in 1988, marked the first large-scale arrival of caregiving workers. The law permits those in need of geriatric care to hire non-Israeli workers to provide round-the-clock care, allowing the elderly to continue living at home. The Israeli government sets quotas for labor migrants in agriculture and construction (approximately 29,000 workers in each sector in 2019); work permits for non-Israeli caregivers are not capped.

Labor Migration Flows

Caregiving has accounted for an increasing share of overall labor migration, currently representing 60 percent (see Figure 2). The agricultural sector has remained quite stable over the last two decades, accounting for roughly one-fourth of work permits. While in 1996 the construction sector was the largest employer of migrant workers, its share has fallen from 58 percent of all permits to 13 percent.

Figure 2. Number of Legal Labor Migrants in Israel by Sector of Employment, 2010-18

Source: Population, Immigration, and Border Authority (PIBA). “Data on Foreigners in Israel, Table 6,” available online .

About two-thirds of labor migrants come from Southeast Asia, mainly female caregivers from the Philippines, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. Migrants from Thailand (mostly men) come to work in the agriculture sector and male migrants from China work in the construction sector. (See Table 2.)

Table 2. Labor Migrants by Selected Countries of Origin, 2018

Source : Central Bureau of Statistics, “Statistical Abstract of Israel, No. 70, Table 2.6,” September 26, 2019, available online .

Labor migrants from Europe come mainly from countries in the FSU (14,900 arriving in 2018), particularly from Moldova, with women working in the caregiving sector and men in construction. Another 800 labor migrants came from Romania that year, nearly three-quarters of them women working in caregiving and men working in construction.

Similar to what happens in other countries, the official figures do not reflect the real number of labor migrants in Israel. Many labor migrants arriving with work permits leave their legal employers and work without a permit or do not depart at the end of their contracts, thus residing illegally in Israel. This phenomenon is more accentuated among caregivers, with an estimated 17 percent working in the sector in irregular fashion, as compared to 7 percent in agriculture and 5 percent in construction. Other irregular migrant workers enter the country on a tourist visa, which forbids them to work, and overstay.

About three-quarters in 2019 were from Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia, with another 10 percent from Mexico, Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, and Uruguay. Due to an extensive immigration enforcement campaign and stepped-up deportations, the numbers of irregular migrants decreased from 95,000 in 2011 to 56,000 in 2019.

Labor Migration Policy

Labor migration in Israel is temporary in nature and based on contractual labor, with no path to permanent settlement or citizenship. In order to prevent extended stays, the government does not allow workers to remain for more than 63 months. Furthermore, labor migrants are not permitted to enter with their spouses or any other first-degree relatives, to prevent them from establishing permanent residence or starting a family in Israel. Employers, not migrants, are the ones who receive work permits, thereby maximizing employer and state control over the migrants. The state does not allow residence without a work permit and has a stringent deportation policy permitting the arrest and expulsion of irregular migrants at any time by administrative decree. Migrant workers are exposed to a high degree of regulation and labor market control that employers do not have over citizens, thus creating a precarious noncitizen workforce.

While Israel has progressive laws protecting workers’ rights for all residents, citizen or not, in practice, there is a huge gap between the laws on paper and their implementation. The violation of migrant workers’ social and civil rights owes more to the lack of infrastructure around the laws, compounded by the state’s unwillingness to enforce them. The precarious status of foreign workers confines them to the margins of the Israeli economy and society.

Recruitment of Labor Migrants: From Privatization to Bilateral Agreements

From the outset, the recruitment of foreign workers through official channels has been privatized and conducted through recruiting agencies at origin and destination, enabling profit-seeking private agents to dominate this field. Until 2006, these agents were prohibited from charging the migrants recruitment fees. Since then, agencies have been permitted to collect fees of no more than 3,479 Israeli shekels (about U.S. $1,000) per worker, in addition to travel expenses. Despite these regulations, manpower agencies were charging migrants significantly higher fees—as high as $22,000 for Chinese workers, and averaging $8,720 for Thai agricultural laborers and $6,000 to $7,000 for Filipino, Nepalese, and Sri Lankan care workers, according to a study conducted by the author and a colleague in 2011-12.

