JEWISH IMMIGRANTS FROM THE FORMER SOVIET UNION: THE FORMATION OF NEW SOCIAL NETWORKS, INTEGRATION, AND ACTIVITY SPACES by ADAM LAKE A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of Geography and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2012 ii DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Adam Lake Title: Jewish Immigrants from the Former Soviet Union: The Formation of New Social Networks, Integration, and Activity Spaces This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of Geography by: Dr. Susan Hardwick Chairperson Dr. Alexander Murphy Member Dr. Xiabo Su Member Dr. Jean Stockard Outside Member and Kimberly Andrews Espy Vice President for Research & Innovation/Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded June 2012 iii © 2012 Adam Lake iv DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Adam Lake Doctor of Philosophy Department of Geography June 2012 Title: Jewish Immigrants from the Former Soviet Union: The Formation of New Social Networks, Integration, and Activity Spaces From 1976 to 2000, an estimated three quarters of a million Jewish refugees from the former Soviet Union immigrated to the United States. These refugees were welcomed by both volunteers and professional aid workers from the American Jewish community who provided food, shelter, and a helping hand in establishing a new life in a new place. Social capital accumulated through membership in a global Jewish identity, both for Soviet and American Jews, provided the foundation for this aid. The shift in identity from “American” or “Russian” to “Jewish” that provided the initial transnational social capital was largely the result of the efforts of the Soviet Jewish Freedom Movement, centered in Cleveland and New York City. Additionally, the descendants of Soviet Jewish refugees appear to be assimilating with native-born populations. Through interviews with Soviet Jewish refugees and other key participants, this dissertation examines the role of place in the shifting identities of Soviet Jewish refugees living in Cleveland. From the evidence gathered through this case study and building on the work of Bourdieu and Lefebvre, this dissertation culminates in the development of a new model of Scalar Assimilation that allows for identity shifts and assimilation processes to simultaneously operate at multiple scales with a variety of outcomes. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Adam Lake GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene Lawrence University, Appleton, WI DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, Geography, 2012, University of Oregon Master of Arts, Geography, 2006, University of Oregon Master of Community and Regional Planning, 2006, University of Oregon Bachelor of Arts, Environmental Studies, 2002, Lawrence University AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Ethnicity, Identity, and Immigration PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Consultant, Echo Lake Consulting, 2006-2012 Graduate Teaching Fellow, Data Services Lab, 2004-2012 Instructor, Lane Community College, 2009-2012 Instructor, Western Oregon University, 2011-2012 vi For the strong women in my life who have supported me throughout this dissertation. Amanda, Lynn, Cornelia, Susan, and my mother vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 1 The Study Population ............................................................................................. 3 Theoretical Underpinnings..................................................................................... 6 Article Summaries ................................................................................................. 8 II. SOCIAL CAPITAL AND THE REDEVELOPMENT OF HABITUS: PLACE AND SOCIAL NETWORK FORMATION AMONG SOVIET JEWISH REFUGEES IN CLEVELAND, OHIO .................................................................. 11 Theoretical Underpinnings: Bourdieu’s Theory of Cultural Reproduction ........... 14 Soviet Jewish Habitus ............................................................................................ 19 Social Capital, Resettlement, and Capital Accumulation ...................................... 23 Place and Social Capital......................................................................................... 27 Conclusions ............................................................................................................ 31 III. ENGINEERING SOVIET JEWISH FREEDOM: IDENTITY, IMAGINED COMMUNITY, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF TRANSNATIONAL SOCIAL CAPITAL ............................................................................................... 34 Methodology .......................................................................................................... 36 Shifting Identities ................................................................................................... 37 Bourdieu and Social Reproduction ........................................................................ 40 Case Study: From Soviet Outcasts to Global Jewish Identity ............................... 44 Globalizing the Consciousness of American Jewry............................................... 48 Constructing Transnational Social Capital ............................................................ 53 Conclusions ............................................................................................................ 60 viii Chapter Page IV. SCALAR ASSIMILATION: TOWARD A SOCIO-SPATIAL REPRODUCTION FRAMEWORK ...................................................................... 63 Core Assimilation Theories ................................................................................... 64 Criticisms of Core Assimilation Theories and Responses ..................................... 68 Toward a Socio-Spatial Reproduction Framework ................................................ 72 An Assimilation Case Study .................................................................................. 80 Conclusions ............................................................................................................ 83 V. CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................... 86 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 95 ix LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page CHAPTER II 1. People born in the former Soviet Union, average from 2005-2009. The areas of higher concentration in the southern suburbs around Parma are generally ethnic Ukrainians and not part of the Soviet Jewish refugee population. .............. 13 2. Intra-urban migration of Soviet Jewish refugees. Early refugees (1975-1980) settled in Cleveland Heights, then moved to eastern suburbs. Later refugees (1989-1995) settled in Mayfield Heights.. ............................................................. 29 CHAPTER III 1. Transnational networks of social capital ................................................................ 43 2. Photo of the crowd at the first CCSA rally in 1965. Source: Cleveland Jewish News 1965 ............................................................................................................. 51 CHAPTER IV 1. The relationship between Bourdieu's habitus/field and Lefebvre's production of space is manifested through the practice of everyday life ................................. 