Preliminary Programme

Flint, Michigan, a boom-to-bust manufacturing center, has had a small, primarily Eastern European Jewish community since its beginnings as a carriage-making center in the 1890s. The birthplace of the General Motors corporation (GM) before World War I and of the United Autoworkers union three decades later, Flint has been a site of substantial in- and out-migration throughout the twentieth century. As in other manufacturing centers, few Flint Jews have held industrial jobs, clustering instead in commercial endeavors, especially retail sales, and the professions. Nevertheless, local Jews, like others in this one-industry autotown, have had their economic fortunes closely tied to that of GM.

Drawing on archival sources, oral histories, and photographs, this paper will examine two streams of Jewish refugees to Flint, comparing and contrasting the experiences of post-1936 European refugees and post-1953 displaced persons with that of post-1970 Soviet Jews. While the overall outlines of the experience of these two cohorts of Jewish refugees to the United States is clear, this case study offers a worthwhile perspective on several related issues. The two refugee cohorts entered Flint in dramatically different economic periods: the city was a model of prosperity during the 1940s and 1950s but began to deindustrialize by the mid 1970s. Yet in both periods, many of the newcomers stayed in Flint only briefly, most leaving the autotown to settle in larger, more cosmopolitan US cities. The refugees’ departures left a mixed legacy among Flint Jewry, which in both periods mobilized disproportionately large resources to resettle immigrants. In addition, Flint occupied a very particular position in related debates that emerged after 1973 concerning the OPEC oil embargo, US auto production, US-Israeli and US-Arab relations, and the Cold War. This position affected how Flint Jewry understood its place both in global relations and in the Jewish diaspora; galvanized a growing Zionist sentiment among local Jewry; and helped foster an anti-Zionist (and sometimes anti-Semitic) countertrend among some nonJews in Flint. Thus Soviet Jews entered a highly-charged political environment in the 1970s and 1980s, a situation very different from that of the 1950s. The post-World War II refugees had come to a city where local Jews largely supported and sometimes helped lead a burgeoning civil rights movement, a cause that drew some of its rhetoric from the struggle against fascism that the displaced persons embodied. (Show less)

The paper looks at the dilemna facing American Jews in 1989 when
the Soviet Union agreed to allow free emigration of its Jewish citizens.
While Israel tried to influence the emigres to immigrate to the Jewish State
more than 90 percent preferred the United States. This caused the United
States Government to rethink its policy of free admission for Soviet Jewish
emigres. While initially opposing a change in US policy the American Jewish
establishment came to support a quota on Soviet Jews. (Show less)

The refugee crisis of the 1980s marked a critical period for the city of Miami, Florida and her ethnic communities. Jewish Americans were no exception. As one of the most important ethnic voting blocks in the county – and in the state – Jews played a central role in local and national politics. Miami’s Jews were often among the most vocal advocates for the rights of minorities and refugees. Yet the 1980s proved a critical moment of decision-making. Torn apart by race riots in 1980, with a few short months the city of Miami experienced several renewed refugee crises as new waves of Cuban and Haitian refugees sought solace by way of Miami’s shores. Within a few years, renewed waves of Soviet Jewish refugees sought to make their homes in Miami as well.

For the most part, Jewish American Organizations – including the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) and others – were silent on the issue of Soviet Jewry, as Fred Lazin and others have demonstrated, preferring instead that the largest numbers of these refugees go to Israel rather than the United States. In Miami, however, this issue resulted in tremendous debate. Drawing on the records of Miami’s HIAS chapter, and a range of other publications and papers from Jewish community organization in Miami and South Florida, this paper then explores these debates in detail. The contours of this debate demonstrate much about divides between Jewish liberal democrats who had come of age in the mid-20th century, and a newer generation who questioned the merits of more open borders, regardless of the ethnicity of those refugees. And they provide a window onto the shifting nature of debates within the United States about migration, nationalism, acculturation, and citizenship over the last two decades of the 20th century. (Show less)

According to Aristotle model city-state exchanges with the individual security and material research in return for support. In modern times
nation-state had replaced city-states and the virtue of the state formation had became based on nation-lines, while subjects of the state should acquire its ethnic/national identity as an act of support. The topic suggested examines how in 90s did USA, Germany and Israel had perceived Soviet Jews, how they tried to sell them its identity, and what are results of the sale. (Show less)