To combat these practices, the Israeli government in 2005 began to negotiate and sign bilateral agreements with countries from which workers would be recruited. Yet because of political pressure exerted by the agricultural lobby and manpower agencies in the agriculture sector in Israel and in Thailand, it took until 2010 for the first bilateral agreement to be signed. The Thai agreement was followed by bilateral agreements to recruit migrant workers for the construction sector with Bulgaria (in 2011), Moldova (2012), Romania (2014), Ukraine (2016), and China (2017).

The switch to bilateral agreements resulted from a push by Israeli NGOs and advocacy networks for adoption of international standards and tools in labor migration control. This intervention has been crucial in prompting changes that incorporate international conventions and normative standards in national legislation.

The implementation of bilateral agreements in agriculture and construction eliminated the role of private recruiters, with recruitment now monitored by national offices in Israel and origin countries. As a result, migration costs have declined dramatically. Costs (including travel) now range from $400 for Moldovan migrant workers to $1,500 for Chinese migrants, and $2,100 for Thai laborers (the latter includes a payment of $800 to the manpower agency that provides services to the workers during their stay). Consequently, the debts migrants incur to finance their move have been dramatically reduced, and so has the time needed to repay them. If before the bilateral agreements it took on average 1.5 years to repay the recruitment debt, post-agreement, the time takes on average five months, according to research this author and a colleague did last year.

The same cannot be said for the caregiving sector. While agreements for pilot programs were signed with Nepal (2015) and Sri Lanka (2016), only an estimated 130 migrant workers have arrived under these accords, recruited by government offices. Most labor migration in the caregiving sector is conducted through private recruitment agencies, and migrants still pay exorbitant fees and illegal fees. A bilateral agreement was signed with the Philippines in 2018, but has yet to be implemented due to political instability in Israel (three elections in the last year).

Asylum Seekers

Since the middle of the 2000s, significant flows of sub-Saharan African asylum seekers, mainly from Sudan and Eritrea, have reached Israel through the Egyptian border. Many lived in Cairo after fleeing war and political persecution in their countries. After protestors were shot by Egyptian police during the Mustafa Mahmud demonstration in 2005, many asylum seekers felt Egypt was no longer safe and sought refuge in Israel. In addition, as Libya clamped down on maritime departures from its shores to Europe, migrants looking for alternative routes saw Israel as a destination because it could be reached through the Sinai. Migrants, especially Eritreans, were smuggled through the Sinai desert and were often victims of human trafficking.

The asylum flows showed a dramatic increase in 2007, but were most marked in 2010-12, when 42,000 asylum seekers arrived (see Figure 3). Since the erection of a fence along the Egyptian border in 2012, only a tiny number have been able to cross the border.

Figure 3. Arrival in Israel of Asylum Seekers from Africa by Year, 2000-18

Source: PIBA, “Data on Foreigners in Israel, Table 2,” updated December 31, 2018, available online .

By the end of 2018, just under 34,000 asylum seekers resided in Israel, with women comprising 17 percent. These numbers do not include the estimated 5,000 to 8,000 children born in Israel to asylum seekers. Seventy-one percent of asylum seekers originate from Eritrea and 20 percent from Sudan, countries known for severe human-rights violations. Most live in the southern neighborhoods of Tel Aviv, but also in impoverished neighborhoods of cities such as Eilat, Arad, and Jerusalem, where labor market demands allow them to find jobs in hotels and restaurants.

Although Israel is a signatory to the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol, and is a member of the Executive Committee of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the state has failed to create an appropriate legal infrastructure to address asylum conditions. Prior to the arrival of African asylum seekers beginning in the 2000s, Israel had granted refuge to small groups of asylum seekers, from Vietnam (around 400, in 1977 and 1979), Bosnia (84 in 1993), Kosovo (112 in 1999), and in 2000 Southern Lebanese soldiers who cooperated with the Israeli Defense Forces. These cases were exceptional humanitarian cases that did not derive from the legal commitment to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and did not lead to the creation of an orderly system for determining refugee status.

Asylum seekers in Israel, especially those who are Eritrean and Sudanese, are given temporary group protection status, which grants them immunity from deportation, in accord with the principle of nonrefoulement endorsed by the Refugee Convention. Under this status, until 2013 asylum seekers were not permitted to submit individual applications for asylum and have their case heard. Between 2014 and 2018, 21,000 asylum applications were submitted by sub-Saharan Africans, but recognition rates remain exceptionally low—less than 1 percent.

