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The article focuses on Yakov Leshchinsky's 1928 essay that provide the first cross-national analysis of the migration and class transformation of world Jewry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It mentions that Jewish economic development was increasing the employment of Jews in productive labor. It also mentions that Leshchinsky died in Jerusalem in 1966 at the age of 89 after undergoing a life-long series of migrations and transformations.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including Jewish migration, Jewish history and Jews from Eastern Europe.

How can the prism of self-reflection help scholars see the mass exodus of Jews from the Soviet Union and its successor states in new ways? This article discusses the first effort to collect the life stories of the 1.6 million Jews and their non-Jewish relatives who left the former Soviet Union between 1970 and 2000. Believing that autobiographical essays elicits a unique perspective on Russian Jewish migration that would otherwise not be known, the authors set out to collect autobiographical materials from members of this last wave of Russian-Jewish migration through autobiography contests modeled after contests run by Max Weinreich and the YIVO Institute in the early twentieth century. Through its discussion of the two winning autobiographies collected through the contests, the article demonstrates why the full social scientific study of the role Russian Jewish migrants played in shaping Jewish history needs to pay heed to the voices and stories of regular migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An excerpt from the essay "Now I know that there are other countries" ( Ia teper' drugie stran'i znaiu ) …" by Svetlana Elizarova, who discusses stories of her childhood during the Second World War, her hardships, works and her immigration to Germany.

This article contributes to the understanding of the processes that shaped patterns of emigration from Poland to Israel (and back) after World War II. The article analyzes the Polish Government’s emigration policies and the ways in which nation-building processes in Poland and Israel interacted. It also discusses the ways and patterns in which individuals sought to navigate these policies, bureaucratic systems, and government obstacles to obtaining visas, and how these patterns reflected nation-building strategies in both Poland and Israel. The article pays special attention to the phenomenon of migration of couples in mixed marriages, including those who sought to return, as a special group that illuminates nation-building strategies and the significance of gender in influencing the responses of decision makers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the course of the ongoing war in Ukraine, the identity of the global Russian-speaking Jewish community was put to the test. The conflict in Ukraine marked the first time in the history of Russian-speaking Jews that every expression, blog or Twitter post, and opinion article were recorded on the World Wide Web. This readily available data enables us to reconstruct the information climate that surrounded Russian-speaking Jews. The present article explores the sway of this climate on the political discourse of Jewish elites in Ukraine, Russia, and Jewish Russian-speaking diasporas between 2014 and 2015. Our findings suggest that identities of these groups are multilayered, but not hierarchical. Moreover, the elites’commonethno-cultural Jewish identity coexists withdistinctpolitical affiliations. The allegiance of minorities to host societies is a well-known phenomenon. However, its mechanisms have yet to command sufficient research interest. Is it fear, prudence, genuine attachment to the country of residence, or other factors that stand behind the minorities’ commitment? This paper fuses thematic maps with content analysis to show that the “infosphere” is a key to understanding the position of Jews toward host regimes and their co-ethnics in other nation-states. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From 1919 to 1925, some 400,000 Jews from Eastern Europe emigrated to the United States and Palestine. The central thesis of this article is that the profile of the Jewish exodus before World War I differed from the postwar flow. Above all, Jews who had escaped the carnage of the Ukrainian Civil War (1918–1920) were more akin to refugees than immigrants. The first of this article’s three parts revolves around Jewish emigration during World War I via Siberia to Vladivostok or to the Chinese town of Harbin, whereupon they continued to the port of Yokohama and sailed to the US Pacific coast. The second part focuses on new immigration policies that were rolled out by the authorities in the United States and Palestine between 1921 and 1924. Lastly, the third part delves into comparative and demographic aspects of Jewish migration during the 1920s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article takes stock of the prime catalyst behind the shrinking and transformation of the Jewish populace in communist Poland – emigration. Over the course of four major waves, nearly a quarter of a million Jews left the country, most of whom headed to Israel. On the basis of recent scholarship and the author’s own research on migrations from communist Poland, he gauges the magnitude of and discusses key factors behind this exodus, not least Polish Jewry’s time- and place-specific considerations, the emerging shape of Warsaw’s relevant policies, and the social dynamics of these outflows. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Between 1968 and 1972, Sweden opened its borders to approximately 2700 Jewish refugees who were fleeing an antisemitic campaign in Poland. Stockholm presented the admission of these immigrants, together with its criticism of Warsaw’s actions, as an example of a proactive foreign policy, which had been launched in the second half of the 1960s. This immigration was also commensurate with Sweden’s benevolent policy towards Jewish émigrés in World War II. That said, this paper’s findings on this entire process indicate that this policy was not a foregone conclusion. As was the case two decades earlier, Stockholm veered from initial apathy to expansive generosity towards these refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1966, Soviet leader Alexei Kosygin stated that Soviet citizens had the right to emigrate for family reunification. This sparked the campaign for Soviet Jewish emigration movement, which adopted the slogan “Let My People Go.” Yet, despite the biblical symbolism, there was a significant controversy about their final destination, with those opting for the West known as “drop-outs” (noshrim). There were intense debates between those Jewish Diaspora leaders, particularly in the United States, who stressed the democratic right of “freedom of choice,” and the Israeli leadership. When the Soviets drastically reduced emigration in the 1980s, the drop-out phenomenon (neshira) was blamed. In 1983 Morris B. Abram became chairman of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry and reversed the accepted American Jewish approach. He developed a close friendship with Australian Jewish leader, Isi Leibler. Both men believed Soviet Jews should migrate to Israel. In the late 1980s, the United States ended the refugee status of Soviet Jews, reducing its financial support. As a result, one million Russians migrated to Israel in the 1990s. This article focuses on this global debate over neshira and illustrates the importance of cooperation between American and non-American actors in global Jewish politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The present study investigated the role of socio-demographic characteristics, social networks, and satisfaction with various aspects of life in predicting the emigration intentions of Jews living in Russia. The study’s subjects consisted of Jews and their relatives eligible for immigration to Israel under the Israeli Law of Return. The study’s participants (n = 824) lived in five metropolitan areas. Socio-demographic characteristics, social networks, and satisfaction with life in Russia together explained 23% of the variance in emigration intentions among Russian Jews. Specifically, stronger emigration intentions were associated with a younger age, a smaller number of Jewish ancestors, a lower level of religiosity, a smaller number of Russian friends, a larger number of friends living abroad, a lower level of psychological well-being, and dissatisfaction with the education and healthcare systems in Russia. In addition, Jews living in Moscow and St. Petersburg expressed stronger emigration intentions than Jews living in other cities in Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With remarkable consistency, the history of Jewish migration westward from Eastern Europe has been narrated and analyzed as the outcome of interaction between a familiar triad of forces: first, a population of immigrants whose vibrant religious practice and confrontational politics led to conflict with the pre-existing communal leaders and institutions; second, an acculturated community of established Jews; and, third, a majority population liable to be hostile to both foreigners and Jews. The immigrants’ acculturation is seen to follow from the interventions of reform and philanthropy and a process of change over generations. This essay provides a critical examination of the current orthodoxy by examining the case of Jewish immigration to London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It begins with a consideration of the historiography and historical sources that have given rise to the predominant interpretation. It goes on to excavate patterns, practices, and social relations that suggest a different and new perspective on the history of Jewish integration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

