Secularization of immigration policy vs. religion's influence on integration: Israel's non‐Jewish Jews' immigration in a comparative perspective

This article deals with the complex relationship between religion and immigration in Western countries, with an emphasis on Israel. The main argument it presents is that the legal procedures of immigration, i.e. laws relating to the acquisition of civil status, have undergone dramatic secularization, while religion's influence is expressed in the social and cultural aspects of the integration of immigrants belonging to religious minorities. This division reinforces the classical theory of secularization, as the formal boundaries of nations are not subject to religious affiliations, but it also supports the theories of competition and complementation between religion and secularism in the social sphere. The tension in the Israeli case between the immigration, naturalization and integration of non‐Jewish Jews, who are part of the extended Jewish population that is not defined by religious parameters, confirms this thesis. The immigration of hundreds of thousands of non‐Jewish Jews' under the Law of Return based on ethno‐national‐secular parameters is an ultimate expression of the secularization of Jewish nationality. On the other hand, the state's encouragement of non‐Jewish immigrants to convert to Judaism so that they can better assimilate into Jewish society signifies the importance of religion in the social integration aspect.     

Whispers from Below: Zionist Secret Diplomacy,Terrorism and British Security Inside and Out of Palestine, 1944–47

This article discusses the global aspect of Zionist terrorism against Britain during 1944–47, relying on recently declassified documents and Hebrew records. Britain struggled against a global terrorist campaign which attacked British targets in Palestine, Egypt and the wider Middle East, continental Europe and the United Kingdom. This article refutes claims by other authors that British rule in Palestine failed because of intelligence failure. Intelligence failure was limited, but so were successes. British intelligence produced reasonable assessments on Zionist politics, but could do little to prevent violence without the cooperation of the Jewish Agency. Success was driven by a combination of signals intelligence, secret agents, one key defector, interrogations and intelligence shared by the Jewish Agency. Failure resulted from a weak understanding of the Zionist underground and from lack of cooperation by Agency authorities. Normally Britain's junior partner, the Jewish Agency was, by 1945, struggling against British restrictions on Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine. Its militia, Haganah, turned to cooperation with terrorists. British intelligence predicted that such developments could occur, but failed to identify them as they unfolded. Britain's dependence on Zionist security intelligence was a key vulnerability that never was addressed by policy-makers. The Jewish Agency leveraged its cooperation, applying it to prevent terrorism in Egypt and the United Kingdom, where violent incidents would harm the Zionist cause. It had little reason to prevent terrorism in the key battlegrounds of Palestine or Europe, and so terrorism harmed Britain's will to continue fighting. The root cause of Britain's failure was at the policy level. Despite known weaknesses, government never assessed its own will and ability to uphold restrictions on Zionist immigration, or to fight terrorism, as against the Yishuv's will and ability to struggle against Britain.     

From Yekke to Zionist: Narrative strategies in life stories of Central European Jewish women immigrants to Mandate Palestine

This article examines the life stories of Jewish women who emigrated from Central Europe to Palestine in the 1930s, on the basis of memoirs written, or transmitted orally, many years later. Although the experience of migration could have caused a crisis in self-perception, their memoirs show that they managed to construct their lives (and identities) anew in a coherent way by means of two main narrative axes – continuity and meaning. The axis of continuity served to establish a bridge between the women's lives, before and after emigration, while the axis of meaning, focusing on the Zionist meta-narrative, provided justification for the choices they made. This discussion illuminates how Central European Jewish women coped with the challenges of immigration to Palestine, both those that were unique to the experience of aliyah to Eretz Yisrael and those that were similar to the challenges faced by immigrants in other times and places.     