78 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Over the past few decades, the term “assimilation” has often come to represent all that is wrong with the dominant Euro-centric perspective in the social sciences. This perception of assimilation has led to large scale abandonment of the term within academia in favor of other approaches to studies of the absorption of immigrants such as incorporation and adaptation. However, at its root, assimilation is about how interactions between people of different cultures lead to transformations of identity and daily practice, and, ultimately, to a reconceptualization of culture. Much attention has been paid to these processes of reproduction within a culture, mostly through experiences acquired as a child, but little to the processes of culture change among people who have migrated from one culture to another. Similarly, a great deal of attention has been paid to strategies of ethno-cultural retention in the face of migration. However, during the past three decades since assimilation theory has fallen out of favor, little has been written about the processes by which culture changes following resettlement in a new place. When assimilation theory initially was formalized in the Chicago School of Sociology, its primary tenets involved the process by which people from diverse cultures merged into a single culture (R. E. Park and Burgess 1921; Burgess 1925; R. E. Park 1930). This process was expected to occur over a timeframe of multiple generations and was not viewed as an unidirectional abandonment of immigrants’ original culture, but rather as a shift in both immigrant and native cultures to become one (Alba and Nee 2003). Later, the standard view of assimilation became an expectation of the 2 abandonment of immigrant culture and adoption of native born culture and, in the process, achieve improved life outcomes (Gordon 1964). In the more recent literature on immigration this view has been criticized for assuming a monolithic mainstream culture that not only privileges whiteness, but reinforces racial, class, and ethnic boundaries (Lieberson 1980; Zhou 1997; Jacobson 1998; Lipsitz 1998; Wright and Ellis 2000; Wright, Ellis, and Parks 2005). In light of this ongoing criticism, most immigration scholars abandoned assimilation theory in favor of pursuing models of multiculturalism whereby immigrants are encouraged to maintain their ethno-cultural heritage. Multiculturalism is often depicted as a “salad bowl” to contrast with assimilation’s “melting pot” (Glazer and Moynihan 1970). From this perspective, scholars prefer measures of immigrant incorporation rather than basing them on assimilation. Incorporation looks at immigrant inclusion in economic and labor markets (Castles and Miller 2003; D. S. Massey 2007), political activity (Foley and Hoge 2007), and access to space as represented by residential geographic distributions (D. S. Massey 1985; D. Massey and Denton 1988; Zelinsky and Lee 1998; Zelinsky 2001; Hardwick 2006). While many of the factors examined as part of immigrant incorporation are related to cultural practices, culture and identity are not directly addressed as part of incorporation. Recent scholarship that has directly examined immigrant cultural practice and identity has tended to focus on the maintenance and expression of ethno-cultural identity following resettlement (Waters 1990; Hardwick 1993; 2003; Arreola 2004). Within this context, geographers have primarily focused on the spatial patterns of immigrant households (Estaville 1986; Wong 1997; Ellis and Wright 2005), and how emerging 3 settlement patterns indicate shifts in immigrant incorporation (Zelinsky 2001; Skop and Li 2003; Singer, Hardwick, and Brettell 2008). While this scholarship in the wake of multiculturalism is of great importance, there remains a gap in the literature as to the processes of culture change through immigration. To this end, there has been a recent call to revive assimilation theory in the vision of its initial imagining by Park and Burgess (1921), that is, as a process by which members of different cultures become more similar over time until they merge into one (Alba and Nee 1997; 1999; 2003). It has been argued that the processes of reproduction of culture and identity are place-based, and thus geographic (Malkki 1997; Bonnemaison 2005). In light of this spatial grounding of cultural reproduction, it is surprising that geographers have not been more active in the debate surrounding assimilation. This dissertation seeks to remedy the dearth of modern geographic work on assimilation by exploring the processes of culture change and reproduction through the lens of Jewish refugees from the former Soviet Union, ultimately seeking to re-theorize assimilation to be more in line with contemporary models of cultural and spatial reproduction. The Study Population An estimated 780,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union live in the United States (Kliger 2004), of which between 400,000 and 500,000 arrived as refugees between the years of 1976 and 2000 (Sheskin 2010). This latter wave can be further divided into two periods of arrival. Under international pressure, largely due to the Jackson-Vanik amendment in the United States, the Soviet Union allowed a small number of Jews to emigrate beginning in 1976 (Beckerman 2010). Most of these early refugees immigrated 4 to Israel, but many also chose to come to the United States. In 1980, with the invasion of Afghanistan, the Soviet borders were once again closed, cutting off the trickle of Jewish refugees. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 then re-opened the borders, this time for all who wished to leave, resulting in a mass emigration. During this most recent wave hundreds of thousands of Jews from the former Soviet Union came to the United States (Remennick 2007). The largest, and most studied, population of Soviet Jewish refugees in the United States lives in New York City, where many have formed an ethnic enclave in Brighton Beach. However, there are also large populations in other cities in the U.S. that are more geographically dispersed throughout the community. These populations provide rich opportunities for studies of the assimilation processes of an ethnic group that has become economically well integrated into U.S. society (Remennick 2007; Kasinitz et al. 2008) and has also begun the assimilation process into the larger Jewish community (Sheskin 2010). The cultural differences between the culture and social structures of the U.S. and the Soviet Union are so great that the shifts made by Soviet Jewish refugees are, in many cases, more obvious than those made by migrants between more similar cultures. Additionally, this group has been established in the United States for long enough to have processed the emotional shock of international migration, placing them in a position to provide insight into the assimilation process. One of the largest Soviet Jewish refugee communities in the U.S. is located in Cleveland, Ohio. The Cleveland Jewish community’s unique history places it at the center of the Soviet Jewish Freedom Movement that ultimately resulted in the ability of Soviet Jews to emigrate from the Soviet Union. The support of this group continued 5 throughout the resettlement process with the Cleveland Jewish community providing housing, furniture, and other support to the newly arrived refugees, who had only been allowed to bring a few hundred dollars’ worth of belongings with them to the U.S. While other cities’ Jewish communities provided similar resettlement aid, the Cleveland community was able to take a wider variety of “free cases,” those who did not have family members sponsoring them, than many other locations. Thus, the Cleveland community of Soviet Jewish refugees offers a counterpoint to other settlement nodes of Soviet Jewish refugees in the U.S. such as New York City. Many of the Soviet Jewish refugees in Cleveland also chose not to settle in New York City because they did not want to live in an ethnic enclave. This dissertation is based upon a series of semi-structured interviews in the Cleveland metropolitan area with Soviet Jewish refugees and other key members of the larger Jewish community who were involved in the resettlement process. Each of these 23 Soviet Jewish refugees interviewed for the project had arrived in Cleveland as adults and had grown up immersed in Soviet Russian culture. They, therefore, remembered the process of adapting to the United States very clearly. Of these 23 respondents, 18 were women and 5 men due to easier access to female respondents. Seven arrived between 1976 and 1980 among the first Jews allowed to leave the Soviet Union. The other 16 arrived in Cleveland between 1989 and 1995. This range of arrival times in the U.S. provided a wide variety of experiences adjusting to American culture useful for my analysis. 