Our American Israel
Our American Israel

Author: Amy Kaplan

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2018-09-17

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0674989929

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An essential account of America’s most controversial alliance that reveals how the United States came to see Israel as an extension of itself, and how that strong and divisive partnership plays out in our own time. Our American Israel tells the story of how a Jewish state in the Middle East came to resonate profoundly with a broad range of Americans in the twentieth century. Beginning with debates about Zionism after World War II, Israel’s identity has been entangled with America’s belief in its own exceptional nature. Now, in the twenty-first century, Amy Kaplan challenges the associations underlying this special alliance. Through popular narratives expressed in news media, fiction, and film, a shared sense of identity emerged from the two nations’ histories as settler societies. Americans projected their own origin myths onto Israel: the biblical promised land, the open frontier, the refuge for immigrants, the revolt against colonialism. Israel assumed a mantle of moral authority, based on its image as an “invincible victim,” a nation of intrepid warriors and concentration camp survivors. This paradox persisted long after the Six-Day War, when the United States rallied behind a story of the Israeli David subduing the Arab Goliath. The image of the underdog shattered when Israel invaded Lebanon and Palestinians rose up against the occupation. Israel’s military was strongly censured around the world, including notes of dissent in the United States. Rather than a symbol of justice, Israel became a model of military strength and technological ingenuity. In America today, Israel’s political realities pose difficult challenges. Turning a critical eye on the turbulent history that bound the two nations together, Kaplan unearths the roots of present controversies that may well divide them in the future.

Aliya
Aliya

Author: Liel Leibovitz

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2013-12-17

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 1466860553

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a·li·ya, n., also aliyah. pl. aliyas or aliyot. The immigration of Jews into Israel. Why would American Jews---not just materially successful in this country but perhaps for the first time in the two-thousand-year Jewish Diaspora truly socially accepted and at home---choose to leave the material comforts, safety, and peace of the United States for the uncertainty and violence of Israel? Still, aliya is a phenomenon that affects all American Jews. Understanding this phenomenon means understanding what is arguably the fundamental question of American Jewry; it is that question that Liel Leibovitz sets out to answer in Aliya. Leibovitz focuses on the stories of three generations of immigrants. Marlin and Betty Levin, searching for excitement and ideology, traveled to Palestine before Israel was even created. There, with Marlin working as a reporter and Betty volunteering with the Jewish underground movement, the two witnessed the bloody birth of the Jewish state. Two decades later, Mike Ginsberg, overcome with awe at the heroic Jews who fought for their country in the l967 war, immigrated as well and was involved in much of Israel's tumultuous history, including the Yom Kippur War. He was a member of Kibbutz Misgav Am during the famous terrorist attack on the infants' nursery there, and he helped repel numerous waves of terrorists attacks on his kibbutz. Finally, Danny and Sharon Kalker and their children left their home in Queens, New York, to move to a West Bank settlement in 2001, during one of the most unsettled phases in Israel's existence. With a keen writer's eye and unfeigned passion for his subject, Leibovitz explores the fears, hopes, and dreams of the American-Jewish immigrants to Israel and the journey they undertook, a journey that lies at the very heart of what it means to be a Jew.

City on a Hilltop
City on a Hilltop

Author: Sara Yael Hirschhorn

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2017-05-22

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 0674979176

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Since 1967, more than 60,000 Jewish-Americans have settled in the territories captured by the State of Israel during the Six Day War. Comprising 15 percent of the settler population today, these immigrants have established major communities, transformed domestic politics and international relations, and committed shocking acts of terrorism. They demand attention in both Israel and the United States, but little is known about who they are and why they chose to leave America to live at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this deeply researched, engaging work, Sara Yael Hirschhorn unsettles stereotypes, showing that the 1960s generation who moved to the occupied territories were not messianic zealots or right-wing extremists but idealists engaged in liberal causes. They did not abandon their progressive heritage when they crossed the Green Line. Rather, they saw a historic opportunity to create new communities to serve as a beacon—a “city on a hilltop”—to Jews across the globe. This pioneering vision was realized in their ventures at Yamit in the Sinai and Efrat and Tekoa in the West Bank. Later, the movement mobilized the rhetoric of civil rights to rebrand itself, especially in the wake of the 1994 Hebron massacre perpetrated by Baruch Goldstein, one of their own. On the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 war, Hirschhorn illuminates the changing face of the settlements and the clash between liberal values and political realities at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Identities in an Era of Globalization and Multiculturalism
Identities in an Era of Globalization and Multiculturalism

Author: Judit Bokser Liwerant

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2008-05-31

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13: 9047428056

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This volume addresses key conceptual issues and case studies dealing with contemporary Jewish identities amidst globalization processes, with special emphasis on Latin American socio-political, communal, and cultural milieu. The book brings together a variety of disciplinary and theoretical approaches that range from political science to sociology and from art and literature to demography in order to offer the reader a multidimensional and multifocal analysis of the diverse constitutional elements of the Jewish experience. Using as its point of departure the wide horizon of historical trajectories and current challenges, the articles analyze the transnational, regional and local processes that inform the different Jewish Diasporas and Israel. Simultaneously, its content provides a snapshot of the current state of research on collective identity building processes and a lively analysis of the challenges posed by cultural diversity and primordial and civic belongings in the framework of political transitions, as well as new and old forms of expressing through cultural creativity individual and collective identities.

