From Russia to Israel – And Back?: Contemporary Transnational Russian Israeli Diaspora

Of about a million Jews that arrived to Israel from the (former) USSR after 1989 some 12% left the country by the end of 2017. It is estimated that about a half of them left "back" for the FSU, and the rest for the USA, Canada and the Western Europe. The book provides a comprehensive analysis of this specific Jewish Israeli Diaspora group through cutting-edge approaches in the social sciences, and examines the settlement patterns of Israeli Russian-speaking emigrants, their identity, social demographic profile, reasons of emigration, their economic achievements, identification, and status vis-à-vis host Jewish and non-Jewish environment, vision of Israel, migration interests and behavior, as well as their social and community networks, elites and institutions. Vladimir Ze'ev Khanin makes a significant contribution to migration theory, academic understanding of transnational Diasporas, and sheds a new light on the identity and structure of contemporary Israeli society. The book is based on the unique statistics from Israeli and other Government sources and sociological information obtained from the author's first of this kind on-going study of Israeli Russian-speaking emigrant communities in different regions of the world.