6 Theoretical Underpinnings Immigrant and refugee integration and assimilation processes are, at root, cultural issues. Over time, both new arrivals and their host society adjust their cultural practices in daily public life. These nature of these adjustments determines the level of integration and the possibility of assimilation for future generations (Alba and Nee 1997; 2003). Therefore, it is necessary to begin with a discussion of how culture changes in order to understand how these cultural shifts occur. Over the past five decades or so, social scientists have proposed a number of different models of social and cultural change, each with a particular set of strengths and weaknesses. Some of the models focus on power relations and class structure (Gramsci 1971a; Foucault 1980; 1984). This approach views culture as the result of indoctrination during childhood by those in power (i.e. Gramsci 1971b). While Soviet Jewish refugees were certainly subjected to educational indoctrination by the Soviet Union, these models are not as useful for examining the processes involved in culture change among adult immigrants. For this, a more flexible model of cultural reproduction is needed because adult immigrants and refugees change the practice of their everyday lives without participating in the formal education system of the new place. However, many of the recent more flexible models, such as those rooted in postmodernist strategies of deconstruction, seek to contextualize each case and, therefore, do not lend themselves to grand theory or generalization (Harvey 1991). Since the end goal of this dissertation is to re-theorize assimilation, these models do not provide sufficient structure from which to build. Thus, a theory of cultural reproduction is more useful as a foundation for this analysis because it provides a solid foundation from which a new theory of assimilation 7 can be built. It is also flexible enough to accommodate the wide variety of contexts in which immigrants arrive and the variety of assimilation outcomes. For this reason, Pierre Bourdieu’s work on social and cultural reproduction provides the most useful beginning point for analyzing the Soviet Jewish refugee experience (1973; 1977; 1986; 1990; 1998). Bourdieu’s theory is rooted in an understanding of culture as a set of practices that individuals perform in their daily lives. He is also interested in the social structures that individuals practice in their everyday lives. Bourdieu refers to structures that are external to the individual as the field. Field is juxtaposed with an individual’s perspective through which one views and understands the world, a concept Bourdieu calls habitus (1973; 1977; 1990). Habitus consists of an individual’s lived experiences, experiences structured by the field in which they occur. In turn, field, the world external to an individual, is constructed by the habitus of every individual who practices their daily life within it. Thus, Bourdieu argues, habitus and field are intertwined and co-constitutive. He goes on to describe the process by which both habitus and field are continuously produced and reproduced as the accumulation of capital (Bourdieu 1990). This capital accumulation can be categorized into four forms: economic, cultural, social, or symbolic (Bourdieu 1986). Each of these forms of capital can be used to accumulate any of the other forms. The nature of this accumulation, structured by the field, characterizes an individual’s habitus, which in turn reproduces and changes the field. These interactions lead to cultural reproduction (since capital of different forms is passed from generation to generation and structured by the field). In each generation, these processes are filtered through a slightly different habitus, and thus result in differing characteristics in the cultural practice of everyday life. 8 The three related articles that constitute this dissertation embrace Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction. Each article builds on a different facet of Bourdieu’s work as it applies to the analysis of assimilation processes among Soviet Jewish refugees. Article Summaries The paper that follows, Social Capital and the Redevelopment of Habitus: Place and Social Network Formation among Soviet Jewish Refugees in Cleveland, Ohio, examines the adjustment processes of Soviet Jewish refugees following their arrival in the United States. Building on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, I describe how the accumulated experiences of life in the field of the Soviet Union led to a unique world view. Upon departing from the Soviet Union, refugees were permitted to take very little with them. Thus, upon arrival in the United States, most did not have sufficient economic capital to become established. The first article explores how the social capital Soviet Jewish refugees had accumulated through their membership in a Jewish identity group was mobilized at the foundation of the accumulation process for other forms of capital. The nature of this capital accumulation process, including the geographic element of place and space in which capital was accumulated, leads to different cultural shifts that put families on different paths toward. In sum, this article establishes the role of place in the capital accumulation process that characterizes the adjustments to habitus required for life in a new place. This modified habitus then leads to decisions such as where to live or work, that, in turn, lead to other modifications to habitus. The end result is that the first generation of immigrants sets a trajectory in motion that structures the daily practices and, subsequently, the culture of future generations. 9 The second paper in this dissertation, Engineering Soviet Jewish Freedom: Identity, Imagined Community, and the Construction of Transnational Social Capital, examines the origins of the social capital that underlies the processes described in the prior article. Social capital is membership in a group via a shared identity that gives the bearer access to the collective resources of that group (Bourdieu 1986). However, due to the closed borders and oppressive policies of the Soviet Union, Jewish religious identity had long been smothered almost out of existence. This paper examines how the Soviet Jewish Freedom Movement that originated in Cleveland and New York City, helped create a new global Jewish identity. Through this movement, agents went to great lengths to make contact with Soviet Jews and provide them with Jewish educational materials while simultaneously encouraging American Jewish communities to symbolically include Soviet Jews in ceremonial events. Soviet persecution excluded Jews from the Russian identity. In comparison, the Soviet Jewish Freedom Movement sought to draw Soviet Jews into a new global Jewish identity. In this way, Soviet Jews became members of an international movement and identity, thereby gaining access to its collective resources in a form of social capital that spanned national borders and languages. The final paper in this dissertation, Scalar Assimilation: Toward a Socio-Spatial Reproduction Framework, uses the outcomes of the first two articles to develop a new model of assimilation theory rooted in cultural reproduction. In this third paper, I also foreground the spatiality of these processes. In order to accomplish this second task, it is necessary to engage theories of spatial reproduction that interface with Bourdieu’s model of cultural reproduction. To accomplish this, I focus on Lefebvre’s work on the 10 production of space (2007). Through this integration of the ideas of Bourdieu and Lefebvre, the paper develops a socio-spatial reproduction framework that is explicitly social and spatial and simultaneously structured and flexible (Harvey 1991 provides another example). From this framework, assimilation may be viewed as the alignment of the practice of everyday life between two formerly distinct groups in such a way that the same social and spatial constructs are reproduced. The strength of this scalar assimilation model is twofold. First, its flexibility allows for a variety of outcomes and does not assume a trajectory toward assimilation. Second, the structure of this approach shifts the focus of related research questions away from outcome-based measures of incorporation and focuses instead on the decision- making processes of each generation related to the reproduction of everyday practice. As a whole, the three papers in this dissertation provide a new understanding of assimilation that avoids the reduction of cultural practices to economic or political measurements. Instead, by working from a framework of cultural reproduction, I seek to contextualize the Soviet Jewish refugee experience while also maintaining enough structure to allow a comparison of my findings with other ethno-cultural groups. This framework scales up from the daily practice of individuals to the impacts their actions may have on the collective identity and culture and, from there, to changes in the social structures that shape the practice of everyday life. 11 CHAPTER II SOCIAL CAPITAL AND THE REDEVELOPMENT OF HABITUS: PLACE AND SOCIAL NETWORK FORMATION AMONG SOVIET JEWISH REFUGEES IN CLEVELAND, OHIO Upon arrival in a new country, one of the most difficult obstacles facing immigrants and refugees is learning how to function in a new place, speak a new language, and work within a new system. This local knowledge, or habitus (Bourdieu 1977; 1986; 1990; 1998), is usually developed throughout childhood and imparted from parents and teachers as an unconscious understanding of how the world works. However, immigrants and refugees are forced to shift their behavior and