Socio‐spatial mix and inter‐ethnic attitudes: Jewish newcomers and Arab‐Jewish issues in the Galilee

Urban and regional planners tend to recommend spatial mix of socially diverse populations as an appropriate strategy to achieve social equity and improve inter‐group relations. However, the actual impact of such a mix on social relations in general, and inter‐ethnic attitudes in particular, has been subject to on‐going, yet inconclusive, debates among social scientists. This paper adds to the study of these issues by examining the inter‐ethnic attitudes of residents in Jewish ‘new settlements’ (elsewhere termed ‘community settlements’, or ‘mitzpim'), which were established some 15 years ago among the Arab villages of Israel's central Galilee region. We found that despite certain strands of ethnocentrism, most Jewish settlers hold significantly more moderate views on Arab‐Jewish issues than: (a) the general (non‐Galilee) Jewish public in Israel; and (b) the region's Arab population. The influence of the socio‐spatial mix on the moderation of hostile attitudes, at least among the Jews, is analyzed and explained by comparing our data with the findings of previous research on the topic. On the basis of that comparison we conclude that the Arab — Jewish mix in the Galilee, along with socio‐economic characteristics of the Jewish population and the existence of a ‘penetrating group phenomenon’, have combined to moderate Jewish attitudes in the study region. Planners are called upon to use this knowledge.     

With a Little Help from Our Feds: Understanding State Immigration Enforcement Policy Adoption in American Federalism

Since 2001, state governments have adopted 287(g) cooperative immigration enforcement agreements with the federal government that authorize their law enforcement personnel to assist in detaining violators of civil federal immigration law. Employing a theoretical framework drawn from theories of policy adoption, intergovernmental relations, and immigration research, we test which state‐level political, sociodemographic, geographic, and economic determinants influence states to enter into such a cooperative agreement. In addition to finding that the partisanship of a state's governor, a state's effort on public welfare, and an increase in a state's percentage of Hispanics are related to the adoption of a cooperative immigration enforcement policy, we found evidence of “steam valve federalism” working not at the state level as Spiro (1997) first theorized but at the local level. When a state's localities adopt immigration enforcement agreements with the federal government, the state itself is far less likely to adopt their own. Understanding the reasons states would adopt this type of policy sheds light on current trends in state immigration policy and their effect on future state/federal intergovernmental relations.     

Exile at home: A matter of being out of place

This article employs Hannah Arendt's theorizing about assimilation to consider how sovereign citizens of a nation state might nevertheless experience a sense of exile. It builds on Aziza Khazzoom's notion of a ‘chain of Orientalism’ to suggest that the assimilation of Europe's Jews to Enlightenment ideals has had ongoing repercussions among Jews in the modern state of Israel. The article focuses on what it means to be Jewish in terms of religious observance, and who feels at home in the Jewish state. Employing vignettes from recent ethnographic fieldwork, it raises questions about the modern nation state's capacity to create conditions in which its own ‘people’ can flourish. In this case, Israel has claimed to make it possible for the Jews to flourish, in Arendt's terms, ‘as Jews’, but it is far from clear what ‘as Jews’ would, could or should mean. This leads the author to suggest that Israel has a Jewish problem.     

Comics and the Demystification of France's Immigration ‘Problem’: Reading Christophe Dabitch's Immigrants

While universalism constitutes the foundation of French republicanism, public discourse and changes in immigration law have revealed that racial and/or ethnic discrimination and exclusion are necessary for cultural assimilation and for the protection of France's ‘universalist’ model. Studies have also shown that at least 40% of the French population is of foreign origin. So how has France justified the reconciliation of universalism and particularism (now referred to as communitarianism) in certain instances but not others? Christophe Dabitch's collaborative comic-book project, Immigrants (2010), aims to deconstruct the French republican narrative of universalism by using a popular medium that is both transcultural and transnational. An effective collage of visual styles, reproduced testimony and scholarship on immigration in France, Dabitch's album proposes writing an alternative French history of immigration and invites readers to question founding mythologies which have erected France as the country of human rights. This article has three objectives: to present Immigrants as a serious historical and artistic project on immigration; to critically examine this publication's purpose (can comics effectively demonstrate that immigration is a common but significant aspect of nation building?); and to explore how comics can positively re-imagine France as a métropole cosmopolite, as an international point of convergence.     