State policies do not consider the needs of asylum seekers and instead deal mainly with forced geographical allocation, detention (at the Saharonim and Holot facilities near the border with Egypt), and deportation and coerced “voluntary” departure.

In order to avoid the concentration of asylum seekers in the central part of the country, the government set up “Gedera-Hadera” geographical restrictions in February 2008. This restriction demarcated a prohibited area for residence and employment north of Gedera or south of Hadera, leaving the central part of the country off limits. This policy created immense social and economic pressure on Israel’s peripheral cities, and after complaints from mayors of these communities, the restrictions were cancelled in July 2009.

Asylum seekers are defined by the Israeli state as “infiltrators,” a term that has two meanings. The first regards asylum seekers as economic migrants instead of genuine refugees. Therefore, under this view, they do not deserve to be treated as asylum seekers who can make legitimate claims for refuge in Israel. The second use is political and related to the border crossings in the 1950s of Palestinian Fedayeen who attempted to enter the country to commit terrorist attacks. Asylum issues have been closely linked with Israeli security concerns because of the fear that the recognition of African refugees “will open up the Pandora’s box of Palestinian refugees’ claims for territory, compensation, and the right of return,” argued Yonathan Paz.

The issue of asylum touches deeply on the perception of the existence of different degrees of membership and the relative position assigned to ethnic and nonethnic migrants in Israeli society. Speaking of the deportation of asylum seekers from South Sudan in 2012, Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai said: “In having to choose between being called ‘enlightened and liberal’ but not having a Jewish and Zionist state, and being called ‘endarkened and racist’ but being a proud citizen, I choose the second option. The era of slogans has ended, now the era of actions has begun."

Asylum Policy

The legal basis upon which the state determines its policy towards sub-Saharan asylum seekers is the 1954 Anti-Infiltration Law, originally designed to stop the entry of Palestinians and other Arab nationals in the wake of the 1948 war—and particularly to prevent the re-entry of Palestinian refugees. Intended to secure Israel’s right to protect itself, the law authorizes severe measures against individuals from enemy states who enter Israel unlawfully.

The Netanyahu government in 2012, 2013, and 2014 attempted to introduce several amendments to the Anti-Infiltration Law that would allow the state to hold asylum seekers in administrative detention, without trial or even indictment. The Israeli Supreme Court of Justice quashed the first two amendments “for violating the constitutional rights to liberty, and human dignity to which every person is entitled in Israeli law." Regarding the 2014 amendment, the court ordered the shortening of the detention period, but did not rule it out entirely as a measure to discourage unauthorized migration.

Asylum seekers are denied welfare and social rights, except for emergency health care. They do not have the right to work in Israel. Yet there is no enforcement against employers who hire asylum seekers. Therefore, de facto, many asylum seekers work in Israel, especially in hotels, restaurants, and domestic work.

Beyond formal labor market restrictions, legislation enacted in recent years prohibits asylum seekers from sending money home. Employers are required to deduct 20 percent of asylum seekers’ salary and deposit it in a separate account to which they are obliged to deposit a further 16 percent of the salary. These funds are to be released only upon the asylum seekers’ departure from Israel. This effectively reduces asylum seekers' disposable income and further exacerbates their precarious status in Israeli society.

These and other laws and policies have hidden and damaging effects on asylum seekers' lives. Their uncertain and liminal status in Israel affects all aspects of their lives, such as labor market opportunities, access to and use of health services, family dynamics, and community organization. As prospects for the regularization of their status are dim, there has been a dramatic decline in the number of asylum seekers residing in the country: from 52,961 in 2013 to 33,627 by the end of 2018. Approximately 12,700 asylum seekers departed under a so-called voluntary repatriation program and many others were granted refugee status in countries such as Canada, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United States.

After launching a campaign of forced deportation contested by civil society, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2018 announced that an agreement had been reached with UNHCR. Under the deal, the UN agency agreed to resettle 16,250 asylum seekers to Western countries; in exchange, the remainder would be allowed to remain in Israel with work authorization, with the government committing to relocating most of them to other areas of the country. However, in response to a right-wing backlash, Netanyahu suspended the deal seven hours after it was announced and later cancelled it. The refusal to grant legal status and rights leaves asylum seekers in a permanently vulnerable and precarious position, in the shadow of the continuous threat of detention and deportation.

