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In recent decades, many Russian-speaking Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union have settled in Germany and Israel. In Food for Thought, Julia Bernstein conducts a widely interdisciplinary investigation into the ways in which such immigrants manage their multiple, overlapping identities--as Jews, Russians, and citizens of their newly adopted nations. Focusing in particular on the packaging, sale, and consumption of food, which offers surprising insights into the self-definitions of these immigrants, the book delivers one of our most detailed looks yet at complicated and important aspects of immigration and national identities.
In 1900 over five million Jews lived in the Russian empire; today, there are four times as many Russian-speaking Jews residing outside the former Soviet Union than there are in that region. The New Jewish Diaspora is the first English-language study of the Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora. This migration has made deep marks on the social, cultural, and political terrain of many countries, in particular the United States, Israel, and Germany. The contributors examine the varied ways these immigrants have adapted to new environments, while identifying the common cultural bonds that continue to unite them. Assembling an international array of experts on the Soviet and post-Soviet Jewish diaspor...
This book offers a critical analysis of the complex relationship between violence and belonging, by exploring the ways sexual, ethnic or national belonging can work through, rather than against, violence. Based on an ethnographic study of Russian-speaking, queer immigrants in Israel/Palestine and in cyberspace, it gives an insight into the world of hate speech and fantasies of torture and sexual abuse; of tormented subjectivities and uncanny homes; of ghostly hauntings from the past and anxieties about the present and future. The author raises questions about the responsibilities of national homemaking, the complicity of queerness within violent regimes of colonialism and war, and the ambivalence of immigrant belonging at the intersection of marginality and privilege. Drawing from scholarship on migration, diaspora and race studies, feminist and queer theory, psychoanalysis and studies on cyberculture, the book traces the interplay between the different forms of violence - physical and verbal, social and psychic, material and discursive - and offers novel insights into the analysis of nationalism, on-line sociality and queer migranthood.
Sweet Burdens presents a detailed ethnographic study of the lives of Russian-Jewish immigrants in Germany over the past twenty years. Focusing on the first generation of adult immigrants, Sveta Roberman examines how they question and negotiate their moral economy and civic culture vis-à-vis the host German state and society, on the one hand, and the Holocaust past, on the other. She approaches the immigrant-host encounter as one of many cycles of social exchanges taking place in multiple and diverse arenas. The book sheds light on a number of issues, including the moral economy of Jewish-German relations, immigrants' performances of civics and citizenship, modes of inclusion and exclusion, consumption and consumerism, work and the phenomena of unemployment and underemployment, the concept of community, and the dynamics and difficulties of reinventing Jewish identity and tradition.
Based on nearly 500 oral history interviews, When Sonia Met Boris is an innovative study of Jewish daily life in the Soviet Union, giving a long-suppressed voice to the Jewish men and women who survived the sustained violence and everyday hardship of Stalin's Russia. It reveals how postwar Soviet Jews came to view their Jewish identity as an obstacle-a shift in attitude with ramifications for contemporary Russian Jewish culture and the broader Jewish diaspora.
This book explores the phenomenon of familyhood across borders, examining the experience of translocal familyhood and the manner in which lifelines in and between countries are formed when individual family members spend long periods away from home. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, it considers the emotions, social relations, materialities and discourses that occur within family lives between Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Romania, Russia and Sweden. With attention to the ways in which gender, generation, class and geography create and reinforce inequalities, strengths and vulnerabilities within and between families, it combines ethnographic, descriptive work with shorter photography-based chapters in order to allow textual and visual methods to complement one another. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, geography and anthropology with interests in migration, transnationalism and the sociology of the family.
The subjects of ethnicity and collective belonging have enjoyed high priority on the agenda for social science research over the last 20 years. This volume focuses on research on the perspectives and biographical experiences of concrete 'historical' actors within the contexts of migration, cultural diversity and social conflicts.
Israelis with a Russian accent have been part of Israel's social, cultural and economic landscape for over 20 years. They are found in all walks of life: as controversial politicians, senior physicians and scientists, kibbutz members and religious settlers. Despite lacking personal assets and below-average income, many of them managed to enter Israeli middle class, and some even became part of local elites – an achievement not to be taken for granted for the first-generation immigrants. This collection offers a multi-faceted portrait of the 'Great Russian Aliyah' of the 1990s with the emphasis on socio-political and cultural aspects of its insertion in Israel – based on social research c...
This Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary Israel, accounting for changes, developments and contemporary debates. The different chapters offer both a historical background and an updated analysis of politics, economy, society and culture. Across five sections, a multidisciplinary group of experts, including sociologists, political scientists, historians and social scientists, engage in a wide variety of topics through different perspectives and insights. The book opens with a historical section outlining the formation of Israel and Jewish nationalism. The second section examines contemporary institutions in Israel, their developments and the contemporary challenges they ...
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