redevelop their habitus as adults. The redevelopment of habitus is a very difficult process that both affects and is affected by social network formation, economic opportunities, and the accumulation of capital, all of which are in turn dependent largely upon the efforts of aid and resettlement organizations. The case of Soviet Jewish refugees in the United States provides an example of a population that was greatly aided by the organized effort of an established community operating at multiple scales. International Jewish organizations helped obtain departure rights for Soviet Jews and provided emigration aid; national organizations coordinated the distribution of refugees between host cities; and local organizations handled the specifics of resettlement, and helped provide the social and economic capital that allowed 12 refugees to establish themselves in their new home. The decisions made by these organizations, especially at the local level, have profound impacts on the lives of the resettled refugees. In particular, the specific place of settlement directly established the conditions under which refugees began accumulating capital, which in turn affected residential mobility and intra-urban residential decision making. While much research has focused on the larger refugee settlement nodes of New York and Chicago, the Jewish community in Cleveland, Ohio, also played a central role in many of the national and international movements that brought about the freedom of Soviet Jews, and subsequently supported a large community of refugees. Furthermore, the refugee community in Cleveland has since become geographically dispersed throughout the eastern suburbs (Figure 1) and thus provides an opportunity to examine social network formation processes outside an ethnic enclave. Of particular interest in this analysis of Soviet Jewish refugees in the Cleveland urban area is determining the processes by which the community redeveloped their habitus. The empirical case study in this paper is primarily based on interviews conducted in Cleveland during the summer of 2009. Interviewees included 23 refugees and 8 other community leaders in Cleveland who played key roles in the Soviet Jewish Freedom movement and refugee resettlement efforts in the city. Project informants included 18 females and 5 males who ranged in age from 40 to 81 years of age and who arrived in the U.S. at various times between 1976 to 1995. The larger number of women interviewed for the study as compared to the number of male interviewees was due to the greater availability due to men being more likely to be too busy due to their work schedules as well as Women tended to have better English language skills. Participants were selected 13 via a snowball sampling methodology and were limited to those who arrived in the United States over the age of 18. Since my goal was specifically to study the process of development of social capital for adults, this limitation was applied to ensure that all respondents made their own decisions concerning their immigration process and eliminate the variable of childhood social network formation in schools. These interviews were supplemented with archival research performed at the Western Reserve Historical Society, which acts as the official document repository for most Jewish community organizations in the Cleveland area including the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland and its subsidiaries, numerous synagogues, and documents related to the Cleveland Council on Soviet Anti-Semitism. Figure 1: People born in the former Soviet Union, average from 2005-2009. The areas of higher concentration in the southern suburbs around Parma are generally ethnic Ukrainians and not part of the Soviet Jewish refugee population. 14 Theoretical Underpinnings: Bourdieu’s Theory of Cultural Reproduction Immigrant and refugee integration and assimilation processes are, at root, cultural issues. In order to function, both new arrivals and the host society need to adjust their culture as practiced in daily public life. These nature of these adjustments determine the level of integration and the possibility of a trajectory towards assimilation in future generations (Alba and Nee 1997; 2003). The work of Pierre Bourdieu (1973; 1977; 1986; 1990; 1998) provides a good model of social and cultural reproduction from which to examine the processes by which immigrants and refugees adjust the practice of everyday life to make the cultural transition to their new home. Prior to Bourdieu, most theories on the reproduction of society followed in the Marxist tradition of focusing on how economic classes were maintained and reproduced via structural means and how these dominant social structures reproduced themselves (Gramsci 1971a). Bourdieu took many of the elements from Marxist structural theorist and, arguing that individual agents construct the social structures, developed a theory of cultural reproduction that incorporates both social structures and the agents that comprise them. He referred to this as habitus/field theory (Bourdieu 1973; 1977; 1990). In Bourdieu’s cultural reproduction model, the field is comprised of all factors external to an individual that structure the practice of everyday life. On the other side, habitus is the lens through which an individual perceives and interprets the field in which daily life is performed. A person’s habitus is the subconscious dispositions and behaviors acquired throughout his lifetime, the embodiment of that person’s cumulative experiences. Bourdieu’s model is based on the entwinement of habitus and field. The field dictates the conditions under which capital is accumulated, but itself is constituted 15 by the habituses of others; i.e. the field is socially constructed by the habituses of society, but also structures the construction of the habitus for each individual. In this way, the reproduction of habitus is structured by the “historically and socially situated conditions” (Bourdieu 1977, 95) that allow for core cultural elements to be reproduced (and changed) throughout time. Similarly, an individual simultaneously practices daily life, as informed by his habitus, within multiple fields that structure interlocking and overlapping scales, and are constantly shifting throughout time and space. Thus, as fields are place specific, an individual’s habitus prepares them to function in the place (field) in which it was formed. This presents a distinct challenge for international migrants and refugees, who often times find themselves faced with functioning in a field that is very different from the one in which they formed their original habitus. In addition to Bourdieu’s habitus/field theory, he also describes the processes by which habitus, and thus field, are constructed. Bourdieu roots this theory in the idea of capital accumulation, although he expands the concept by describing four categories of capital: economic, cultural, social, and symbolic (Bourdieu 1986). Economic capital is the easily monetized objects an individual possesses, such as land, precious metals, currency, etc. Cultural capital exists in three states: the objectified state, the institutionalized state, and the embodied state. The objectified state of cultural capital is made up of objects of meaning. These objects have more value than simply the physical object itself, but that value can only be consumed or realized by a person with the appropriate embodied cultural capital. Each of these forms of capital can be mobilized in exchange for the other forms of capital. Institutionalized cultural capital is embodied cultural 16 capital that has also been objectified. For example, a university degree is a certificate that marks the bearer to be competent in their field. While objects of cultural value and institutionalized cultural capital can be important, it is the embodied state of cultural capital that makes them so. Embodied cultural capital is the accumulation and incorporation of experiences and knowledge. This process takes time and must be done only by the beneficiary. Embodied cultural capital cannot be transferred instantaneously from one individual to another in the way that economic capital or even objectified or institutionalized cultural capital may be. Embodied cultural capital gains its value through the application of learned skills or through the availability of social capital by being recognized as a member of a group with a shared culture. The concept of social capital is much more amorphous than that of economic capital. Social capital is, at its simplest, the ability of an individual to draw on the collective resources of a group. According