Contemporary Jewish Diaspora in Global Context: Human Development Correlates of Population Trends

• Published in: Israel studies (Bloomington, Ind.) Vol. 10; no. 1; pp. 61 - 95
• Main Authors: DellaPergola, Sergio, Rebhun, Uzi, Tolts, Mark
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bloomington Indiana University Press 22.03.2005
• Subjects: Assimilation; Censuses; Cognitive development; Countries; Demography; Diaspora; Emigration; European Monetary Union; Geopolitics; Globalization; Jewish diaspora; Jewish migration; Jewish people; Jewish peoples; Jewish studies; Migration; Population; Population distributions; Population growth; Society; Sociodemographics; Socioeconomics; Trends; Russia; New York; United States > US; Africa; Israel; Jerusalem Israel; Union of Soviet Socialist Republics > USSR; North America
• ISSN: 1084-9513; 1527-201X; 1527-201X
• DOI: 10.1353/is.2005.0106

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT AND INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION As already noted, international migration has consistently represented one of the critical mechanisms in changing Jewish population size and distribution. Since World War II, about 4.7 million Jews involved in international migration: 1.9 million between 1948 and 1968; 1 million between 1969 and 1988; and 1.8 million between 1989 and 2002.11 Table 4 provides a parsimonious classification of the main Jewish migration streams relating to two main areas of origin-Eastern Europe and countries in Asia and Africa-and two major competing areas of destination-Israel and the Western countries. In 1930, shortly after the termination of mass immigration, the index of dissimilarity15 between Jewish and total regional population distributions reached a high value of 40.3 percent. Since World War II-and with growing significance over timeinternal movement has played a key role in the redistribution of the U.S. Jewish population. In this regard, Jews continue to be much more concentrated than total Americans: the ten states with the largest numbers of Jews constitute slightly more than 80 percent of the American Jewish population, while the parallel figure for the total population is only 54 percent (Table 6). [...]in some of the states with a large Jewish presence, the Jews constitute a substantial proportion of the total population and accordingly hold significant political power. [...]the proportion of Jews in the least developed states in stratum 5 was only one-twelfth of the proportion of total Americans in those states. [...]the presence of Jews in the leading areas of the American socioeconomic system continued to be much above their average share in the population notwithstanding some decline over the last three decades.