A De Facto Multiculturalist Society without Prospect for Multiculturalism?

The changing ethnonational composition of post-1990 immigration flows poses new challenges to the Israeli state and society, one of which is dealing with non-Jewish immigrants and relatives who arrive under the Law of Return. This new status of non-Jewish olim has substantial stratifying effects on the materialization of various rights in the context of an ethnonational state. Such immigrants face difficulties over rights such as marriage, burial, and family unification, due to the monopoly of religious institutions over family and burial issues. Non-Jews marrying Jews in Israel, for example, must bypass the official institutions, sometimes traveling abroad to formalize their union. Non-Jewish burial grounds have only recently been introduced, and many immigrants have experienced great difficulty when seeking to lay their loved ones to rest. Non-Jewish citizens also face difficulties in seeking citizenship for their non-Jewish spouses, children, or parents. This inability to sponsor the immigration of an immediate relative is a source of great distress for many. Given that Israel is unlikely to separate religion and state in the near future, the chances of full legal and political equality for the new (non-Jewish) immigrant population seem slight.

The presence of migrant workers and asylum seekers also challenges the basic definition of Israeli society as an ethnonational polity that encourages the permanent settlement of Jewish immigrants and discourages that of non-Jewish migrants. The migration regime is highly exclusionary regarding non-Jews not covered by the Law of Return amendment; it also denies any possibility of incorporation for foreign workers and asylum seekers. The unwillingness to accept non-Jewish immigrants is expressed through exclusionary immigration policies (especially the limitations of family reunion and refusal to provide residence status), restrictive naturalization rules, and a double standard: an exclusionary model for non- Jews vs. an "acceptance-encouragement" model for Jews. In that sense, Israel’s migration policy for non-Jews reflects official concern that a changing ethnoscape could threaten its Jewish character.

These exclusionary attitudes and policies towards nonethnic migrants should be understood within the general context of an ethnonational state like Israel. The ethnic-religious nature of nationalism (and incorporation regime), the absence of egalitarian rules and citizenship for non-Jews, and a highly restrictive naturalization policy all make Israel a de facto multicultural society with few prospects for multiculturalism.

Afeef, Karin Fathimath. 2009. A Promised Land for Refugees? Asylum and Migration in Israel. New Issues in Refugee Research, Working Paper No. 183, Geneva, UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Available online .

Central Bureau of Statistics. 2018. Population – Statistical Yearbook for Israel 2018 – No. 69, Population, by Population Group. Available online .

---. 2019. Statistical Abstract of Israel 2019 – No. 70. Last updated September 19, 2019. Available online .

Cohen, Asher and Bernard Susser. 2009. Jews and Others: Non-Jewish Jews in Israel,  Israel Affairs  15 (1): 52-65.

Cohen, Yinon. 2002. From Haven to Heaven: Changing Patterns of Immigration to Israel. In Challenging Ethnic Citizenship: German and Israeli Perspectives on Immigration, 36-56, eds. D. Levy and Y. Weiss. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

DellaPergola, Sergio. 1998. The Global Context of Migration to Israel. In Immigration to Israel: Sociological Perspectives , 51-92, eds. Elazer Leshem and Judith T. Shuval. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

Fisher, Netanel. 2013. A Jewish State? Controversial Conversions and the Dispute over Israel’s Jewish Character,  Contemporary Jewry  33 (3): 217-240.

Gershon, Shafir and Yoav Peled. 2002. Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Guthmann, Anat and Sigal Rozen. 2019. Immigration, Detention in Israel 1998-2018 . Tel Aviv: Hotline for Refugees and Migrants. Available online .

Kalir, Barak. 2015. The Jewish State of Anxiety: Between Moral Obligation and Fearism in the Treatment of African Asylum Seekers in Israel, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies  41 (4): 580-98.

Kemp, Adriana and Rebeca Raijman. 2004. “Tel-Aviv Is Not Foreign to You”: Urban Incorporation Policy on Labor Migrants in Israel, International Migration Review 38 (1): 26-52.