to Bourdieu (1986, 248–9), social capital is: The aggregate of the actual and potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition, or, in other words, to membership in a group which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectivity-owned capital. This definition points to two components of social capital that are directly tied to a person’s social network. First, an individual’s social capital is based on how many people can be mobilized to provide support. The ability to mobilize people is closely related to the strength of the social tie, as it is easier to mobilize strong ties such as family and close friends, than weak ties such as an acquaintance from work (although the ease of mobilization is also tied to what form of capital is being requested). When looking for a job, new information about available positions is very important. Yet the transfer of this 17 information is not a burden to the giver. It is therefore easier to mobilize a social network to extract this form of capital than it would be when seeking a monetary loan, the giving of which is a greater burden. The second component of social capital is the capital available to the people within a mobilized social network. This capital can be any of the four types of capital depending upon the situation and the possibilities for conversion between the four types of capital. Mobilizing a social network of 50 low status poor immigrants who do not know how to function within the cultural system, for example, will yield a lower social capital than mobilizing one person with access to a large amount of capital, such as the governor of the state. Since Bourdieu, the concept of social capital has been refined and expanded upon by numerous scholars (Coleman 1988; Portes 1998), although many conceptualizations lose some of the flexibility of Bourdieu’s definition in favor of easing measurement of social capital. For example, Putnam (2000) limits his conceptualization of social capital to membership in formal groups, such as clubs, teams, and leagues, but does not consider more informal social networks such as friendships. Social capital has recently become a popular topic in studies of immigrant integration among sociologists, anthropologies, geographers, and other scholars. Much of the geographical work on social capital focuses on Putnam’s conceptualization (Holt 2008) despite criticism on methodological and epistemological grounds (Portes and Landolt 1996; Portes 1998; Jackman and Miller 1998; Foley and Edwards 1999; Amin 2005). Holt (2008), in turn, has called for geographers to turn to a conceptualization of social capital more in line with Bourdieu. To date, the majority of studies focused on immigration have examined two aspects of immigrant social capital: (1) transnational social networks and their impacts on 18 migration and settlement patterns, such as chain migration and heterolocalism (Skop and Li 2003; Hardwick 2003; Hardwick 2006; Zelinsky and Lee 1998; Zelinsky 2001); or (2) the role of ethnic in-group social networks ( endogenous social capital) in the maintenance of culture or development of economic opportunities (Sanders and Nee 1987; Hardwick 2003; Bell-Rose and Bean 1999; Foley and Hoge 2007; Kaplan and Li 2006; Mattingly 1999; Portes and Sensenbrenner 1993). Despite this focus on intra- ethnic networks, weak out-group network connections (exogenous social capital) may actually be more important for the introduction of new information (Granovetter 1973; 1983; 1995). This information can be about employment opportunities, of great economic value, or simply exposure to a person who better understands the social and cultural norms of the new country. All can be of great value in the accumulation of embodied cultural capital. Each of these four forms of capital can be exchanged or mobilized as part of the capital accumulation process. The nature of these exchanges constructs and is structured by both habitus and field, all intertwined in the practice of everyday life. This provides a robust framework from which to examine the processes by which immigrants and refugees shift practices of capital exchange and accumulation as they shift their daily practices to redevelop their habitus to better function in the field of their new home. Nee and Sanders (2001) have already shown that immigrant groups that arrive with accumulated capital that is fungible in the new field tend to have better first generation outcomes than those that do not. However, they focus largely on economic and cultural capital. Soviet Jewish refugees provide an excellent opportunity to study the process of redeveloping habitus and capital accumulation for a group arriving with primarily social 19 capital. Furthermore, the redevelopment of habitus takes a long time. Soviet Jewish refugees arrived between 1975 and 1995 and therefore enough time has elapsed for them to become established and redevelop habitus. Also, as a whole, the Soviet Jewish refugee population has, from the beginning, viewed themselves as becoming permanently established in the U.S. Since they are not temporary refugees planning to return to their home country, this group has been motivated to redevelop their habitus in closer alignment to the norms of American society. Soviet Jewish Habitus The rise of the Soviet Union following the Russian Revolution brought a dramatic shift in the practice of everyday life. The Soviet Union was not just an experiment in a new governmental form; it involved an explicit reimagining of what it meant to be Russian (Berdi a ev 1960). The Russian revolution sought to remove the differentiation between classes of people, and thus they needed to change the people’s view of the world to create what Leon Trotsky called the “New Man” (1924). This dramatic shift in the national scale field in Russia led to a need to bring the habituses of the populous in line. Thus, while the nature of a person’s habitus is place specific and will be different for people from diverse regions, this is particularly true of a habitus developed in the Soviet Union. Life under the Soviet Union was so different from anywhere else in the world that sociologist and satirist Aleksandr Zinoviev (1986) coined the satirical term “Homo Sovieticus” to describe the unique mindset of Soviet people. Homo Sovieticus is defined by indifference to communist ideology, isolation from the rest of the world, and a sense 20 that the only way to get ahead is to game the system. In Zinoviev’s depiction, Homo Sovieticus is the opposite of Trotsky’s ideal New Man. While the Soviet Union may have failed in creating their ideal New Man, they fully succeeded in destroying pre- Soviet ways of life. The combination of re-educating the citizenry and outlawing the performance of ethnic and religious identities served to flatten the social landscape of the Soviet Union and recast the practice of everyday life as Soviet. Following this shift in field to persecution of teaching the old ways, it was only a matter of a few generations before the habitus of Soviet citizens was forever reshaped. As Victoria 1 explained, “from both sides of my parents, from two generations before that, they were rabbis. Then they were not rabbis, but at least knew something. Then they knew very little and hide that so as not to hurt our lives. [For us], nowhere was religion.” Despite the efficiency with which the Soviet Union suppressed expression of old identities in the name of removing class differentiation, the end result was simply a shifting of the constituents in each class. While persecuting the expression of ethnic or religious identities, various official policies led to the subordination of certain groups. The fifth line of internal Soviet passports was for nationality. For most people, their official nationality was the member country in which they were born. However, for certain minority groups, including Jews and Tatars, the fifth line was instead inscribed with their ethnicity. Thus, the ideals of a communist Russia where all citizens were equal were undermined by fixing the ethno-national identities of minorities in their internal passports, which were required to be shown when applying for work or simply moving from place to place. The fixing of minority identities was compounded by shifting 1 Pseudonyms are used throughout 21 attitudes that accompanied the Communist Party’s rise to power. In pre-communist times and the early years of the Party’s rule, minorities were often given special treatment in affirmative action programs. However, as is often the case when power changes hands via a revolution, any group that had previously received special treatment later became