My essay examines Yiddish-speaking immigrants in the Netherlands between the two world wars with a focus on Amsterdam, the Jewish center of the country. The Netherlands was never a major recipient of migrants of any kind, let alone Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Despite seeing the Netherlands primarily as a transit site, enough Yiddish-speakers stayed – either due to finding work in the country or because they failed to get entry papers to other countries – that they formed a visible presence in Amsterdam, The Hague, Scheveningen, and other cities across the country. Due to its small size and unstable immigrant population – since most immigrants did not plan on settling in Amsterdam – this community remained on the periphery of the global interwar Yiddish-speaking map. I argue that by being on the margins of the global Yiddish community Amsterdam's left-wing Yiddish-speaking community, organized around the Ansky Society, remained above the sharp politicized polemics that drove a wedge between communists and non-communist leftists in other Yiddish cultural centers not located in the Soviet Union. (There, the Communist Party's Evsektsiia had long ago ended public internecine debates.) I also show that Yiddish-speaking immigrants affected Dutch culture more generally. Because it operated in Yiddish, the Ansky Society was perceived to be marginal in the Netherlands. That marginalization allowed its members the political space (on the margins of both Dutch society and the global Yiddish-speaking diaspora) to advocate for international political positions that in any Dutch-language institution, Jewish or not, would have been considered too radical in a political culture that avoided extremes of any kind. The Ansky Society nonetheless served as the Netherlands' outspoken voice against the rise of fascism in all of its 1930s manifestations. Unlike the mainstream Dutch Jewish community, members of which enfranchised citizens and therefore deeply implicated in party politics and questions of loyalty, the Ansky Society had no such fears, because most of its members lacked citizenship. They were beyond (or perhaps beneath) questions of loyalty. Finally, the Ansky Society also publicly criticized the Dutch government's complacency in the face of fascism spreading across Europe. In other words, Amsterdam's Yiddish-speaking community in the interwar period was doubly marginalized – from global Yiddish culture and from Dutch politics – and was therefore politically empowered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1930s, Paris was home to approximately two million immigrants. Around 150,000 of these were Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe who used Paris as the basis for a new Western European influenced Yiddishism and Diaspora Nationalism. This paper traces the high point of that interwar Parisian Yiddish internationalist cultural development, the Modern Jewish Culture pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair. Through an analysis that places the pavilion within its immigrant Jewish and interwar Popular Front Parisian contexts, this article argues that the Modern Jewish Culture pavilion represented the culmination of decades of leftist cultural work in Paris. The Modern Jewish Culture pavilion highlighted both universal and particular aspects of Yiddish culture and placed them on display in the most international way possible. Buttressed by the rise in European fascism, antisemitism, and antifascism, Yiddish culture-makers in Paris created a cultural display that presented a sophisticated, global, pan-leftist Yiddish culture that spoke to Jews and non-Jews around the world in an attempt to preserve the burgeoning global Yiddish culture and stave off fascism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the history of the migration of Jews in Eastern Europe following the Holocaust with a focus on the communities of Vilna, Lithuania and Lodz, Poland. Emphasis is given to the transformations of communal structures and the relevance of hometown associations (landmanshaftn). Other topics include the social networks of Jewish migrants, memorialization, and the preservation of archival collections.

