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The crumbling of the USSR has set Russian-speaking Jews free to emigrate. From the threat of antisemitism to economic disaster, their "good reasons" to do so were numerous and within one and a half decade most of them moved out and scattered throughout the world. This book is about the million that settled in Israel, the half million now in the US and the 200.000 who settled in Germany.
This book presents the comparative work of an international team of researchers which delves into the building of communities, the formulation of collective identities and the articulation of public discourse by people who, after eighty years of Marxism-Leninism and compulsory removal from Jewish culture, are now reconstructing their ethnicity.
In every place, they face contrasting challenges and as a whole, constitute an ideal case for the study of the making of contemporary transnational diasporas.
List of contents
Preface
PART A: BUILDING A TRANSNATIONAL DIASPORA
Chapter 1: Collective construction
Chapter 2: The shake-up of Russian Jewry
Chapter 3: Research Methodology
PART B: BUILDING COMMUNITIES
Chapter 4: When ethnicity becomes national and vice-versa: Israel
Chapter 5: A new American Jewry
Chapter 6: Russian Jews in Germany
Chapter 7: Communities compared
PART C: COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES
Chapter 8: RSJs' images and self-images in Israel
Chapter 9: RSJs images and self-images in America
Chapter 10: RSJs' images and self-images in Germany
Chapter 11: Divergent and Convergent Identities
Chapter 12: RSJs' distancing from "others"
PART D: MEDIA DISCOURSE
Chapter 13: RSJs' press and in the Press - Israel
Chapter 14: RSJs' Press and in the Press - USA
Chapter 15: RSJs' Press and in the Press - Germany
Chapter 16: RSJs' Press and in the Press - In Comparative Perspective
PART E: PRACTICAL AND THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
Chapter 17: The phases of collective construction
Chapter 18: "Jewishness" versus "Russianness"?
Chapter 19: RSJs in perspective
Addenda
Addendum 1: The Experience of Non-Jewish "Russian" Immigrants in Israel
Addendum 2: Policy-making perspectives
Appendices
Appendix 1: SAM survey and Measures
Appendix 2: The media analysis: classification System
Bibliography
The authors
Report
" (...) Building a Diaspora: Russian Jews in Isreal, Germany and the USA is an insightful and thought-provoking study. It makes a valuable contribution to the scholaship, and it is a necessary source for those who study ethnicity, immigration and diasporas in the epoch of globalization." - Maria Yelenevskaya, in: Studies in Contemporary Jewry. An Annual (2008), 266-269