---. 2008. “Workers” and “Foreigners”: The Political Economy of Labor Migration in Israel. Jerusalem: Van-Leer Institute and Kibbutz Hamehuhad. (In Hebrew)

Mesgena, Hadas Yaron and Oran Ramati. 2017. Where Time Stands Still: Holot Detention Facility and the Israeli Anti-Infiltration Law,  Hagira 7: 67-82.‎ Available online .

Nathan, Gilad. 2019. International Migration- Israel 2018-2019: The OECD Expert Group on Migration SOPEMI Annual Report . Emek Hefer, Israel: Ruppin Academic Center, Institute for Immigration and Social Integration. Available online .

Paz, Yonatan. 2011. Ordered Disorder: African Asylum Seekers in Israel and Discursive Challenges to an Emerging Refugee Regime , Research Paper No. 205. Geneva: UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Available online .

Population, Immigration and Border Authority (PIBA). 2019. Data on Foreigners in Israel. Accessed January 23, 2020. Available online . (In Hebrew)

Prashizky, Anna and Larissa Remennick. 2014. Gender and Cultural Citizenship among Non-Jewish Immigrants from the Former Soviet Union in Israel,  Citizenship Studies  18 (3-4): 365-83.

Raijman, Rebeca. 2010. Citizenship Status, Ethno-National Origin and Entitlement to Rights: Majority Attitudes towards Minorities and Immigrants in Israel, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 36 (1): 87-106.

Raijman, Rebeca and Anastasia Gorodzeisky. 2016. We and the Others: Majority Attitudes towards Non-Jews in Israel. In Handbook of Israel: The Major Debates vol.1, 324-44, eds. Eliezer Ben-Rafael (coordinator), Julius H. Schoeps, Yitzhak Sternberg, and Olaf Glöckner. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. 

Raijman, Rebeca and Adriana Kemp. 2007. Labor Migration, Managing the Ethno-National Conflict, and Client Politics in Israel. In Transnational Migration to Israel in Global Comparative Context , 31-50, ed. Sarah S. Willen. Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books.

---. 2010. The New Immigration to Israel: Becoming a De-Facto Immigration State in the 1990s . In Immigration Worldwide, 227-43, eds. Uma A. Segal, Doreen Elliott, and Nazneen S. Mayadas. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

---. 2016. The Institutionalization of Labor Migration in Israel, Arbor 192 (777): a289.

Raijman, Rebeca and Nonna Kushnirovich. 2012. Labor Migration Recruitment Practices in Israel. Jerusalem: Center for International Migration and Integration. Available online .

---. 2019. The Effectiveness of the Bilateral Agreements: Recruitment, Realization of Social Rights, and Living and Employment Conditions of Migrants Workers in the Agriculture, Construction, and Caregiving Sectors in Israel: 2011-2018. Emek Hefer and Jerusalem: Ruppin Academic Center, Center for International Migration and Integration, and Population and Immigration Authority. Available online .

Raijman, Rebeca and Yanina Pinsky. 20 11 . Non-Jewish and Christian: Feelings of Discrimination and Social Distance of FSU Migrants in Israel, Israel Affairs 17 (1): 125-41.

---. 2013. Religion, Ethnicity and Identity: Former Soviet Union Christian Immigrants in Israel, Ethnic and Racial Studies 36 (11): 1687-1705.

Remennick, Larissa. 2007. Russian Jews on Three Continents: Identity, Integration and Conflict . New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

---. 2003. Immigration and Ethnicity in Israel: Returning Diasporas and Nation Building. In Diasporas and Ethnic Migrants: Germany, Israel and Post-Soviet Successor States in Comparative Perspective , eds. Rainer Muenz and Rainer Ohliger . London: Frank Cass.

Shapira, Assaf. 2019. Israel’s Citizenship Policy since the 1990s—New Challenges, (Mostly) Old Solutions, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies  46 (4): 602-21.

Weiss, Yfaat. 2002. The Golem and its Creator, or How the Jewish Nation-State Became Multiethnic. In Challenging Ethnic Citizenship: German and Israeli Perspectives on Immigration, 82-104, eds. Daniel Levy and Yfaat Weiss. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Ziegler, Reuven. 2015. No Asylum for “Infiltrators”: The Legal Predicament of Eritrean and Sudanese Nationals in Israel, Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Law 29 (2): 172-91. Available online .