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This chapter explores how established Jewish organizations confronted the legal conundrums the quota laws posed. It examines Jewish leaders’ responses to the illegal immigration of Jews over the Mexico-Texas border and to the plight of Jews stranded in Europe with U.S visas rendered defunct by the Immigration Act of 1924. The quota laws posed new dilemmas for American Jewish leaders, pitting their desire to operate in solidarity with Jewish migrants against their need to be regarded as law-abiding Americans. Moreover, there were a number of gray areas that remained in the laws themselves. Jewish leaders exploited this lack of clarity in their efforts to shape the regime of U.S. immigration law as best they could. Whenever possible, they sought to engage in a strategic balancing act, trying to argue the cases of Jewish migrants without seeming to encourage or condone any law-breaking on the part of those migrants.

The Holocaust, the establishment of the state of Israel, the Cold War, postwar American prosperity and the American civil rights movement all recast debates about race, immigration, and law. Chapter Six traces how these forces, along with ongoing American Jewish activism, helped redefine the relationship between Jews and U.S. immigration law, and complete the process of severing the association between Jews and illegal immigration. The new language of “refugees” helped to validate the claims that European migrants had on the nation. So did the 1965 abolition of the quota system, which had come to be seen as an embarrassing legacy of a racist past. During this same period, illegal immigration increasingly came to be defined as nearly synonymous with Mexican immigration, a racialized equation which, in turn, helped erase the history of the illegal European incursions of the prewar period.

This chapter looks at the history of Ottoman Palestine from the late 18^th century up to the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, focusing on the historic ties to the land of both Palestinians and Jews. It then looks at why both communities welcomed the revolution, adopting a sense of Ottoman civic identity. However, rather than bringing the two communities together, Ottomanism did the opposite, placing the two communities on a track of conflict, with each community taking steps to “claim the homeland.”

This chapter examines exhibition of Jewish immigration in Jewish museums and immigration museums. These include those exhibitions in museums in western countries with large Jewish populations such as the U.S., Canada, Australia, Great Britain, France, and the Federal Republic of Germany. This chapter explores points of dialogue and dissonance among exhibits in these museums and strategies of inclusion and exclusion in the exhibits and in the operations of the respective museums.

Chapter Three explores the underground of Jewish organizing around migration, namely the profit-driven world of Jewish alien smuggling. Like legitimate Jewish organizations, smuggling rings sought to shape the ways the quota laws functioned in reality. The chapter demonstrates that there was a symbiotic relationship between government mechanisms of enforcement and smuggling networks. Each provided the other with a reason for being, and each shaped the strategies the other used to achieve their goals. Tracing the emergence of this underworld, moreover, sheds light on how the very act of migration increasingly came to be associated with criminality during this era, helping to create a national conception of the dangers posed by “smuggled aliens.”

Chapter Four examines Jewish migrants’ experiences with illegal immigration in the years following the quota laws, experiences that show the extent to which illegal immigration to the United States was embedded in a complicated set of interactions between individuals and the newly established international regime of national borders and identity documents. Looking at individuals’ migration stories broadens the frame of reference beyond U.S. law, and beyond the moment in which migrants entered the United States illegally. This approach also demonstrates how unclear the boundaries between legal and illegal migration could be from the point of view of individuals struggling to make the best choices amidst the chaos and danger of post-World War I Europe. This chapter also examines the underworld of temporary “passing” in which illegal immigrants participated when they were smuggled into the country. Such masquerade challenged the fundamental categories of the quota laws even as it relied on them.

Chapter Five explores the issue of internal “border control” in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. It investigates the battles over alien registration laws requiring all non-naturalized foreigners to register with the government. American Jews consistently opposed these laws and led the fight against their passage and implementation. This chapter, which focuses in particular on the fate of a state alien registration law passed in Michigan in 1931, argues that Jews ultimately escaped the specter of illegal alienness in part through their own political efforts in the face of such controversies.

This chapter is a critique of Zionism in response to the Great Arab Revolt that raged in Palestine between 1936 and 1939. Authored by Socialist Party member Samuel Weiss, the chapter argues that Zionism, in accordance with its illusion of building a homeland for Jews in Palestine, is constantly pursuing the policy of taking over the economic positions of the native population. However, Weiss also calls for open Jewish immigration to Palestine, contrary to the demand of Arab nationalists and many left-wing anti-Zionists. The chapter closes with a socialist vision that can resolve the Jewish problem in Palestine and promote working-class unity among the Jews and Arabs.

This chapter highlights the impact of the First World War and the changes in French Jewish society that paved the way for the expansion of Jewish associational and cultural life in the 1920s. It discusses how the war marked an important moment at which antisemitism subsided and Jewish belonging to the French nation was confirmed. It also talks about how Jewish participation in the war helped to popularize the notion that Jews were no less French for proudly affirming their unique spiritual and cultural heritage. The chapter outlines the link between issues of Jewish identity and national minority rights at the 1919 Peace Conference, the growth of the Zionist movement, and increase in Jewish immigration from eastern Europe. It describes the diversity within French-speaking natives and impoverished, Yiddish-speaking immigrants.

