A collection of articles based on a symposium held at Brandeis University.

Russians in Cold War Australia explores the time during the Cold War when Russian displaced persons, including former Soviet citizens, were amongst the hundreds of thousands of immigrants given assisted passage to Australia and other Western countries in the wake of the Second World War. With the Soviet Union and Australia as enemies, skepticism surrounding the immigrants’ avowed anti-communism introduced new hardships and challenges. This book examines Russian immigration to Australia in the late 1940s and 1950s, both through their own eyes and those of Australia's security service (ASIO), to whom all Russian speakers were persons of interest.

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.

For over forty years, Cold War concerns about the threat of communism shaped the contours of refugee and asylum policy in the United States, and the majority of those admitted as refugees came from communist countries. In the post-Cold War period, a wider range of geopolitical and domestic interests influence which populations policymakers prioritize for admission. The Refugee Challenge in Post-Cold War America examines the actors and interests that have shaped refugee and asylum policy since 1989. Policymakers are now considering a wider range of populations as potentially eligible for protection: victims of civil unrest, genocide, trafficking, environmental upheaval, and gender-based discrimination, among others. Many of those granted protected status since 1989 would never have been considered for admission during the Cold War. Among the challenges of the post-Cold War era are the growing number of asylum seekers who have petitioned for protection at a port of entry and are backlogging the immigration courts. Concerns over national security have also resulted in deterrence policies that have raised important questions about the rights of refugees and the duties of nations. María Cristina García evaluates the challenges of reconciling international humanitarian obligations with domestic concerns for national security.

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.

This book deftly extends previous research on post-1965 immigration to the United States in order to examine the cultural, socioeconomic, structural, and political adaptation of Eastern European immigrants after 1991. Also, the book engages in a systematic examination of adaptation experiences through the lenses of existing theories of adaptation, and fills a gap in the literature on this understudied immigrant population. Using the latest quantitative data, Nina Michalikova contributes to the field of immigration studies by revealing the diverse adaptation experiences of contemporary American immigrants through cross-country and cross-group comparisons.

This collection examines various aspects of Jewish migration within, from and to eastern Europe between 1880 and the present. It focuses on not only the wide variety of factors that often influenced the fateful decision to immigrate, but also the personal experience of migration and the critical role of individuals in larger historical processes. Including contributions by historians and social scientists alongside first-person memoirs, the book analyses the historical experiences of Jewish immigrants, the impact of anti-Jewish violence and government policies on the history of Jewish migration, the reception of Jewish immigrants in a variety of centres in America, Europe and Israel, and the personal dilemmas of those individuals who debated whether or not to embark on their own path of migration. By looking at the phenomenon of Jewish migration from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and in a range of different settings, the contributions to this volume challenge and complicate many widely-held assumptions regarding Jewish migration in modern times. In particular, the chapters in this volume raise critical questions regarding the place of anti-Jewish violence in the history of Jewish migration as well as the chronological periodization and general direction of Jewish migration over the past 150 years. The volume also compares the experiences of Jewish immigrants to those of immigrants from other ethnic or religious communities. As such, this collection will be of much interest to not only scholars of Jewish history, but also researchers in the fields of migration studies, as well as those using personal histories as historical sources. This book was originally published as a special issue of East European Jewish Affairs.

The most comprehensive surveys ever undertaken of Jews in Russia and Ukraine show that their sense of Jewishness is powerful but detached from religion. Their understandings of Jewishness differ from those of Jews elsewhere and create tensions in their interactions with other Jews, especially in Israel. This book examines in depth post-Soviet Jews' attitudes toward religion, intermarriage, emigration, anti-Semitism, and rebuilding Jewish life.

The United States is truly a nation of immigrants, or as the poet Walt Whitman once said, a nation of nations. Spanning the time from when the Europeans first came to the New World to the present day, the new Immigration to the United States set conveys the excitement of these stories to young people. Beginning with a brief preface to the set written by general editor Robert Asher that discusses some of the broad reasons why people came to the New World, both as explorers and settlers, each book's narrative highlights the themes, people, places, and events that were important to each immigrant group. In an engaging, informative manner, each volume describes what members of a particular group found when they arrived in the United States as well as where they settled. Historical information and background on the various communities present life as it was lived at the time they arrived. The books then trace the group's history and current status in the United States. Each volume includes photographs and illustrations such as passports and other artifacts of immigration, as well as quotes from original source materials. Box features highlight special topics or people, and each book is rounded out with a glossary, timeline, further reading list, and index.

Reveals the mass mobilization tactics that helped free Soviet Jews and reshaped the Jewish American experience from the Johnson era through the Reagan–Bush years What do these things have in common? Ingrid Bergman, Passover matzoh, Banana Republic®, the fitness craze, the Philadelphia Flyers, B-grade spy movies, and ten thousand Bar and Bat Mitzvah sermons? Nothing, except that social movement activists enlisted them all into the most effective human rights campaign of the Cold War. The plight of Jews in the USSR was marked by systemic antisemitism, a problem largely ignored by Western policymakers trying to improve relations with the Soviets. In the face of governmental apathy, activists in the United States hatched a bold plan: unite Jewish Americans to demand that Washington exert pressure on Moscow for change. A Cold War Exodus delves into the gripping narrative of how these men and women, through ingenuity and determination, devised mass mobilization tactics during a three-decade-long campaign to liberate Soviet Jews—an endeavor that would ultimately lead to one of the most significant mass emigrations in Jewish history. Drawing from a wealth of archival sources including the travelogues of thousands of American tourists who smuggled aid to Russian Jews, Shaul Kelner offers a compelling tale of activism and its profound impact, revealing how a seemingly disparate array of elements could be woven together to forge a movement and achieve the seemingly impossible. It is a testament to the power of unity, creativity, and the unwavering dedication of those who believe in the cause of human rights.