viewed as an enemy of the people. In this way, Soviet Jews developed their habitus in a different field than the Soviet majority. The field of Soviet Jewry was defined by discrimination, reduced access to university level education, and limited career advancement. When asked why they left the Soviet Union, almost every respondent indicated some form of anti-Semitism. Irene illustrated the anti-Semitism that drove her to leave with a story. “In ’73 a man from my father’s department, who was fired from a different department because he was Jewish, decided to leave… So, finally he left, and my father lost all his positions and couldn’t work anymore as if he was responsible for his decision.” She also indicated that she feared her daughter would not be admitted to the university because of her Jewish ethnicity, despite being the equivalent to valedictorian of her high school. Others left to avoid having their sons drafted into the military when the Soviet Union was at war in Afghanistan. But, even those avoiding military service mentioned anti-Semitism. Natalia indicated that she was not only afraid for her son’s life during the invasion, but in the military many Jews were “just killed by their friends.” In addition to the structural anti-Semitism, Soviet Jews were also subjected to the low standard of living typical of the Soviet Union by the 1960s. Olga described her family’s living conditions: We lived, five of us, lived in one small room in so called cardinal apartment. Before revolution of course, all of this apartment and maybe 22 whole building, several floors, belonged to one person, but after revolution all this property was taken away from them. Each apartment, for example, would have five or six rooms. Each room was occupied by one family. It could be three or five or six people. One kitchen for everybody, so if there are five or six neighbors it will be shared, one kerosene stove. One restroom for everybody, for twenty or thirty people. The combination of anti-Semitism and economic scarcity led to a Soviet Jewish habitus defined by fear. Fear of authority. Fear of diminished opportunity. Fear of not being able to buy essential items that led to hording when they were available. Victoria explained that “we [did] not say hello or smile to people that we do not know on the street… [We were] preoccupied with keeping afloat … just looking for another line to stand in to hopefully get a chicken or something.” The habitus that allowed a Jew to survive in the Soviet Union involved a system of trading favors with friends and bending the rules to obtain items outside the official channels. Between the poor living conditions in the Soviet Union and the anti-Semitic atmosphere, many Jews wanted to leave. However, the borders were closed by the Iron Curtain and they were not permitted to leave until 1975 when the Soviet Union began to permit a few Jews to emigrate for Israel due to escalating world pressure from the Soviet Jewish Freedom Movement (Remennick 2007; Beckerman 2010). In 1980, the borders were once again closed due to the war with Afghanistan. Then, with Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power and a desire for improved trade relations with the United States, the borders were once again opened in 1990. This time, thousands of Jews fled the Soviet Union. Most of these refugees went to Israel, however, upon reaching Vienna, the stop-over between the Soviet Union and Israel, many chose to head south for Italy where they would await entrance visas for the United States. When a person left the Soviet Union, they were only allowed to take one suitcase and about five hundred dollars. 23 Social Capital, Resettlement, and Capital Accumulation Arriving in the United States with a suitcase and a few hundred dollars, the Soviet Jewish refugees were economically destitute. They also had very few career skills that transferred to the new field. Despite this lack of economic or cultural capital, Soviet Jewish refugees had accumulated a great deal of social capital through their membership in a new global Jewish identity. This social capital provided access to numerous aid organizations operating at local, national, and international scales. Even when leaving the Soviet Union, the refugees had unknowingly mobilized this social capital to obtain the airline tickets to Vienna, provided by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). This support was continued by local organizations once refugees were resettled in their new locations. Upon arrival in Cleveland, refugees were immediately able to mobilize the exogenous social capital accumulated based upon their Jewish ethnicity to economic capital through the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland and its subsidiaries. The Jewish Family Services Association (JFSA), a division of the Federation, along with numerous volunteers would arrange for a furnished apartment for an incoming family with three months’ rent paid and a supply of food. The money to pay for the apartment, food, and furniture was supplied by a sponsor, usually a family member living in the area. All refugees were required to have a sponsor in order to obtain an entry visa for the U.S. Refugees who did not have any family in the U.S. to sponsor them were called “free cases” and could then be sponsored by an organization. The Jewish Federation had sufficient monetary resources to allow them to never turn down a free case. They were able to provide this level of financial commitment due to the support of the Cleveland 24 Jewish community, another way the existing social capital could be converted into economic capital. Jewish Family Services in Cleveland would also help refugees find employment and would provide transportation to job interviews when necessary, although most jobs provided through the Jewish Family Services were unskilled low wage work and the majority of refugees interviewed found meaningful employment on their own as soon as possible. One more immediate way refugees were able to convert social capital to economic capital was through the Hebrew Free Loan Association (HFLA). The Hebrew Free Loan, founded in 1904 to help European refugees resettle, offers small interest free loans to Jews. Most of the upfront capital required of the sponsors was borrowed from the Hebrew Free Loan, oftentimes by newly arrived refugees who wanted to secure visas for family members who were still abroad as quickly as possible. One respondent borrowed the money and initiated the process for his brother’s family within two weeks of arrival. In addition to financial aid, there were numerous services provided through the Federation and Jewish Family Services designed specifically to help refugees accumulate embodied cultural capital. Refugee children, while obviously eligible for the public school system, were also provided tuition free admittance to any of the private Jewish schools their first year. Adults were offered free access to English-as-a-Second Language (ESL) classes (which all of the people interviewed for this study took advantage of) as well as access to social workers through the Jewish Family Services. Community volunteers were also available to help with basic tasks such as setting up a bank account or going grocery shopping. Coming from a communist country, refugees’ habitus did not include the skills necessary for day-to-day functioning in a capitalist 25 regime. This meant that the volunteers who helped them after resettlement in Cleveland often became some of the most important people in their lives. As one respondent put it, “Everybody who worked for the agency meant very much for me. They taught me everything from day one.” While these initial methods of converting social capital to economic and cultural capital were very helpful to Soviet Jewish refugees, life was not easy for them. In general, they were well educated, and while every person interviewed had obtained a college degree in the former Soviet Union before emigrating, most were forced to seek work in Cleveland outside their area of expertise due to poor language skills, or because they possessed technical skills that did not transfer directly to the field in the U.S. The population of Russian speakers in Cleveland was not large enough to create its own large scale ethnic economy as happened in other larger Russian communities such as in Brighton Beach (Orleck 1999). Most refugees were part of a lower economic class in the U.S. than they were accustomed to in the Soviet Union. Despite these economic hardships, however, only one person interviewed was unhappy with the decision to come to the U.S., and all respondents talked about how driven