Формирование и идентичность “русского Израиля” в зеркале израильской социологии

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Date
2011
Authors
Ханин, Зеев
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Abstract
The breakdown of the Soviet Union and subsequent mass Jewish emigration from the USSR and its successor states has turned Israel into the largest center of Russian-speaking Jewry in the world. Since 1989, Israel, now a country of over 7,500,000 people, has taken in more than one million former Soviet Jews and their family members. Immigrants from the former Soviet Union are the second largest group, after native Israelis, of the Israeli Jewish population. This community demonstrates a sophisticated system of internal social, political, cultural, and identity divisions and cleavages, some of which were “imported” from the countries of origin and the diversity others adopted locally. This also included models of the immigrants’ integration into Israeli society-“assimilation,” isolation, and “integration without acculturation”, which had a certain correlation with their basic ethnic national identity models, which we managed to identify in the course of our research: “universal Jewish”; (sub-) ethnic Jewish; “postmodern”, or double identity Jewish; and non-Jewish. However, the community-integrative trends were also obvious, and resulted in creation of the community’s framework, formed by leadership groups, numerous in-service institutions and structures, as well as extensive network of intra-communal formal and informal relations. All that also promoted a more autonomous view of many Russian speakers in regard to social and political issues and thus supported the relevant elements of the communal political infrastructure. Against this background, there was a transformation and development of ethnic, national, social religious and civic identity of FSU immigrants in Israel. Israeli sociologists in the course of resent two decades have made numerous more or less successful efforts to understand, explain, and model these trends. Special attention has been paid to two ethnic culture subgroups among “Russian” Israelis - “pure” Jews and persons of non-Jewish and mixed origin. The borderlines between these groups, as numerous studies showed, experienced considerable shift since the start of the “big Aliyah” from the FSU. A general conclusion was that by the end of the 1990s, the FSU immigrant society between those who identified themselves as “Israelis”, “Jews” and “Russians” in the proportion 30-35, 40-45; and about 25 percent respectively. And almost the same identity structure had place also a decade later. More careful analyses show, however, that despite the popular view, Russian, Jewish or Israeli identities arc not necessarily mutually exclusive, as far as Russianspeaking immigrants in Israel are concerned. We believe, that wile Jewishness and Russianness mean ethnic identification of the predominant parts of the “pure Jewish” and “mixed” FSU immigrant groups, respectively, Israeli identity means civic identification of both groups with the state more them anything else. Our conclusion is that the desire of FSU immigrants to appropriate Israeli culture while at the same time maintaining their own culture; a belief in the possibility of integration into the host society culture while simultaneously preserving the culture of the country and community of origin is still a dominant trend among Russian-speaking Israelis.
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идентичность, Израиль, социология, СССР, СНГ, интеграция, русскоязычные граждане, статья
Citation
Ханин З. Формирование и идентичность "русского Израиля" в зеркале израильской социологии / Зеев Ханин // Українська орієнталістика : спеціальний випуск з юдаїки. - 2011. - С. 325-352.