Examines Israel's decision to legalize the status of some undocumented non-Jewish Latino migrant families on the basis of their children's cultural assimilation and identification with the State, and argues that this decision signifies a recognition of the importance of practical belonging for understanding citizenship and national identity.

Kugel and Frijoles: Latino Jews in the United States analyzes the changing construction of race and ethnicity in the United States through the lens of contemporary Jewish immigrants from Latin America. Since Latino Jews are not easily classified within the U.S. racial and ethnic schema, their ethnic identity and group affiliation challenge existing paradigms. Author Laura Limonic offers a view into the lives of this designation of Jewish immigrants, highlighting the ways in which they adopt different identities (e.g., national, religious, or panethnic) in response to different actors and situations. Limonic begins by introducing the stories of Latino Jewish immigrants and laying out the important questions surrounding ethnic identity: How do Latino Jews identify? Can they choose their identity or is it assigned to them? How is ethnicity strategic or instrumental? These larger questions are placed within the existing scholarly literature on immigrant integration, religion, and ethnic group construction. Limonic explains how groups can be constructed when there is a lack of a perfect host group and details the ways different factors influence ethnic identity and shape membership into ethnic groups. The book concludes that group construction is never static in the United States, and, in particular, how race, religion, and class are increasingly important mediating factors in defining ethnicity and ethnic identity. As the Latino population continues to grow in the United States, so does the influence of millions of Latinos on U.S. culture, politics, economy, and social structure. Kugel and Frijoles offers new insight with which to understand the diversity of Latinos, the incorporation of contemporary Jewish immigrants, and the effect of U.S. ethno-racial structures for immigrant assimilation.

Latinos in Israel charts the unexpected ways that non-citizen immigrants become potential citizens. In the late 1980s Latin Americans of Christian background started arriving in Israel as labor migrants. Alejandro Paz examines the ways they perceived themselves and were perceived as potential citizens during an unexpected campaign for citizenship in the mid-2000s. This ethnographic account describes the problem of citizenship as it unfolds through language and language use among these Latinos both at home and in public life, and considers the different ways by which Latinos were recognized as having some of the qualities of citizens. Paz explains how unauthorized labor migrants quickly gained certain limited rights, such as the right to attend public schools or the right to work. Ultimately engaging Israelis across many such contexts, Latinos, especially youth, gained recognition as citizens to Israeli public opinion and governing politics. Paz illustrates how language use and mediatized interaction are under-appreciated aspects of the politics of immigration, citizenship, and national belonging.

This collection of essays addresses various aspects of Arab and Jewish immigration and acculturation in Latin America. The volume examines how the Latin American elites who were keen to change their countries' ethnic mix felt threatened by the arrival of Arabs and Jews.

A comprehaensive study of those people who have immigrated to the State of Israel from Latin America. The author explains the great significance of immigration to Israel in light of the Israeli Jews' extremely low birthrate. He then focuses on those Latin Americans who live in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and Beer Sheva, examining how the immigrants feel about various aspects of their lives in Israel, and exploring such topics as education, age, housing, employment, and knowledge of Hebrew.

This volume addresses key conceptual issues and case studies dealing with contemporary Jewish identities amidst globalization processes, with special emphasis on Latin American socio-political, communal, and cultural milieu.The book brings together a variety of disciplinary and theoretical approaches that range from political science to sociology and from art and literature to demography in order to offer the reader a multidimensional and multifocal analysis of the diverse constitutional elements of the Jewish experience. Using as its point of departure the wide horizon of historical trajectories and current challenges, the articles analyze the transnational, regional and local processes that inform the different Jewish Diasporas and Israel. Simultaneously, its content provides a snapshot of the current state of research on collective identity building processes and a lively analysis of the challenges posed by cultural diversity and primordial and civic belongings in the framework of political transitions, as well as new and old forms of expressing through cultural creativity individual and collective identities. This volume is also available in paperback.