This article focuses primarily on countries that had been, prior to 1914, among the most favored destinations for East European Jewish migrants: chiefly the United States, Canada, Palestine, Brazil and Argentina. In the inter-war years, these ceased to be the only ports of final entry for Jewish migrants. However, despite restrictive migration regimes and unfavorable economic conditions, traditional receiver countries continued to absorb the largest share of such migrants (the U. S. and Palestine, between them, accounting for over 800,000). Jewish migration to countries other than the United States peaked around 1933; was just about equal to the U. S.-bound migrant stream by 1938; and fell off in 1939–1940. The Jewish case raises several theoretical and methodological issues, including the definition of migrant motivation as well as the framing of immigration policy as products of mixed factors – both political and economic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory article provides an overview of modern Jewish migration from Eastern Europe. It engages the foundational historiography of the field and explores intersections of Jewish migration with general migration theory. In addition to framing the six articles in this special collection, this essay presents longue durée factors linking today's post-Soviet diaspora communities on three continents with social and political trends beginning in the late nineteenth century and during the interwar period and postwar periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how educated Jewish observers struggled to understand the causes of the global immigration restriction that so impacted East European Jewry in the 1920s and 1930s, and uses their competing explanations, convictions, and uncertainties to reveal underlying structures of Jewish political understanding in the interwar period more broadly. Efforts to explain restriction, the ways in which it seemed both to target Jews and to be part of a general closure of the developed world, and questions of timing demanded reflection on the most fundamental questions of the interwar political order. Did state policies flow from economic reason, and did nationalisation, democratisation, and socialisation of domestic politics alter this causal pattern? In a world where closed borders were the default, what difference did statehood or statelessness make? What was the meaning and implication of the deployment of “race” in others' debates about restriction, and what role did global race-thinking play in determining population policies? What was the causal significance of specifically anti-Jewish animus, its nature, and the role of Jews' own choices in determining their situation? Analyzing a number of loci of Jewish social policy debate, the essay focuses particularly on the diasporist emigration activist Il'ya Dizhur, the Zionist sociologist Aryeh Tartakover, and the cooperative-movement activist Majer Pollner. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research often argues or implies that the First World War suddenly discontinued the age of Jewish mass migration and led to increased sedentarism. Indeed, the former main destinations like the USA drastically cut down on the arrival of East European Jews. This did not, however, result in the end of Jewish mass migration. This article will demonstrate that it rather led to manifold attempts to circumvent the newly introduced and increasingly exclusive measures, to a rising complexity of transnational movement patterns, and finally to the emergence of new destinations and Jewish communities all over the globe. This movement, however, was overshadowed and impacted by the almost global rise of xenophobia and fascism. Based on local histories, statistical and legal sources, as well as reports and communications by delegates of Jewish relief organizations, this article presents a social history of the intersection between global Jewish migration and politically motivated migration management. It leaves behind the focus on “departure” and “arrival” in Jewish migration history and elaborates on the relevance and dynamics of transmigration, the dominance of migrant networks and the complex relationship between national policies and migrants' agency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Based on the interviews David Boder conducted with Holocaust survivors in 1946, this article explores the realm of migration choices that were available to Jewish survivors in European Displaced Persons camps. The article argues that, aided by Jewish philanthropic and self-help organisations, many Displaced Persons had already established long-term strategies for their postwar lives by 1946. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical research on the Bund traditionally focuses on its programme and practices in Eastern Europe. But the Bund emerged as one of the most important parties in Jewish history only in the age of mass migration. Many Bundists emigrated to the New World. This article asks for transfers of concepts and practices they made in this process of migration. By looking at the entanglements of the Bund in Eastern Europe with circles in the United States and Argentina it argues for a closer observation of the transnational relations between source and destination communities. Especially through their production and usage of memory and history, Bundists strongly contributed to the global presence of Jewish secularism through their distinct and influential practice of Yiddish culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Jewish Workers' Bund was shattered by the Holocaust, not only physically but spiritually. Its membership was decimated and its philosophical foundation was thought by many to have been discredited. Several thousand Bundist survivors made their homes in countries with liberal and democratic traditions, and tried to build new Bundist movements. This essay focuses on how Bundists in two of these countries – the United States and Australia – sought to adapt aspects of traditional Bundist thought, particularly