Israelis The Jews Who Lived Through History - Haviv Rettig Gur

1881: Assassination of Alexander II. May Laws

1881-1920: 1,300 pogroms.

150,000-250,000 Jewish deaths
- Most during WWI & Russian Civil War
Jews Kicked out of Universities
May Laws
Where Jews can live
What Jews can study
Jews told they don’t belong
Encouraging Jews to migrate was de facto state policy in Russia, Romania, Poland

Two to two-half million Jews flee Russia

1840s: 200-300,000 Jews land in America

1881-1924: Migration to America

Those 300,000 Jews now have to absorb 10x their number to a large extent Yiddish speaking Ukrainian peasants
Didn’t have enough money to take care of them all
Streamline, maximize the dollar? Established the Federation
- 150 of them
- Jewish United Fund, Combined Philanthropies etc..
- Second largest charitable institution still today
Tradition builds on how a small community absorbs and large community

American Jews Discovery

Society built on Protestant radical individualism
Told they are American, different from every other diaspora experience they’ve had before
- Offended by the flattery from Jews
- Washington says that he doesn’t have to tolerate them, that its their country. Their natural inherent rights, not rights I (Washington) gives.
- Saying to think I need to tolerate, is to misunderstand America. Its not just another European government.
- Expression of a new kind of relationship
- A promise; You’re no long in the diaspora. You’re home. You’re American. You belong. You’re safe.
Reason why Jews are obsessed with Black experience
- Jews at every step helped and supported their freedom
- Reason because Jews need the liberal promise to continue, because if not, there goes the Jews

Oct 7th Trauma

Jewish Immigration Shut Down
Misc/Documents/Israelis The Jews Who Lived Through History - Haviv Rettig Gur-20240629234247781.webp

1921: The World Shuts their Doors
Chinese immigration bill passed in U.S.
America closes it door to the Jews even as Europe is getting worse.
- Jobs are scarce during Great Depression, not for immigrants
- The West closed it doors; so the Jews went to Israel
- Between 1919-1948; Jews had nowhere to go. They didn’t want to go to ‘Israel’, wasn’t a great place to go
- 1935: Fifth Aliyah, 65,000 Jews in one year. 50,000 in 37 years before, they all spoke German
- 1948-1951: 650,000 in 4 years
The Jews that didn’t get to America or to ‘Israel’; were trapped in the Holocaust

After the Holocaust

15,000,000 displaced
Pogroms in Poland after War telling Jews returning to their homes, to leave
IRO: International Refugee Organization
- Camps
- 40 countries come to find workers for their countries, give them passports
  - All the pro-Nazi collaborators that can’t go back were immediately taken from the 750,000
  - Then the others, such as Catholics from Poland
  - Only the Jews were left in the camps; literally unwanted even for work
Truman in desperation in 1945 asks Congress to lift the quotas on Jewish immigration; Congress refuses
Harrison Report
- Goes to the camps; meets the Jews
- Still living in the Concentration Camps
- Opened 70 Newspapers, soccer leagues, but still in the camps
- Survey to find out where Jews want to go
  - 90% write Palestine, 90% write Palestine on second line
  - Another survey after first, except Palestine, 20% said crematorium.
    - They felt the World has finally told us. They don’t want us.
Israelis are literally refugees
- Palestinians don’t know this
- Its not nationalism; its refuge
- Israel’s don’t claim its refuge; claims it was some incredible willpower, but it was simply refugees, a decimated people from 60 countries.
- Project of Rescue not a national movement
- Theodor Herzl is Zionism as rescue.

Zionism is not a national movement.

Zionism as sociology: Economic change, Industrialization, urbanization, and the mass identities
- World went from small cities of 150 people with farms, knowing everyone—into being an ant in a big city.
- Changing how people think of their identities.
Zionism is NOT an ideological movement. It’s NOT nationalism. It’s refuge.
Zionism is a sociological analysis of modernity.
World is changing in 19th Century
Small farm -> Industrialization
- Ant in the middle of a city not your own farm
- Identity shattering
- Created Communism
- Changes how people think about themselves
- ‘Mass Societies’ identities
  - Part of a societies with people you don’t know, but you belong to.
  - Ideology of nationalism; these imagined beliefs that will connect people within a country even if you don’t know each other
Ideologies of Nationalism
- Police the boundaries to firm up the boundaries to keep them strong
Theodor Herzl
Nazi problem with the Jews is because it stood against what German-ness was
- Could be a Jew in the morning, a German in the evening
- German-ness was biological to Nazi’s
- If a Jew can be a German, and still be a Jew, you don’t have absolute identity.
U.S. Congress updates quotas after all the Jews went to Israel

Israel