scholarly journals “This Is Who I Would Become”: Russian Jewish Immigrants and Their Encounters with Chabad-Lubavitch in the Greater Toronto Area

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 57-80
Author(s):  
Joshua Tapper
Keyword(s):  
Religious Identity ◽  
Social Space ◽  
The United States ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Cultural Activity ◽  
Greater Toronto Area ◽  
Jewish Diaspora ◽  
Soviet Jews ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
Community Centre

Since the early 1970s, the Chabad Lubavitch movement has served as an important setting for religious, social, and cultural activity among Russian-speaking Jewish migrants to Canada and the United States. While scholars and community observers have long recognized the attentiveness of Lubavitch emissaries toward Russian Jews, there is no quantitative data and little qualitative research on Chabad’s influence in the post-Soviet Jewish diaspora. This paper explores the motivations, mechanics, and consequences of this encounter in a Canadian setting, examining how Chabad creates a religious and social space adapted to the unique features of post-Soviet Jewish ethnic and religious identity. Participating in a growing scholarly discussion, this paper moves away from older characterizations of Soviet Jewish identity as thinly constructed and looks to the Chabad space for alternative constructions in which religion and traditionalism play integral roles. This paper draws on oral histories and observational fieldwork from a small qualitative study of a Chabad-run Jewish Russian Community Centre in Toronto, Ontario. It argues that Chabad, which was founded in eighteenth-century Belorussia, is successful among post-Soviet Jews in Canada and elsewhere thanks, in part, to its presentation of the movement as an authentically Russian brand of Judaism—one that grew up in a pre-Soviet Russian context, endured the repressions of the Soviet period, and has since emerged as the dominant Jewish force in the Russian-speaking world. The paper, among the first to examine the religious convictions of Canada’s Russian-speaking Jewish community, reveals that post-Soviet Jews in Toronto gravitate toward Chabad because they view it as a uniquely Russian space.  

Exodus from Europe: Jewish Diaspora Immigration from Central and Eastern Europe to the United States (1820-1914)

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 85-102
Author(s):  
John P. Williams
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Jewish Diaspora ◽  
Employment Education ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
The Mansion

This article examines one of the largest exoduses in human history. In less than three decades, over five million Jews from Poland, Germany, and Russia journeyed to what they considered to be the “American Promised Land.” This study serves five main purposes: first, to identify social, political, and economic factors that encouraged this unprecedented migration; second, to examine the extensive communication and transportation networks that aided this exodus, highlighting the roles that mutual aid societies (especially the Alliance Israelite Universelle in Paris, the Mansion House Fund in London, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in New York City) played in the success of these migrations; third, to analyze this diaspora’s impact on the cultural identity of the Jewish communities in which they settled; fourth, to discuss the cultural and economic success of this mass resettlement; and finally, fifth, identify incidents of anti-Semitism in employment, education, and legal realms that tempered economic and cultural gains by Jewish immigrants to America.

The Russian-Speaking Jewish Diaspora in Translation: Liudmila Ulitskaia's Daniel Stein, Translator

Slavic Review ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margarita Levantovskaya
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Jewish Diaspora ◽  
Nazi Occupation ◽  
Soviet Jews ◽  
Jewish Immigrants

Liudmila Ulitskaia's 2006 novel, Daniel' Shtain, pervodchik (Daniel Stein, Translator), explores the experience of the Russian-speaking diaspora in the aftermath of World War II through a focus on Jewish immigrants in Israel who convert to Christianity. The novel's treatment of the divisive topic of Jewish to Christian conversion is enabled by the author's reliance on the theoretical and allegorical values of translation. Evoking advancements in twentieth-century translation studies through its broad treatment of translation and critique of the investment in the notion of fidelity to the original, be it language or identity, the novel advocates for the acceptance of the transformations and the resulting hybridity of the Jewish diasporic self. Daniel Stein, Translator specifically highlights the influence of the Soviet nationalities policies and the Nazi occupation of eastern Europe on the identity metamorphoses of Soviet Jews. By promoting the legitimacy of the expressions of Jewish identity by immigrants from the USSR through her novel, Ulitskaia proposes an expanded and anti-essentialist view of Jewish identity that would include individuals traditionally viewed as apostates.

Utopias of One

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Kotin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Original Research ◽  
The Soviet Union

This book is a new account of utopian writing. It examines how eight writers—Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne—construct utopias of one within and against modernity's two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. In this way it captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds—for themselves alone. The book contributes to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. It models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.

