Jews on the Move. Global Jewish Migration History in Modern Times Jewish Migration History

Migration is a key concept in Jewish history and one of its defining elements– this includes different forms of mobility such as immigration and emigration, flight and rescue, and forced and involuntary migration. Accordingly, Jewish historiography extensively engages with the causes, effects, and aftermath of migration. 

This course will examine migration from the 19th to 21st century as a foundational aspect of the Jewish experience. Geographically, we will focus on three main regions of Jewish migration in this period-- Europe, the Americas, and Israel. The first part of this course will explore various forms of Jewish movement and mobility in these years such as the Great Migration from Eastern Europe; emigration and flight from Nazi-Europe; migration to Israel from the Middle East and North Africa, migration from Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and contemporary migration from Israel to Germany and the US. 

In the second part of this course, we will take a deeper dive into crucial topics in the study of migration in a comparative way: how did gender, age, and class matter? How did migration change the everyday lives of migrants (e.g., what they cooked, how they dressed)? How did this process shape families and communities? And how did migrants cope with the enormous changes?

Please register by April 15, 2025, directly with Viola Alianov-Rautenberg

Alianov-Rautenberg@ghi-dc.org