they were to succeed. For example, Eli described his experience finding his first job: I have a masters’ degree in mechanical engineering. I was experimental design department manager [in the Soviet Union] … The first job, I obviously started to look in the area of engineering. Nobody would hire me as an engineer … So Jewish Family Services found a few addresses where to go to be interviewed … The first position was a temporary assignment as a draftsman [and paid $5 per hour]. In this way, refugees began the process of accumulating economic capital. Earnings potential at first was very limited, before refugees acquired the embodied cultural capital of how to function within the American job market and before they had 26 acquired the understanding of social norms necessary to succeed in interviews. Motivation was high and all respondents wanted to learn how to function as an American so their children would have greater opportunities than they did. Many respondents indicated they did not even teach their children born here the Russian language and tried to raise them purely as “Americans.” This illustrates that the process of accumulation of cultural capital was of great importance to this group of refugees and was, in fact, a prerequisite for the greater accumulation of economic capital. Once Eli, mentioned above, had accumulated the necessary cultural capital to understand how working as an engineer in the U.S. differed from working in the former Soviet Union, he advanced rapidly and was employed as an engineer within a year of his arrival. He went on to be a senior research engineer for General Electric and even worked for NASA. The accumulation of embodied cultural capital is the primary process by which habitus is redeveloped. This process can only be accomplished through practice within the field for which the habitus is being constructed. The practice of social norms with others of a similar habitus will reinforce existing practices, whereas everyday practice with those of a different habitus will lead to the accumulation of a different set of embodied cultural capital. Furthermore, since social practices and norms (i.e. the field) vary with location, this process is geographically rooted with and is also dependent on scale. For example, it would be very difficult to learn how to function within Chinese society while living in the U.S. It would be less difficult to shop for quality meats when moving to a new city within the same culture, but developing such local knowledge still requires taking time to visit numerous butchers. In order to redevelop habitus, therefore, one must practice day to day life with a group of people that have a habitus similar to that 27 which is desired, but this practice must also occur in a similar field, which is necessarily place specific. In the case of the Soviet Jewish refugees, the redevelopment of habitus required daily interaction with Americans in the U.S. Since this interaction involved regular and extended interaction with other people, it was rooted in the social networks, and therefore social capital, of the practitioners, thus making the accumulation of exogenous social capital a prerequisite for the accumulation of the embodied cultural capital that is itself a prerequisite for improving economic outcomes. Respondents repeatedly indicated that the accumulation of new cultural capital, specifically adjusting subconscious behaviors, was the most difficult part of adjusting to life in the United States. Norm told a story about how he thought the toilet in his first apartment was broken because the water filled half the bowl. Victoria, a business owner, indicated that she had only recently become aware of some of her own habitus, almost thirty years after arriving in the country. When I walk into my own store in the morning, I walk with apparently a very angry face. And it’s not angry, I mean it looks angry. What it is it’s concentrated and it’s studying the product that happened the night before… So I come in with look that everybody’s like, stay away from her, and I wasn’t aware of it until fairly recently… So I made a conscious effort to come in and smile. I try to contact with my eyes the people behind the counter and smile at them to say, it’s okay, it’s alright, I’m okay, don’t quit yet! Place and Social Capital Once established, social networks may span great distances, but they generally form in a specific place and are therefore place dependent. Refugees in Cleveland generally identified four locations where the accumulation of social capital took place: neighbors in the same apartment complex; students and instructors in ESL classes; at 28 work; and at school (since many of them took advantage of government grants to take additional college courses). Respondents indicated that they tended to make close endogenous network connections among their neighbors and in ESL classes, and formed weak exogenous connections at work and school. One respondent, an exception, made a very strong exogenous connection by meeting her non-immigrant husband at school. Of these connections, the strong ties formed amongst neighbors were reported as being the ones that remained the most durable and had the greatest impact on quality of life. The makeup of these close network ties varied with the period in which the respondent arrived in Cleveland. Time of arrival also determined where refugees settled in the city. Those who came with the earliest wave of Soviet Jewish refuge (1975-1980) were settled in Cleveland Heights, an inner ring suburb with, at that time, a very strong Jewish identity and significant populations of religious Ashkenazi and Hasidic Jews. These early refugees indicated during interviews for this study that they had fewer Soviet Jews as neighbors than American Jews and therefore they formed closer ties to American Jews than did refugees who arrived later. During the 1980s, Cleveland Heights underwent a demographic shift as the population of lower income African Americans increased (Morton 2002). In a classic pattern of “white flight”, the majority of the city’s Jewish population began an eastward migration to Cleveland’s outer suburbs, particularly those refugees who could afford to move since their habitus did not include the experience of living in close proximity to black people. Many of the Jews who chose not to relocate were the Hasidic Jews who needed to be within walking distance of the synagogues. This gradual relocation of the majority of Cleveland’s Russian Jewish refugee population, however, started a chain 29 reaction that affected the settlement patterns of later refugees. When the later, larger, wave of refugees arrived (1989-1995), they were largely placed by the resettlement agency in apartments in Mayfield Heights, a far eastern suburb of Cleveland (Figure 2). These later arrivals found themselves living in apartment blocks primarily occupied by other Soviet Jewish refugees in what could be considered a Russian ethnic enclave. Refugees who settled in Mayfield Heights indicated that their social networks consisted almost entirely of other refugees, and thus had a very different character than those of earlier arrivals. However, many of the refugees that make up the social networks of later arrivals had been living in Cleveland long enough to have redeveloped their habitus to a degree that they could pass on cultural knowledge and aid in the accumulation of cultural capital to new arrivals. Of course, the character of this cultural knowledge, as a product of past experience, was distinctly more Russian than earlier refugees would have encountered. In this way, the patterns of residential settlement determined by the Figure 2: Intra-urban migration of Soviet Jewish refugees. Early refugees (1975-1980) settled in Cleveland Heights, then moved to eastern suburbs. Later refugees (1989-1995) settled in Mayfield Heights. 