The Myth of the Israeli Expatriate
Herman, Pini
THE MYTH OF THE ISRAELI EXPATRIATE PINI HERMAN Another—and very different—report on the Israeli "exodus" to America There is a new genre of analysis that might be called the literature of...
...In Peter Stuy-vesant's New Amsterdam, the 23 Sephardic refugees from Brazil soon looked askance at the Ashkenazi newcomers, and we are all familiar with the tension between Central European and East European Jews at the turn of this century...
...and abroad...
...In 1980, approximately 5,500 Israelis received "green cards...
...This high density of a relatively modest number of Israelis in a small geographical area undoubtedly increases the perception of American Jews and of Israelis themselves that there are a great number of Israelis in the community...
...once we define something as a "problem" and set up a commission to deal with it, we come to "need" the problem...
...Its best estimate, not adjusted for mortality, and including the emigration of non-Jews from Israel (some 70,000 since 1948), was that 368,000 Israelis had left the country between 1948 and 1980...
...This, of course, assumes that the Israeli's resolve to stay in Israel is about as tenuous as the average American Jew's resolve to emigrate to Israel...
...is an Israeli...
...But 150,000 means about five percent of Israel's Jewish population, a very substantial and perceptible slice of a small nation's population...
...These are often highly trained workers who react to economic conditions and opportunities, alternately living in the U.S...
...That is, of course, a very far cry from the 2-300,000 sometimes estimated for New York and the 100,000 commonly accepted for Los Angeles...
...Many Jews who deal with the "problem" express the view that if Israelis are welcomed or aided here in the United States by the local Jewish communities, other Israelis will be encouraged to emigrate from Israel...
...of these, only 3-4,000 will stay in the U.S...
...the raw data are easily available in any library that serves as federal documents depository...
...Until recently, the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics defined an emigrant as a person who had not returned to Israel for four years...
...So the bureau developed estimates, there being no precise data on emigration...
...The U.S...
...Most Israelis in Los Angeles choose to live in areas where there are high concentrations of American Jews...
...These figures are obviously interesting...
...American-bom children of Israelis, or American spouses of Israelis, have not been counted, which explains the discrepancy between our figures and those developed for the New York area by Steven M. Cohen and Paul Ritter-band...
...in 1978...
...The character of our community is not likely to be much changed by their arrival here, nor is the character of Israel likely to be much affected by their departure...
...In fact, less than one out of 50 Jews in the U.S...
...There is a modest and steady flow, which increases by about 10 percent a year...
...as it is here, the number of additional Israelis living outside Israel would increase by only 40,000...
...From these data, we learn about the age, sex, occupation, residential patterns, immigration patterns—and numbers—of the Israeli migrant population in the United States...
...Yet, at least so far as Israeli emigrants who have ended up in the United States are concerned, there is a way of arriving at a more precise figure...
...Over 70 percent of employed Israeli immigrants work at white-collar occupations (so much for the "all Israelis are taxi drivers" myth...
...Many American Jews accept the myth that Israelis will go to great lengths— say, marriage—just to obtain U.S...
...And the larger the problem—in this case, the larger the numbers—the more importance the commission has...
...citizenship...
...Each year, thousands of Israelis with "green cards" leave the U.S...
...Some are concerned that the "flood" of Israelis will overtax already burdened communal services...
...THE MYTH OF THE ISRAELI EXPATRIATE PINI HERMAN Another—and very different—report on the Israeli "exodus" to America There is a new genre of analysis that might be called the literature of yeridah...
...But even if the percentage of Israelis in all those Jewish communities around the world where Israelis might move is as high ("high...
...Which is to say, we have here an interesting phenomenon—but hardly a major development in our history...
...And everyone knows, of course, that Israelis are lacking in social^graces...
...Indeed, a few months after these data were published, Jewish Agency Executive Director Shmuel Lahis issued a report citing 300-500,000 yordim in the U.S...
...By comparison, the U.S...
...Where do such numbers come from...
...I have several hypotheses that may explain the curiosity: • Seventy-five percent of Israeli migrants in the U.S...
...The proportion of Israelis who acquire citizenship through marriage dropped from 35 percent to 18 percent 17 years ago, and it has stayed at that level until now...
...Fully 40 percent of the immigrants are young adults between the ages of 20 and 29...
...Problems" are self-sustaining...
...Our study shows many of these perceptions to be wrong...
...And with each round of citations, the number of yordim— emigrants from Israel—is jacked up by another 50-100,000...
...mographer, estimated a total of 371,000 Jewish emigrants between 1922 and 1975...
...In other words, almost three-quarters of the Israeli migrants are under 30...