as they confronted issues surrounding race that differed greatly from racial issues in Europe. It helps shed new light on the ultimate fate of the Bund and gives a sense of how local political and cultural circumstances came to shape a newly decentralised, and barely breathing, Bundism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Glancing at the Jewish spaces in contemporary Germany, an occasional observer would probably be startled. Since the Russian Jewish migration of the 1990s, Germany's Jewish community has come to be the third-largest in Europe. Synagogues, Jewish community centres, and Jewish cultural events have burgeoned. There is even talk about a “Jewish renaissance” in Germany. However, many immigrants claim that the resurrection of Jewish life in Germany is “only a myth,” “an illusion.” This paper is part of a project exploring the processes of the reconstruction of Jewish identities and Jewish communal life by Russian Jewish immigrants in Germany. The focus of this paper is on the stereotypes of Jews and Jewishness evident in immigrants' perceptions and imaginings of their physical gathering spaces – the Jewish community centres (Gemeinden). Focusing on the images that haunt a particular place, I seek to shed light upon the difficulties of re/creating Jewish identity and life among the Russian Jewish immigrants in contemporary Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on ethnic life stories written by early twentieth-century Romanian-Jewish immigrants to the US, and attempts to determine to what extent these narratives correspond to the generalised pattern of ethnic life writing at the time, as well as what particularises their texts. I analyse the memoirs of M.E. Ravage, Konrad Bercovici, Maurice Samuel and Edward G. Robinson, all of them born at the close of the nineteenth century but publishing their memoirs at different moments in history. I first trace the images of Romania that spring from these texts, ranging from the legal and educational discrimination portrayed by M.E. Ravage and Edward G. Robinson, to the existence of pogroms and other anti-Jewish feelings foregrounded by Konrad Bercovici, and to the nostalgic shtetl atmosphere evoked in Maurice Samuel's books. I then consider the place of the US in these authors' writings, starting from its utopian image prior to emigration to its more complex image after settlement in the new location. Finally, I show how their return journeys to Romania at different moments in time and the persisting prejudiced atmosphere they found there contributed in all cases to these authors becoming strong supporters of American democracy and its openness to critical debate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the late nineteenth century the history of Russian Jewry has been one of contradictory trends: on the one hand, large-scale migration and resettlement (both abroad and in the major industrial and cultural centres of Russia/the USSR/the former Soviet Union [FSU]); and, on the other hand, attempts to (re-)establish a full Jewish life and adapt it to changing conditions. The refuseniks – a small but notable group of Soviet Jewish activists who were prevented by the Soviet authorities from leaving the country for Israel – melded both trends. Despite extensive literature on this subject, we are still lacking satisfactory answers to a few important questions, dealing with the factors in the creation of the Zionist refusenik community, its organisational frameworks, and the social and political legacy of the refuseniks for Jewish communities of the post-Soviet space and the “new Russian Jewish diaspora.” This article addresses refusenik associations in Moscow and in some other places as a “community in the making,” which between the early 1970s and mid 1980s, a period of Jewish national awakening in the USSR, experienced a process of gradual transformation from an amorphous semi-structured entity to a more institutionalised structure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses whether the Jews leaving Tsarist Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, part of the transatlantic mass migration of the end of the nineteenth century, became subject to state control. Most emigrants from Eastern Europe in this period passed through the ports of Bremen, Hamburg and Antwerp. In the 1880s only a few emigrants were not welcome in America and sent back to Europe, but economic competition and the supposed health threat immigrants posed meant the US became the trendsetter in implementing protectionist immigration policy in the 1890s. More emigrants were returned to Europe because of the newly erected US federal immigration control stations, but many more were denied the possibility to leave for the United States by the remote control mechanism which the American authorities enforced on the European authorities and the shipping companies. At the Russian-German border and the port of Antwerp, shipping companies stopped transit migrants who were deemed medically unacceptable by American standards. The shipping companies became subcontractors for the American authorities as they risked heavy fines if they transported unwanted emigrants. The Belgian authorities refused to collaborate with the Americans and defended their sovereignty, and made shipping companies in the port of Antwerp solely responsible for the American remote migration control. Due to the private migration control at the port of Antwerp transit migrants became stuck in Belgium. The Belgian authorities wanted these stranded migrants to return 'home.' It seems that the number of stranded migrants remained manageable as the Belgian authorities did not make the shipping companies pay the bill. They were able to get away by making some symbolic gestures and these migrants were supported by charitable contributions from the local Jewish community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented to the issue of the journal that discusses topics such as European Jewish immigration, Jews in the Soviet Union, and multilingual scholarship.