Millennial Missionaries

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Dugan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
College Campuses ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Gender Essentialism ◽  
Craft Beer ◽  
Catholic University ◽  
Religious Piety ◽  
Religious Landscape

This book is an ethnography of millennial-generation Catholic missionaries. The Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) began hiring young adults to evangelize students on college campuses in 1998. Since then, FOCUS missionaries have developed a style of Catholic evangelization that navigates between strict and savvy interpretations of Catholic teaching in contemporary US youth culture. The Catholicism that FOCUS missionaries embrace and promote grew up with them and amid their middle-class American norms—missionaries own iPhones, drink craft beer, and create March Madness brackets. Born in the 1990s, millennial missionaries in their skinny jeans and devotional tattoos, large-framed glasses and scapulars embody an attractive style of Catholicism. They love saints and have memorized the “Tantum Ergo,” are fluent in college-student slang, but reject hook-up culture in favor of gender essentialism dictated by papal teachings. Missionaries rely on their social capital to make Catholicism cool. Many of their peers have been characterized as defectors from religious institutions. Yet, underneath the rise of “nones” is a story of increased religious piety. This book studies religion in the United States from the perspective of proud Catholic millennials. As they navigate their Catholic and US identities, these missionaries propose Catholicism as uniquely able to overcome perceived threats of secularism, relativism, and modernity. How, why, and with what implications is this Catholicism enacted? These questions, which point to power struggles between US culture and religious identity, drive this book. Through their prayers and evangelization efforts, missionaries are reshaping Catholic identity and shifting the religious landscape of the United States.

Muslim and Jewish Immigrants’ Adjustment: The Role of Religious-American Harmony, Religious-American Identity Centrality, and Discrimination

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-274
Author(s):  
Sadie S. Amini ◽  
Angela-MinhTu D. Nguyen
Keyword(s):  
Religious Identity ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Perceived Discrimination ◽  
Positive Association ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Muslim American ◽  
Religious Minority ◽  
Identity Centrality ◽  
Dual Identities ◽  
Jewish Immigrants

Religious-minority immigrants must negotiate both their religious and host cultural (e.g., American) identities; however, the duality of these identities is rarely examined in relation to adjustment. In this study, we tested whether a religious-American identity centrality could predict better adjustment over and above religious identity centrality and American identity centrality. Moreover, based on the Integrative Psychological Model of Biculturalism, we investigated whether the harmony perceived between one’s religious and American identities could mediate the relationship between religious-American identity centrality and adjustment, and between perceived discrimination and adjustment. With data from 130 first-generation Muslim American and Jewish American participants, we found support for most hypotheses. Although a more central religious-American identity predicted better adjustment, it did not predict better adjustment over and above religious identity centrality and American identity centrality. More importantly, religious-American harmony mediated the positive association between religious-American identity centrality and adjustment, and the negative association between perceived discrimination and adjustment. Implications of our findings for research on dual identities are discussed.

Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism

1991 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-23
Author(s):  
Roger Rouse
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Social Space ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mexican Migration ◽  
Single Word ◽  
The Social ◽  
Made In

In a hidden sweatshop in downtown Los Angeles, Asian and Latino migrants produce automobile parts for a factory in Detroit. As the parts leave the production line, they are stamped “Made in Brazil.” In a small village in the heart of Mexico, a young woman at her father’s wake wears a black T-shirt sent to her by a brother in the United States. The shirt bears a legend that some of the mourners understand but she does not. It reads, “Let’s Have Fun Tonight!” And on the Tijuana-San Diego border, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a writer originally from Mexico City, reflects on the time he has spent in what he calls “the gap between two worlds”: “Today, eight years after my departure, when they ask me for my nationality or ethnic identity, I cannot answer with a single word, for my ‘identity’ now possesses multiple repertoires: I am Mexican but I am also Chicano and Latin American. On the border they call me ‘chilango’ or ‘mexiquillo’; in the capital, ‘pocho’ or ‘norteno,’ and in Spain ‘sudaca.’… My companion Emily is Anglo-Italian but she speaks Spanish with an Argentinian accent. Together we wander through the ruined Babel that is our American postmodemity.”

scholarly journals immigration of Argentinean Jews to Winnipeg : Emigration and Successful Settlement

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Reuben Covshoff
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Labour Market ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Currency Crisis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Provincial Government ◽  
Jewish Federation ◽  
Market Approach ◽  
Jewish Immigrants

