Jews in the Americas

What is it about?

Recurrent conceptual concerns raise a primary question—how should the American be approached: as one, two, or many? As a reality, an idea, and a concept, the term “the Americas” is not univocal since it covers very different regions. As a territorial, geopolitical, economic, social, multiethnic, and cultural entity, it can be outlined with a high level of generalization while also paying concrete attention to its components. The Americas are simultaneously a single ideal entity and many realities. The Jewish experience in different subregions and countries of the Americas is equally pluralistic. Its internal diversity depends on the variety of contexts, time, and modalities with which it was inserted in the regional and international scenario. Still, it carries an inner diversity inherited from its long historical and sociological trajectory in and outside the continent. Significant diversity prevails among and within commonalities—convergences and divergences arising from the globally interconnected continent and the Jewish ethno-national/transnational diaspora. This chapter analyzes the structures and trends of the establishment, growth, and transformation of the Jewish presence in the Americas. Under such a conceptual and thematic umbrella, this chapter first addresses the Americas, reviewing theoretical approaches to the continent and the frameworks for studying Jews as a collective that is territorially dispersed and maintains shared symbolic bonds locally and at a distance. After outlining several fundamental characteristics of the general continental societal environment and its internal differentiation, the second part focuses on Jewish communities in North and Latin America in the context of world Jewry. Migration flows were central to the relocation of Jewish life. Specific interactions between social constraints and opportunities in a given country or region and the unique character of Jewish backgrounds and integration patterns stay as a background. Selected sociohistorical aspects relevant to the development of Jewish immigration, settlement, and community formation and change are analyzed. The third part analyzes the current changing patterns of collective life and community, while addressing new trends. The changes in the perimeters and scope of organized communities and the encounters and intersections they favored stimulated similitudes and differences under the impact of globalization, transnationalism, and the changing profile of the diaspora. Lessons from the past may help outline future paths.

Featured Image

Photo by Leon Overweel on Unsplash

Photo by Leon Overweel on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Our analysis contributes to new conceptual approaches and a better understanding of the past and ongoing changing trends of Jewish life in The Americas. While the continental regions are more interdependent than in the past, we are witnessing different paths of restructuring regional and national processes and their Jewish presence. Although experiencing serious challenges, democracies in the North and democratization in the South may lead Jews and Jewish life to a shift from the focus on differences to a broader focus that encompasses emerging civic-national commonalities and transnational links. Various societies and communal sectors express prevailing inner divisions in differing institutional capabilities. The existing forms of organization are subject to questions and the search for new structures and behavioral patterns. Should we think of a scenario of a world Jewish network society articulated between diverse focal places? A Jewish world might coalesce in global and integral terms based on networks, relationships, links, and interactions that include voluntary and compulsory frameworks, primordial and elective foci of identities, and associative and institutionalized structures. It would be a world where plural identities would claim differentiated approaches to individuals and institutional orders as agents of change. Future patterns of migration, geographical mobility, and its implications, the reshaping of existing and newly created communities, the expansion of material and symbolic boundaries, and their redefinition are all processes that will influence the profile of Jewish life in the Americas. In our current contemporary world, increasingly complex, sustained research that crosses regions and disciplines becomes a valuable tool for scientific and social advancement.

Perspectives