...When you combine that rate with the ideological sensitivity that Zionism manifests towards emigration, there is little wonder that the number of emigrants is magnified both in Israel and by Jews elsewhere...
...In fact, there are today not 700,000, and not 500,000, and not even 200,000 Israelis in the United States...
...to live abroad—probably in Israel...
...Others are worried that the "Israeli Mafia" will blight the respectable name of the Jewish community...
...census at 23,000...
...had only 385,000 American citizens emigrate during the turbulent 1960s, less than three persons per thousand...
...There are, instead, approximately 100,000 Israelis here...
...When the results of this study were made known to the Commission on Israelis set up in Los Angeles to advise the Jewish Federation-Council on how to respond to the "problem" of relating to and absorbing the Israeli immigrants in its midst, the common response was, "If there are only 1012,000 Israelis, what are we doing here...
...Ben Zion Sobel's article in the May moment is an example of this genre...
...So at most there would be 150,000 Israelis living permanently outside Israel...
...How is it possible that the Jewish Agency increased its estimate by 50-100,000 in one year...
...We have counted all those who were either born in Israel or, though born elsewhere, entered the United States with Israeli passports...
...Which is not to say that there is no problem...
...youth (10 to 19 years old) comprise 12 percent, and children up to the age of nine comprise 22 percent...
...emigration is a problem, and so are the attitudes of American and Israeli Jews towards emigration and towards the emigrants...
...Given that tradition, small numbers take on large meanings—and may lead to exaggeration of the numbers themselves...
...On what are the estimates based...
...There is a problem...
...This new estimate includes Israeli illegal aliens, and is consistent with a recently released study by Jeffrey Pas-sel and Robert Warren of the Population Division, U.S...
...He conducted this study together with David LaFontaine...
...American Jews have a long tradition of finger-pointing at Jewish newcomers to the U.S...
...This perception is further reinforced because of the young age and family composition of recent Israeli immigrants to the U.S...
...Passel and Warren estimate the number of illegal Israeli-born aliens counted in the 1980 U.S...
...And it turns out, on the basis of these data, that the numbers are very much smaller than has generally been supposed...
...But that definition was not really workable, as many Israeli emigrants managed to visit Israel with some frequency—more often than every fifth year—and thus were not included in the totals...
...live in four states— New York, New Jersey, California and Illinois...
...So Israel's emigration rate is about 20 times higher than that of the United States...
...There is no flood of Israeli immigrants to the U.S...
...Only five percent are employed as service workers (a category that includes taxi drivers...
...Most of its writers cite each other's numbers and conjectures about emigration from Israel...
...These estimates have been fiercely debated within Israel, where there is considerable sensitivity on the subject and where diverse public policies and even budgets depend on the numbers...
...It is time for us to understand that we are behaving towards the Israelis very much as we behaved towards earlier immigrant groups—that is, with grudging hospitality...
...And that brings us to the curious question: How is it that such readily-available data, obtained without budget by a graduate student of social work, eluded all the highly trained social scientists who have so energetically written about yeridahl And why have we so readily accepted estimates that were, in fact, inflated...
...of these, about half are professional, technical and kindred workers (doctors, engineers, etc...
...For the past 17 years, Israeli-born Jews have constituted a majority of Jewish immigrants from Israel admitted to the U.S...
...they quote liberally from media reports that are based on other media reports that are based, in turn, on the yeridah literature...
...Of the 100,000, about 50,000 are in the New York metropolitan area, and 10-12,000 in the Los Angeles area...
...Robert Bachi, the Israeli deSocial worker Pini Herman is a recent graduate of the School of Jewish Communal Service at Hebrew Union College and the School of Social Work at the University of Southern California...
...Historically, Israelis have not migrated in large numbers to Canada, Europe, Africa and South America...
...The proportion of those born in Israel reached 73 percent of all Israeli immigrants admitted to the U.S...
...But we serve no constructive purpose when we inflate the problem, when we describe a phenomenon that is of modest dimensions—and is likely to stay modest—as a "crisis...
...Bureau of the Census...
...The rest will leave this country within eight years...
...And they are so un-Jewish...
...Amos Elon, the astute Israeli observer, remarks on the curiosity that the official Work Plan of the Jewish Agency for its overseas emissaries in 1979 spoke of about 200,000 yordim in the United States, while the 1980 Work Plan spoke of 250-300,000— this despite the fact that of the total number of Israelis who left Israel in 1979, only 6,400 did not return to Israel...
...Immigration and Naturalization Service maintains and annually publishes rich data that provide a detailed demographic picture of the post-State years of Israeli migration...
...they are brash, loud, pushy, "on the make," materialistic, untrustworthy...
Vol. 8 • September 1983 • No. 8