Leaving Zion
Leaving Zion

Author: Ori Yehudai

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-05-14

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1108478344

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Explores Jewish emigration from Palestine and Israel during the critical period between 1945 and the late 1950s by weaving together the perspectives of governments, aid organizations, Jewish communities and the personal stories of individual migrants.

Politics of (Dis)Integration
Politics of (Dis)Integration

Author: Sophie Hinger

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-10-16

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 303025089X

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This open access book explores how contemporary integration policies and practices are not just about migrants and minority groups becoming part of society but often also reflect deliberate attempts to undermine their inclusion or participation. This affects individual lives as well as social cohesion. The book highlights the variety of ways in which integration and disintegration are related to, and often depend on each other. By analysing how (dis)integration works within a wide range of legal and institutional settings, this book contributes to the literature on integration by considering (dis)integration as a highly stratified process. Through featuring a fertile combination of comparative policy analyses and ethnographic research based on original material from six European and two non-European countries, this book will be a great resource for students, academics and policy makers in migration and integration studies. Book Presentation: On April 22, 2021, the University of Sheffield hosted the book presentation on “Politics of (Dis)Integration”. During this event, the editors, Sophie Hinger and Reinhard Schweitzer, discussed the book. The event was chaired by Aneta Piekut and Jean-Marie Lafleur was the discussant. Please find the recording here: https://eu-lti.bbcollab.com/collab/ui/session/playback.

The New Jewish Diaspora
The New Jewish Diaspora

Author: Zvi Y. Gitelman

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2016-07-27

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 0813576318

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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 diaspora, the book makes room for a wide range of scholarly approaches, allowing readers to appreciate the significance of this migration from many different angles. Some chapters offer data-driven analyses that seek to quantify the impact Russian-speaking Jewish populations are making in their adoptive countries and their adaptations there. Others take a more ethnographic approach, using interviews and observations to determine how these immigrants integrate their old traditions and affiliations into their new identities. Further chapters examine how, despite the oceans separating them, members of this diaspora form imagined communities within cyberspace and through literature, enabling them to keep their shared culture alive. Above all, the scholars in The New Jewish Diaspora place the migration of Russian-speaking Jews in its historical and social contexts, showing where it fits within the larger historic saga of the Jewish diaspora, exploring its dynamic engagement with the contemporary world, and pointing to future paths these immigrants and their descendants might follow.

Transnationalism
Transnationalism

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2009-05-20

Total Pages: 800

ISBN-13: 9047440110

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This book deals with transnationalism and captures its singularity as a generalized phenomenon. The profusion of transnational communities is a factor of fluidity in social orders and represents confrontations between contingencies and basic socio-cultural drives. It has created a new era different from the past at essential respects. This is an age of enriching cultural diversity fraught with threatening risks inextricably linked to contemporary globalization. National sovereignty is eroded from above by global processes, from below by aspirations of sub-national groups, and from the sides - by transnational allegiances. This is the backdrop against which this book delves into the fundamental issues relating to the nature, scope and overall significance of transnationalism.

Becoming Israeli
Becoming Israeli

Author: Akiva Gersh

Publisher:

Published: 2017-05-29

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9780692899885

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"Becoming Israeli" captures the story of aliyah, of Jews moving their entire lives and futures to Israel. To tell this story, Akiva Gersh recruited 40 bloggers whose words take readers on an adventure that evokes a wide range of emotions, from frustration to inspiration, from confusion to deep pride. It is a record and a testament to what drives olim (immigrants) to make aliyah, gives voice to the challenges they face acclimating to a new language and culture, and illustrates vividly why they would never want to live anywhere else. You will literally laugh out loud as well as wipe away tears as you journey through the world of aliyah with these bloggers who want to share their story. A story which, essentially, is the story of the Jewish people coming home.

U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel
U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel

Author: Jeremy M. Sharp

Publisher: DIANE Publishing

Published: 2010-10

Total Pages: 29

ISBN-13: 1437927475

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Contents: (1) U.S.-Israeli Relations and the Role of Foreign Aid; (2) U.S. Bilateral Military Aid to Israel: A 10-Year Military Aid Agreement; Foreign Military Financing; Ongoing U.S.-Israeli Defense Procurement Negotiations; (3) Defense Budget Appropriations for U.S.-Israeli Missile Defense Programs: Multi-Layered Missile Defense; High Altitude Missile Defense System; (4) Aid Restrictions and Possible Violations: Israeli Arms Sales to China; Israeli Settlements; (5) Other Ongoing Assistance and Cooperative Programs: Migration and Refugee Assistance; Loan Guarantees for Economic Recovery; American Schools and Hospitals Abroad Program; U.S.-Israeli Scientific and Business Cooperation; (6) Historical Background. Illustrations.