A selected and annotated bibliography for 1988: The history of Zionism and the state of Israel

The option of aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel) poses a continuous challenge to any attempt to forge a diasporic version of Zionist ideology. This challenge grew twofold during the years immediately preceding and following the founding of the State of Israel. The article examines this challenge through the lens of Abba Hillel Silver, the leader of American Jewry during the period in question. While the Israeli leadership saw aliyah as a litmus test, indicating the degree to which Zionist leaders abroad were committed to the cause, for Silver the question was not one of dual loyalties between competing American and Israeli citizenships but a dilemma of inner American-Jewish identity. It is through this American-Jewish perspective that Silver's grappling with both the option of his own aliyah, and the importance of aliyah per se in American Zionism should be seen. An analysis of his views on the matter may illumine the evolving relations between diasporic transnationalism and homeland nationalism during the critical years when the homeland gains independence and sovereignty.     

Helping the enemy? Why transnational Jewish philanthropic foundations donate to Palestinian NGOs in Israel

ABSTRACT. This article asks why transnational Jewish donor organisations have been increasingly providing financial support to Palestinian social movements and NGOs in Israel when many of the main recipients are strong critics of the Jewish character of the state and act to promote Palestinian national claims within Israel. The article evaluates a number of plausible explanations, some generated by interest‐centric theories while others are driven by ideational underpinnings. The study concludes that the donors do not view the interests of the Jewish state and the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel (PAI) in zero‐sum terms. Having internalised liberal values of minority rights and pluralism in their countries of residence (mainly the United States), donating foundations believe that the development of the PAI is both normatively desirable and strengthens Israel as a whole because it facilitates the minority's integration into Israel's society and bolsters its civic culture, and therefore, it also contributes to the country's security. These findings are theoretically significant because they demonstrate how the interpretation of communal interest is strongly related to the normative social environment in which transnational activists operate.     

Skill,Migration and Gender in Australia and Canada: The Case of Gender-based Analysis

The shift away from family immigration and towards skilled immigration is one of the most important changes over the past decade in Australian immigration policy. Yet the implications of this shift for female applicants have remained largely unexplored. Skilled immigration has slipped by as a genderless story in which the androgynous skilled migrant is the central character and economists do most of the storytelling. This paper discusses the gender equality concerns raised by the policy shift towards skilled immigration. It argues that Australia's skilled immigration scheme disadvantages female applicants through its construction both of economic independence and ‘skill.’ A comparison with Canada's skilled migration law and regulations, which are audited by gender mainstreaming tools, is considered to ascertain what role, if any, gender-based analysis plays in identifying and rectifying the potential gender inequalities produced by skilled immigration selection.     

Orthodox violence: “Critique of Violence” and Walter Benjamin's Jewish political theology

This paper deals with the role of Judaism in Walter Benjamin's famous 1921 essay on violence and law, Zur Kritik der Gewalt. Despite the intense attention devoted to this essay, the role of Jewish myth in it has not yet been thoroughly explained. This study contends that the association between what Benjamin termed revolutionary violence and the Jewish messianic tradition, which plays a central role in the evaluation of Benjamin's text, is far more problematic than has hitherto been assumed, and poses a serious challenge, which has not been fully examined in its historical context. Second, this essay claims that the subversive elements that many have supposedly found in Benjamin's text and the attempts to link these elements to messianic traditions are also unconvincing. Third, the paper contextualizes Benjamin's thought within the framework of the Jewish political–theological debate of the period. It contends that Benjamin's theory of law and justice should be understood not as a revolutionary, anti-republican text, as has been generally accepted, but as a secularized conservative orthodox one. In doing so, it seeks to shed light not only on Benjamin's early thinking and its influences, but also on the neglected element of Jewish orthodoxy within the broader topic of political theology.     

The Shishakli assault on the Syrian Druze and the Israeli response,January–February 1954

This article addresses Syrian leader Adib al-Shishakli's assault on the Syrian Druze minority in the mid-1950s, the Syrian Druze reaction, and contemporaneous observations and reactions from both the Israeli government and the Israeli Druze community to Shishakli's assault. The events analyzed in this article provide insight into the difficulties and opportunities the Jewish state had in cultivating minority allies in a hostile region, on the one hand, and the dilemmas Middle Eastern minorities had in seeking out the regionally beleaguered Jewish state's support, on the other.     

