Jewish Diaspora Essay

Transnationalism is defined as as “the process by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement.”(lecture Mixtects). When a native person becomes a transnational they are then participating in sustaining their culture and memories where ever they travel. Transnationalism implies that native migrants continue to be involved in the life

Diaspora is the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral home land or in this case a scattered population whose origin lies within a smaller geographic location. The poem “Diaspora” by Chelsea Dingman ventures through the journey of a Ukrainian girl leaving her country and the in the pride she receives from that journey and her heritage. The poem focuses around the hardships that are included in taking this journey and how she lose so much, the feelings of despair and weakness is all she has left.

In her book Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship, May Joseph explores the issues of migrancy and displacement among modern peoples. She contends that citizenship “is not organic but must be acquired

To begin it is helpful to understand that the word “migrant” is a rather contested concept, one that changes over time, and varies depending on the criteria used to assign it.(Raghuram & Erel, 2014, p.133)

The scattering a Jews beyond Israel has been a reoccurring pattern of events in history. Essential Jewish practice and creation of cultural identity has formed far from Jerusalem, despite the Torah’s vital theme of longing for the Promise Land. The idea that Jews are outsiders is ingrained in Jewish culture and identity Jerusalem faces being exiled too because it is “merely an extension of Western colonialism,” from its neighboring countries. However, today Jews are starting to close the chapter in history of exile and statelessness by returning to the Promise Land but this doesn’t mean that the Diaspora is coming to an end. Jewish history has continuous movement that caused great triumph and sadness. The issue that Jews have faced for so long is not having a home, power, and a sense of belonging because of the continuous exiling and persecution they face, at home and away, while still trying to create an identity for themselves.

At its most fundamental, diaspora focuses on the physical movement of people. However, comprehensive scholarship elevates “diaspora” beyond

No diasporic community manifests all of these characteristics or shares with the same intensity an identity with its scattered ancestral kin. In many respects, diasporas are not actual but imaginary and symbolic communities and political constructs; it is we who often call them into being.” (Palmer)

Immigration, “to come into a country of which one is not a native for permanent residence”(Merriam-Webster). In The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini utilizes Baba’s personality to educate the audience on the difficulties of immigrating. People who have never left their country don’t know the difficult tasks that immigrants have to face. Leaving your country is already a big task by itself, especially if there are people who wish you harm. When you are finally safe you start to miss people you left behind. Immigrants also have difficulty immersing themselves into a different culture.

Transnational communities are sometimes referred to as Diasporas: globally dispersed populations whose origins lie in a single homeland or set of linked homelands. Diasporas have become a common feature of the common world. One of the effects of the growing salience of such identities in some people’s lives is to reduce the sense of affiliation to the states in which those diasporic populations reside. In John’s case, the majority of his family migrated to Australia, leaving him with only small familial links in his home country of England. “I’ve been able to keep in contact regularly through writing letters, and I’ve been back to England about 2-3 times since migrating to Australia to visit the extended family, and they’ve been here to see us too.

Within the frames of the new reality, those immigrants face myriad problems associated with finding their way to cope with the assumed expectations and identifying their relatively split identities. This leads to a multi-level conflict that results from the conception or definition of national identity according to the visionary of state versus the socio-cultural diversity reflected in real life.

The Jewish Diaspora is a phrase used to describe the exile of Jews from their homeland and the way of life they created in other parts of the world in response to their exile. Some returned to their homeland after the Babylonians were defeated by the Persians, but many remained dispersed. Throughout history, Israel remained governed by foreign empires including the Babylonian, Persian, Greek Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine Empires, Islamic and Christian crusaders, the Ottoman Empire, and eventually the British Empire. The first exile served as a major turning point in the fight for Israel, because the Jews no longer had their land and from this point forward were engaged in a constant struggle to gain back their homeland lasting all the way until Israel’s

The question of identity is always a difficult one for those living in a culture or group, yet belonging to another. This difficulty frequently remains in the mind of most immigrants, especially the second generations who were born in a country other than their parents. Younger generations feel as if they are forced to change to fit the social standards despite previous culture or group. Furthermore those who wish to adopt a new identity of a group or culture haven't yet been fully accepted by original members due to their former identity.

In fact, the exile and the student and scholar narratives illustrate a different transnational dimension than that of the migrant worker account. The connections made by the exile and student and scholar immigrant experiences are specific to the Indonesian inter-immigrant relations and the interaction with the people in the host country. The transnational dimensions these Indonesian immigrants have are more as the diaspora which simply refers to the people living outside their home country (Safran 1991: 83; Ang 2003: 142). The Indonesian im/migrant experiences as an exile automatically erases the label transmigrant because an exile is characterized as uprooted, dismissing homeland connection to the immigrant (Chambert-Loir 2016; Baumann 2010). By this, the exiles only have a single connection, the attachment to the host country/ies. While to be identified as transmigrant, the immigrants need to maintain multiple links between home and host country (Glick Schiller et al. 1995; Jones 1995; Heisler 2000). The connection to the home country for the exile is embodied in the forms of memories and nostalgia imbued by a sense of displacement which are commonly found in most migrant writing (Zaman 75). In Cerita dari Tanah Pengasingan (Stories from the Exile), Sobron Aidit laments on his homeland nostalgia as seen in the quotation

The diaspora Indian is not just the Punjabi expatriate but also people from other ethnic backgrounds, representing young technocratic Indians who travel to other countries all the time thus creating a more eclectic, flexible and more enduring diaspora. AvtarBrah writes that, “at the heart of the notion of diaspora is the image of a journey” and “diasporic journeys are essentially about settling down, about putting roots elsewhere” (McLeod 209). The Bong Connection is about two such journeys; one in search of roots and the other of planting new ones in a new

In this essay, I used the case of the Kurdish diaspora to prove my point. As I mentioned earlier, the concept of transnational politics entails three important features. First, there is interaction between societal actors of different nation states. This was the case as the Kurdish diaspora is scattered all over the world, but kept in contact. Second, it bypasses the institution of government. This is also the case, because the Kurdish diaspora do not have a homeland and consequently no government. Third and last, the interactions affect government and states. This requirement is also met because of the possibilities the Kurds have to influence their homeland and host countries’ policies. Thus, due to the fact that the Kurdish diaspora meets the three requirements it provides a perfect example of transnational politics and is a good example of the difference between international relations and transnational