No territory was more central to the mandates system than Palestine. Britain had always insisted that its Palestine policy be approved in Geneva, and went to some lengths to secure international support for a Zionist pledge that its allies initially thought misguided. In the 1930s, however, this ‘internationalization’ of Palestine policymaking lessened Britain's room to manoeuvre. As the 1929 riots and the 1936 Arab Revolt revealed the depth of Arab opposition to continued Jewish immigration, British statesmen looked first for new ways (including partition) to balance both communities' claims, and then to retreat from the Balfour pledge. Yet, most members of the Mandates Commission, as well as increasingly anti-Semitic East European statesmen, had come to see Palestine largely as a destination for European Jews and opposed any such moves. This chapter tracks that complex history, showing how the inflexibility fostered by ‘internationalization’ drove a number of British statesmen to condemn a mandates regime they had largely created.

The main argument of this chapter is that the electric grid participated in the assembly of a Jewish economy, incrementally distinct from both the all-Palestine economy and from a counter-factual Arab economy. Jewish immigration in the mid 1920s’ created new possibilities for grid-expansion. Efforts to modernize agricultural methods and to establish new industries had mostly been a Jewish affair. Powered by wired-electricity, the grid not only facilitated growing inequality between Jews and Arabs but also contributed to the collection of data that ultimately established the reality of a distinct Jewish economy. The chapter thereby established links between the statistical and scientific work which is involved in the creation of ’the economy’ and the development of measurable and quantifiable electric supply. Still, the chapter also exposes the unique logic of the grid, one that cannot be reduced to Zionist interests.

This chapter offers further insight on citizenship in Palestine after 1939 and until the end of the mandate in 1948, and the changing levels of the Arabs' political subjectivity. The differences between the multiple doctrines, vocabularies, expressions, and concepts of citizenship during the first two decades of the mandate administration are reflected in the legislation on citizenship passed by the British administration and in the reactions by the Arab citizens to that legislation. It explores the immediate reactions of Great Britain and the Palestine administration to the increased Jewish immigration to the territory and the changes made to the mandate's citizenship legislation in the wake of the Peel Commission's recommendations.

This chapter considers the radical assimilation of entire Jewish families as a common occurrence in western and central Europe between the Enlightenment and the Second World War. It analyses drift and defection that removed the names of thousands of families from communal rosters, although immigration often masked the demographic consequences of their departure. It also reviews the case of liberal states like England and France, where no government or church agency gathered data on conversion and intermarriage in which historians must reconstruct the course of radical assimilation on anecdotal evidence. The chapter explains how Jews understood and represented their transformation into Christians and how they regarded their Jewish background in later years. It explores the strategy to overcome the limitations of quantitative data by following the transformation of Jewish practice, affiliation, and self-reflection in a single family over three or more generations.

The music now known as klezmer took root in the United States during the period of heaviest eastern European Jewish immigration, between 1880 and 1924. Klezmorim migrated from many parts of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires and from Romania and carried with them musical traditions which, while diverse, also share a great deal in common. At first, virtually all of the klezmer orchestra leaders were violinists. Some brought over typical European klezmer instruments such as the tsimbl (hammered dulcimer), straw fiddle (folk xylophone), harmonica (small accordion), bohemian flute, and rotary valve cornet. By the 1920s, Jewish dance music instrumentation had fallen more in line with typical American vaudeville or concert bands of the time. By then, a large proportion of the European Jewish ritual music repertoire had also been abandoned, along with much of the badkhones (wedding jester) tradition, which only lived on in certain Hasidic communities.

This chapter reflects on the author's experience in Europe where, he reports, the revival of Jewish culture is engineered by non-Jews as well as Jews, and the author ponders the meaning of this co-construction. It draws on the ideas and notions of Henri Lefèbvre, Diana Pinto, Ruth Ellen Gruber, David Biale, and some others. Here, ‘Jewish space’ becomes a point of focus as a co-constructed field of cultural and political activity. This space is examined within the context of the post-World War II period — with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakdown of communism, with the peaceful manner in which these events had taken place, with the possibility of a peace accord in the Middle East, and with the beginning of a substantial immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union into Europe and especially Germany. This period heralded a new era for Europe, in which Jewish life and culture could take part. Not only would there be a heightened awareness of the Jewish contribution to European culture, but also a common endeavour to foster democracy and freedom in the post-communist countries of central and eastern Europe.

Chapter 7 traces the sensibilities that brought Jacob Robinson and Shabtai Rosenne to clash over the Refugee Convention’s ratification. Here they diverged in how they read the Convention’s Jewish aspect and the Diaspora’s place in Jewish life at the age of Jewish sovereignty. The Refugee Convention confirmed and challenged cardinal Zionist principles. On the one hand, it affirmed Israel’s character as the Jewish people’s state of asylum and validated the Zionist principle of ‘Return’ and Israel’s ‘in-gathering of exiles’ policy. On the other hand, the Convention was rendered superfluous by Zionism’s ‘radical solution’ and ‘better remedy’ of ‘Return’ to the Jewish state. Moreover, the Convention subverted the Jewish state’s very raison d’être: a permanent political remedy to Jewish statelessness itself. Robinson’s reading of the Convention as according Israel ‘legal title’ to intervene on behalf of Jewish refugees, therefore, marked an ideological deviation accentuated by Rosenne’s reticence to see it ratified.

This and the next chapter explore the theme refuge and the ambivalence of Jacob Robinson and Shabtai Rosenne towards the 1951 Refugee Convention. This chapter assesses Robinson’s extensive involvement in drafting of the Convention. Against the backdrop of Robinson’s wartime work, as director of the New York-based Institute of Jewish Affairs, the chapter traces Robinson’s attempts to reconcile the demands of the Zionist creed with his lingering sensibilities with regard to the interests of Jewish refugees. In this regard, the chapter offers a critical reading of the degree to which Robinson was, in fact, representing the position of the Jewish state in this legislative process.