Zionist identity and the British Mandate: Palestine's internment camps and the making of the Western native

This paper examines the relationship between British police officers, Jewish guards, and German internees in Palestine's internment camps during World War II. Using the reports of the Jewish guards, the paper investigates the role of Western‐identified actors in the Zionist identity‐making project. The reports evince a surprising rapport between the British and their German prisoners and the mistreatment of the Jewish guards by their British superiors. The paper analyses these Jewish accounts in the context of identity‐ and ethnic boundary‐making and argues that they illustrate Zionism's intent to construct itself as a Western but noncolonial movement and Zionists in Palestine as natives but not “Orientals.” The reports also reveal a breach between the formal hierarchy—British officers, Jewish guards, German internees—and the ethnic order, which situated British and Germans at the apex and the Jews at the bottom. The paper highlights the utility of researching group‐making interactions in different contexts to develop a more nuanced understanding of identity‐making processes.     

Between the General and the Particular: Reminiscences of Plato's Timaeus in Piotr Rawicz's Le sang du ciel

Piotr Rawicz's novel Le sang du ciel depicts a Jewish protagonist, Boris, who manages to escape the Nazi genocide and, as a result, doubts his own legitimacy to bear witness to the other Jews' fate during that period. His difficult relationships with the Jewish community find expression in an intertextual construction, founded on the ontocosmology developed in Plato's Timaeus. Boris uses—and sometimes perverts—Plato's world vision both to measure his own inauthenticity and to define new ways of creating a state of "fusion" with the "beings" surrounding him. Another technique to overcome Boris's inability to testify is the use of a frame narrative, which, moreover, sheds new light on the protagonist's identity as a witness.     

An unlikely alliance: the 1907 Ukrainian–Jewish electoral coalition

This paper contextualises a political alliance between Ukrainian and Jewish national activists in Austrian Galicia during the 1907 parliamentary elections, Austria's first elections with universal manhood suffrage. This alliance represented a milestone in the making of a new paradigm of Ukrainian–Jewish relations. Ironically, the Ukrainian and Jewish nationalists, portrayed elsewhere as staunch enemies, were uniquely able to overcome the profound social, religious, political, and cultural barriers separating the two communities. Ukrainian nationalists recognised the potential of a nationalised Jewish community to undermine Polish hegemony in Galicia, while some Zionists saw the potential to elect Jewish parliamentary representatives in rural Ukrainian districts where Poles and Jews competed for the districts' second mandate. The alliance mobilised the Ukrainian and Jewish electorate around shared slogans and goals. It was a qualified success, leading to a more powerful national Ukrainian faction as well as the first Zionist faction in any European parliament. Although the two sides failed to repeat the alliance in the subsequent elections in 1911, the coalition sparked a new sense of history for both communities. It created a pro‐Ukrainian discourse in Jewish politics, and a pro‐Zionist one in Ukrainian politics. The alliance also exposes Zionism as a response to the European‐wide nationalist revivalism rather than a reaction to rampant turn‐of‐the‐century racial anti‐Semitism.     

“Suffer Not the Evil One”: Unitarianism and the 1826 Maryland Jew Bill

The 1826 Maryland Jew Bill was the most protracted and heated fight over Jewish political rights in the United States. For eight years, in the legislature, in newspapers, and in elections, Marylanders debated whether Jews should be allowed to hold government office or positions of public trust, a struggle that garnered journalistic coverage from throughout the country. Historians have not explained why Maryland, a state with very few Jews in the early nineteenth century, was the site of the country's largest debate over their legal status. This study argues that Unitarianism, which did not claim many adherents in Maryland at the time of the Jew Bill but occupied an outsized role in the state's debates about religious rights and Christian orthodoxy, is a key part of the story of Jewish rights in Maryland; the state's unique experience with Unitarianism is one of the causes of the state's unique place in the story of Jewish rights in the United States.     

