In this dissertation, I explore how Jewish migrants who have relocated from Israel, but who are now living in the Greater Toronto Area understand, negotiate and perform their identities, belongings, and citizenship upon migration, both individually and collectively. Working from a series of forty-eight interviews and a set of participant observations at public events, I discuss how the discourses and material realities of life in Israel and in Toronto inform their attachments, identities, and claims of belonging. I illustrate the ways in which their hybrid and transnational identities, attachments, and claims of belonging challenge Euro-Zionism's homogenizing project - opening up potential for new revitalized spaces for conversations about Israel/Palestine.
The empirical chapters in this study focus on the themes of diaspora, whiteness, and citizenship in an attempt to foreground the multi-dimensional and diverse nature of Jewish identity and Jewish multiculturality and multiraciality in Canada (and in Israel).
Theoretically, this opens up opportunities to consider scaffolding that describes the complex multiplicity within cultures. Case studies are used to address the formation and re-formation of racial, religious, and national identities after migration, providing theoretical insights into the complex relations of multiple local racial formations to global racial formations, both historically and in the contemporary period, and their interconnectivity with other axes of difference, such as religion.
In particular, I emphasize the intersection of racial formation and religious identity by foregrounding the immense diversity of Jewish identities, cultures, and racial connections. Doing so, I begin to map previously unexplored intersections between Jewish studies and critical theories of race in order to illuminate spaces for potential critical geographical analyses of these fields. This study, therefore, opens up new questions not only for future research on the "Israeli diaspora" , but also for studies of race, religion, migration, and urban space in social and cultural geography.Ph.D
