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Israel at 70 and World Jewry: One People or Two?

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Israel and the Diaspora: Jewish Connectivity in a Changing World

Part of the book series: Studies of Jews in Society ((SOJS,volume 3))

Abstract

Seventy years of Israeli statehood offer an opportunity to assess what major continuities and discontinuities, convergences and divergences, conflicts and reconciliations have emerged in the complex and unique human aggregate that I will address here as the Jewish people. As the title of this chapter suggests, do the Jews constitute one people or two? Or maybe more? Or none? Differently formulated, is contemporary Jewish peoplehood better characterized as one center in Israel surrounded by a diaspora of other Jewish communities worldwide? Or as multiple, competing centers? Or as a centerless, transnational galaxy?

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Acknowledgments

Research for this paper was conducted at the Division for Jewish Demography and Statistics (headed by Uzi Rebhun) of the A. Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The author is indebted to Alan Cooperman and Neha Seghal of the Pew Research Center for facilitating access to a special merged file of the two Pew surveys in the US (2013) and in Israel (2015); to Daniel Staetsky of the Jewish Policy Research Institute/JPR, London, for processing the 2012 FRA survey data; and to Ariela Keysar of Trinity College, Hartford, CT, for our shared work on the US and Israel Pew surveys. The author bears sole responsibility for the contents of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Faculty of Humanities, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Sergio DellaPergola

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  1. Sergio DellaPergola
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Correspondence to Sergio DellaPergola .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Robert A. Kenedy

  2. Shlomo Argov Chair in Israel-Diaspora Relations, Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Mount Scopus Campus, Jerusalem, Israel

    Uzi Rebhun

  3. Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Carl S. Ehrlich

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DellaPergola, S. (2022). Israel at 70 and World Jewry: One People or Two?. In: Kenedy, R.A., Rebhun, U., Ehrlich, C.S. (eds) Israel and the Diaspora: Jewish Connectivity in a Changing World. Studies of Jews in Society, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80872-3_2

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