Liberal nationalism and Central American refugees: What is America's national responsibility?

In an era of unprecedented numbers of migrants from the global south to the global north, nationalism has become synonymous with liberal states' ethnocentric, xenophobic, and racist immigration policies. The Trump administration's treatment of Central American refugees has been taken as a prime example. By focusing on liberal cultural nationalism, this paper demonstrates that these prevailing perceptions about nationalism are unfounded. Although liberal cultural nationalism has been accused of endorsing restrictive immigration policies, the degree to which liberal cultural nationalism's immigration policies are restrictive is context dependent; under certain circumstances, liberal nationalism may call for relaxing immigration policies to admit certain types of immigrants by invoking the idea of national responsibility. Consequently, liberal cultural nationalism offers one of the strongest liberal arguments for admitting certain kinds of migrants from the global south. The Central American refugee crisis at the U.S. southern border is analysed as a case study to illustrate this.     

A transnational history of immigration restriction: Natal and New South Wales, 1896–97

This article investigates the creation of Natal's 1897 Immigration Restriction Act and traces the legislative connections between southern Africa and Australia. It describes Natal's anti-Indian agitation of 1896–97 and argues that the colony's government initially sought to solve the ‘Asiatic question’ by adopting a racial immigration bill passed in New South Wales in 1896. However, the threat of violent extra-legal action by white settlers convinced the Natal government to replace this bill with one that made no direct reference to race. Natal ministers realised that racial legislation would face constitutional obstacles and were anxious to enact a restrictive immigration law without delay. The new Act was partly modelled on American immigration legislation and, though not explicit on race, its educational test was primarily designed to restrict Indian immigration. The Natal law was in turn used as the basis for Australian immigration legislation. Given these transnational connections, Natal's response to the ‘Indian question’ should be placed in a global context.     

Fictions and artifices

This article is in part a critique of Laura Nader's position on the three jihads (as published in AT 31,4). The author argues that Nader's critique of the privileges afforded to Zionism, specifically the failure to prosecute foreign British‐Jewish enlistees who served in the Israel Defence Forces program (Mahal), under the Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870 is misconstrued in Law. It further maintains that Nader's obfuscation of the term jihad as a ‘catch all’ in the framework of Jewish Christian and Islamic war ethics (‘holy war’) ignores the independent development and uniqueness of these phenomena which are necessarily historically and substantively distinct. The prevalence of metaphorical language, notably the modern use and abuse of the terms ‘jihad’ and ‘crusade’, denigrates the agency of medieval Christians and Muslims at the same time as it exculpates the agency of man today.     

2. THE VICTIM'S VOICE AND MELODRAMATIC AESTHETICS IN HISTORY1

Saul Friedländer's recent Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination offers a brilliant new literary mode for historical representation of extreme events such as the Holocaust. He has produced an authoritative historical narrative of the Holocaust, within which he integrates the victims' authentic voices, as recorded (mostly) in their contemporary writings. This article offers a comparative assessment of Friedländer's achievement with regard to the integration of Jewish sources into the historical account. It begins with a contextualization of Friedländer's book within a framework that compares the ways in which Jewish sources are addressed by different historiographical approaches. In the second part it seeks to contextualize analytically and critically Friedländer's concept of “disbelief”—a concept by which he defines the role of the “victims’ voices” in his narrative. I claim that in our current “era of the witness,” set within a culture addicted to the “excessive,” the voices of the victims and the witnesses appear to have lost their radical political and ethical force. They seem no longer to bear the excess of history, and can thus hardly claim to be the guardians of disbelief. Excess and disbelief have thus become the most commonplace cultural topos. In our current culture, I contend, the excessive voices of the victims have, to some extent, exchanged their epistemological, ontological, and ethical revolutionary function for an aesthetic one. They operate according to the pleasure principle in order to bring us, the consumers of Holocaust images, the most expected image of the “unimaginable,” which therefore generates a melancholic pleasure and involves the narrative in melodramatic aesthetics. The article concludes by briefly suggesting some guidelines for an alternative approach to the study of contemporary Jewish Holocaust sources.