Gender and assimilation in modern jewish history: the roles and representation of women

Cultural memory, gender and age: young Latvian women's narrative memories of war-time Europe, 1944–1947

The thesis indicates that, to make sense of how white South African migrants and their non-migrant kin construct their views about migration from apartheid-based South Africa, it is important to take account of apartheid-based racialization as well as prior histories of displacement and oppression. It demonstrates the need to move beyond globalized notions of the family when researching constructions of the consequences of migration. This includes considering how such constructions inform and are informed by: prior family dynamics; life course changes; gender; whether the relationship under discussion is with a parent, child or sibling; whether the views are expressed by a migrant or non-migrant; and responses to the dismantling of apartheid. It highlights the value of adopting a narrative-based biographical interpretative methodology and combining social constructionist and psychoanalytic ideas when investigating issues that have been under theorized and under researched,are troubling to articulate and concern relationships with people who came to be seen as racialized and/or gendered 'others'.

Migration, the family and apartheid : journeys that span geographic space, the life course and responses to political change

There has been a growing focus on personal life, memoir and autobiography in feminist writing, and in the social sciences more generally, in recent years. Feminist geographers, among others, argue that family relationships and personal recollections should be part of studies of the construction of personal identity and a sense of place. I combine this argument with research into women's labour market participation to explore the changing significance of waged work in British women's lives over the last century, seen through the personal lens of three generations of women's experiences of migration across geographical and class boundaries.

Border crossings: reflections on women's lives in twentieth-century Britain

(Re)negotiating transnational identities: notions of ‘home’ and ‘distanced intimacies’

From around 1880 to the Second World War (which transformed Jewish history and Jewish identity with an awful finality), millions of Jews left their homes in Europe and emigrated to various parts of the world in two distinct waves of migrations, the larger migration from Eastern Europe in the decades around the turn of the century, and then a second, smaller migration of refugees from Nazism in the 1930s. In most histories of Jewish immigration, women disappear from view, subsumed into the male immigrant experience (Gartner, 1960; Hirschfeld, 1984), yet their experiences of migration were undoubtedly shaped by their gender as well as their ethnic origins and their class, together with the current political, social, economic and cultural conditions in the countries to which they emigrated and the characteristics of the Jewish communities already there (Hyman, 1983: 157; Jewish Women in London Group, 1989: 8). The gendered specificity of the experience of Jewish migration is now being examined, albeit largely in relation to the significance of gender in the process of acculturation of immigrants.

Ruth Swirsky

Papers

Migration and Dislocation: Echoes of Loss within Jewish Women’s Narratives