Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora [Paperback]

The mass migration of East European Jews and their resettlement in cities throughout Europe, the United States, Argentina, the Middle East and Australia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries not only transformed the demographic and cultural centers of world Jewry, it also reshaped Jews' understanding and performance of their diasporic identities. Rebecca Kobrin's study of the dispersal of Jews from one city in PolandBialystokdemonstrates how the act of migration set in motion a wide range of transformations that led the migrants to imagine themselves as exiles not only from the mythic Land of Israel but most immediately from their east European homeland. Kobrin explores the organizations, institutions, newspapers, and philanthropies that the Bialystokers created around the world and that reshaped their perceptions of exile and diaspora.

Kobrin (Jewish history, Columbia) analyzes the Jewish migration experience from Bialystok in the 19th and 20th centuries. Adopting a transnational perspective, she seeks to place Jewish migration from eastern Europe to the US in a broader global context in which the US is not a land unto itself, but one of several locales in which migration and integration occurred. In doing so, Kobrin argues that Bialystok Jews constructed a transnational self-perception, melding together their eastern European Jewish heritage and their new homelands. They subsequently expressed this new sense of identity through cultural and philanthropic organizations focused on Bialystok emigrants and their descendants as a specific group with their own specific diaspora experience. This migration, she concludes, 'radically revised and reconfigured the ideological cornerstones of modern Jewish life.' Kobrin's study builds upon previous work by scholars like Nancy Green who utilize a divergent analysis of migrationnot studying merely one destination, but comparing the experiences of immigrants in different cities or countries. Kobrin's well-writtlÓ)