Reframing Jewish mobilities: de-nationalized/non-territorialized, racialized, and hybrid identities among Israeli immigrants in Canada

ABSTRACT

In this article, I share the voices of diverse Jewish-Israeli immigrants who cross racial, cultural, and political boundaries as they discuss their cultural diasporic identities and belongings in Israel, in Toronto, and elsewhere along their personal and familial journeys of migration. Participants’ narratives illustrate that the geographies of Jewish diaspora are not simple locations in time and space that can be mapped based on the mobility from one nation state to another. Some migrants understand their Jewish diasporic identities in de-nationalized, cosmopolitan term, while others understand their Jewish diasporic identities as being inherently multiple, fluid, and hybrid. However, what is common among the participants is that they require scholars to stretch and re-form ethno-national Zionist geographies of social care, kinship, and belonging that are emphasized in the existing literature on the Israeli diaspora.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• diaspora
• race
• nation
• Jews
• Israel

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to David Fisher, Krysta Pandolfi, Minelle Mahtani, and Deborah Leslie for their willingness to read drafts and offer substantive critique.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. While the term ‘ethnicity’ has come to be employed without much discussion in most of the literature on Jewish and Israeli ‘diasporas’ and in a number of very different ways (ethnicity is used to describe different divisions between Jews, particularly between Mizrahim (or Sephardim) and Ashkenazim; to distinguish between immigrants from Israel and Jews in host societies/from other parts of the world; and to denote a division between ‘Jews’ as a monolithic ethnic group and other, non-Jewish ethnic groups in receiving societies and globally), Jewish racial diversity and Israeli immigrants racialized identities and experiences (both within Israel and in host societies) are seldom acknowledged. A few studies address how the so called ethno-class divisions between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews within contemporary Israeli society play out upon migration to North America (Gold 2001, 2002; Lev Ari 2005; Rebhun and Lev-Ari 2010; 144–146).

2. The term ‘Mizrahi’ is a category of identity commonly used by Israelis to identify all non-European Jews in Israel since the state’s establishment in 1948. Arab-Jewish is a critical discursive concept that aims at disturbing the artificial separation of ‘Jewish history’ from Arab/Middle Eastern history, and at highlighting the ‘Arabness’ of the Jews who arrived in Israel from Arab/Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa (Shohat 2003; Shenhav 2003).