Manitoba has strategized from 2002 onwards to incorporate a free-market approach into Manitoba's Provincial Nominee Programme in order to fulfill its labour market goals. In the grand scheme of attracting new Argentinean Jewish immigrants, it was an opportunity for these people to leave their homeland that was suffering under an economic depression and a currency crisis. Both the provincial government (through the Manitoba Provincial Nominee Programme) and an ethno-cultural institution (the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg) forged a partnership that matched these immigrants with jobs and also helped integrate them into the Winnipeg Jewish community. Seventeen interviews of Argentinean Jews now living in Winnipeg explained how they had a choice of emigrating to Spain, Israel or the United States but they selected Winnipeg and they give their reasons for doing so.

scholarly journals Еmigration processes from Russia: directions, scale, ethnic structure

POPULATION ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-50
Author(s):  
Leonid Rybakovsky ◽  
Natalia Kozhevnikova
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Migration ◽  
Migration Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Migration Flow ◽  
Period Analysis ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Internal Migrations

After the collapse of the Soviet Union the structure of migration processes in Russia radically changed, a significant part of the internal migrations transformed into international ones. Although the scale of internal migrations noticeably decreased, still they continued to exceed international by several times. Along with the re-emigration of Russians and the immigration of people of other nationalities to Russia from the countries of the new abroad, which assumed a mass character, the international emigration from Russia to the countries of the old abroad increased significantly. This international migration flow has become permanent in the post-Soviet period. Analysis of statistical data made it possible to conclude that the scale of international migration, that substantially increased in the 1990s, in the zero years of the 21st century declined markedly. This applies both to immigration flows to Russia from the countries of the new abroad and to emigration flows from Russia to the countries of the old abroad. Despite the significant reduction in emigration from Russia in the twenty-first century, the main recipient countries for emigrants, as they were originally, are still Germany, Israel and the United States. The latter is due to the ethnic component. The article shows the extent to which international migrations damage Russia and improve labor (first of all, scientific and technical) and demographic potential of a number of recipient countries. It is emphasized that the solution of these problems is beyond the scope of state migration policy.

scholarly journals RELIGIOUS IDENTITY IN THE CONTEXT OF THE ETHNO-NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF UKRAINE

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-24
Author(s):  
Viacheslav Каlаch
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Ethnic Group ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
National Development ◽  
Group Living ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Religious Identification

The article discusses the peculiarities of the formation of religious identity in the dynamics of geopolitical processes in Ukraine, which depend on historical conditions, features of the economic and socio-political structure, democratic and cultural traditions of society, the level of legal and moral development of its members and the ambitions of its leaders. It is proved that religion is a decisive factor in the ethnic life of Ukrainians, and the controversial role of Christianity in ethno-identification and ethno-consolidation processes is noted. The modern world-wide political, economic and spiritual crisis imposes its imprint on Ukraine as well. As one of the transitional countries of the post-socialist space, our state has not yet found a single-minded vector of its own development, in particular, the ecclesiastical. Ukraine is only on the verge of forming a united national idea and crystallizing its own self-identification on the religious marker. Religion is the basic semantic-forming component of a unified national identity. Today, religious and ethnic identities are closely intertwined. Therefore, the problem of the ethnorelain factor always attracts significant attention of leading scholars, statesmen and church hierarchs. In Ukraine, a significant number of religious groups completely coincide with the boundaries of a separate ethnic group. The lack of civic consensus on the country's foreign policy, cultural identity, separate sovereign positions of the Ukrainian state, the diverse views of the past and the future at the present makes it impossible to formulate unanimous interests, which negatively affects external and internal policies. Compared with the Soviet period, religious identity today is a relatively new category. On opposition to the state-civilian benchmark for many Ukrainians, religion is on the forefront. Undeniably, Orthodoxy played a very important role in the formation of the Ukrainian nation and our religious identity. However, today, multiconfessional diversity and inability or reluctance to negotiate, to be tolerant, break Ukraine into several regions. The negative tendency of loss of awareness of Ukrainians of the unity of religion, nation, common spirit is traced. The formation of religious identity is a long process of formation of society as a whole, and is a consequence of the historical formation of Ukraine as a nation. Religious identification is the reproduction of accumulated social and religious experience in all spheres. World and domestic scholars are unequivocal in the conclusions that the central place in the formation of national identity belongs to religiousness. Religious beliefs that have an indelible imprint of an ethnic group living on a particular territory are precisely the center of the formation of a new national-religious identity of Ukrainian society.

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