30 resettlement agency, had a profound impact on the process of social network formation and, therefore, on the redevelopment of habitus in this particular refugee community. All of these processes occur in a cyclic fashion whereby capital is accumulated and converted between forms. Once refugees acquire sufficient cultural capital, they are able to find better jobs and increase the rate at which they accumulate economic capital, as well as exogenous social capital by shifting to a new job setting with different coworkers and new social experiences. With the accumulation of economic capital, many decided to move out of their apartments to buy a single family home. For many, the choice of where to buy a home was influenced by social networks based on their desire to reside near friends. After moving, some would help their friends buy houses in the same neighborhood. One respondent even gave a close friend money for a down payment when the house across the street came up for sale. Throughout this process, habitus is being continuously redeveloped to allow for the more efficient accumulation of social capital, as the refugee’s daily practice becomes more in tune with the field of their new home, which in turn allows for the more efficient accumulation of social capital, and its conversion to cultural and economic capital. Despite the relative success of Soviet Jewish Refugees both economically and in redeveloping their habitus to function in the new field, most indicated, while they maintain numerous weak social ties to the native born population, the preponderance of their strong social network connections are with other refugees. In order to combat this, one Soviet Jewish refugee was able to mobilize the social capital associated with his membership in the Cleveland Jewish community to secure funding from the Jewish 31 Community Federation of Cleveland for a Russian Cultural program. He described the goal of the program as To involve [Soviet Jewish refugees in the Jewish community] through education programs, through leadership development courses… We are twelve to thirteen thousand Russian speaking Jews in Cleveland and we didn’t have one single person on the board of directors in the federation. Now we have three. The Russian cultural program was highly successful, not only in getting Soviet Jewish refugees to participate in the Jewish community, but in bringing together people from diverse backgrounds. They offered classical music evenings with musicians from the Cleveland Orchestra, mobilizing connections through the Russian musicians. They also offered Russian language and cultural classes for children through the Jewish Community Center. Many of the parents who enrolled their children in these classes were not Jews, but were Russian Orthodox immigrants. This is just one more example of the conscious effort to develop social capital through Cleveland Jewish institutions and set the Soviet Jewish refugees on a trajectory towards incorporation and assimilation. Conclusions The redevelopment of habitus is one of the most difficult processes facing a migrant in their new home. In particular, the accumulation of exogenous social capital that is necessary to obtain information on how to practice within the new field is a daunting task. This is especially true of refugees from the former Soviet Union. The social capital that was carefully and deliberately constructed though the formation of transnational social networks during the Soviet Jewish Freedom movement, and the resultant economic and cultural capital, gave Soviet Jewish refugees a much needed 32 helping hand whether or not they wanted to adopt the culture of their new home and redevelop their habitus. This places social capital solidly at the foundation of the capital accumulation process of social and cultural reproduction for Soviet Jewish refugees in Cleveland and other parts of the United States. Place also plays an important role in the ongoing accumulation of all forms of capital and the redevelopment of habitus. Indeed, multiple respondents in this study indicated that they chose to settle in Cleveland because, as compared to settling in larger ethnic neighborhoods in places like New York where the larger size of the ethnic enclave there would allow them to live life much as they had in the Soviet Union. These informants indicated clearly during my interviews with them that they left the Soviet Union to become “Americans,” not “Russians in America,” and access to resources via Jewish social capital allowed them to choose which social and cultural processes they wanted to reproduce and pass on to the next generation. This conscious decision to redevelop habitus is reflected in their decision to settle outside an ethnic enclave. In turn, future residential relocation decisions are rooted in the social networks formed as a direct result of the initial place of settlement; a decision that further affects the accumulation of capital and the redevelopment of habitus. This re-conceptualization of the refugee resettlement experience and associated capital exchange process within Bourdieu’s framework links scholarly work focused on economic and residential integration (structural assimilation) to prior work on social capital. These two different but closely related research agendas, incorporated into Bourdieu’s concepts of economic and social capital, can then be linked to the formation of cultural capital. This analysis of Soviet Jewish networks and capital also provides 33 evidence that Bourdieu’s field theory, and the associated concept of habitus, both provide a structure through which important decisions about daily practice may be examined. Within the field of the receiving country, refugees and immigrants must make difficult decisions about daily practice as represented by their redeveloped habitus. Some may decide to redevelop their habitus in ways that maximize retention of their ethnic identities, such as by living in enclaves near others with a similar ethnicity and language. Other immigrants and refugees, such as the ones in this study, may consciously choose to redevelop their habitus in line with the receiving culture. This latter option indicates that Park and Burgess’ (1921) model of assimilation may warrant a new examination within the lens of Bourdieu’s field theory. On a broader note, this case study highlights the importance of the accumulation of social and cultural capital, without denying the value of economic capital, in an attempt to avoid the economic reductionism that is all too common in immigration research. The results of this study of the shifting habitus of Russian Soviet Jews in Cleveland also respond to Holt’s (2008) call for a re-conceptualization of social capital rooted in Bourdieu and embodied in the habitus and spatial practice of the individual within the field. This finding, along with understanding more about how a modified version of Bourdieu’s model of capital accumulation and conversion applies to transnational migration, places social capital at the heart of the redevelopment and reproduction of habitus. Thus it is important to further examine the initial accumulation of transnational social capital that provided refugees with access to Jewish aid institutions through the Soviet Jewish Freedom Movement’s conscious efforts to include Soviet Jews in the global Jewish identity. 34 CHAPTER III ENGINEERING SOVIET JEWISH FREEDOM: IDENTITY, IMAGINED COMMUNITY, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF TRANSNATIONAL SOCIAL CAPITAL When they finally gained permission to leave the Soviet Union, Jewish refugees were allowed to take only a few hundred dollars and two small suitcases filled with their personal belongings. Those headed for the United States usually found themselves stranded for up to a year on the outskirts of Rome awaiting approved entrance visas needed to continue on to their new permanent homes. While they waited, many would be forced to sell what few belongings they had and deplete their meager cash reserves simply to live. Upon arrival in the United States, most Soviet Jewish refugees were in an impoverished state that, were they members of another ethnic group, would have been a significant barrier to establishing their new lives. However, as discussed in this article, Soviet Jewish refugees arrived with a significant amount of social capital derived entirely from their membership in a global Jewish imaginative. Social capital, the access to resources provided by membership in a group, is exceedingly important for refugees. It provides a social network which chain migration follows, and is central to resettlement and integration outcomes. Most scholarship on the role of social capital in refugee groups focuses on support from co-ethnics in the same situation (i.e. Sanders and Nee 1987; Hardwick 2003). On the surface, one might note that this analysis of Soviet Jews as co-ethnics linked to American Jews by virtue of being 35 Jewish builds directly on this prior literature. However, the modern notion of a global Jewish consciousness did not exist until after the late 1960s. This global Jewish identity, and the social capital derived from this identity, arose from two primary factors. First, the formation of Israel and its later victory in the six days war provided a focal point for Jews around the world; and second, the Soviet Jewish Freedom Movement, one of the most significant human rights movements in the twentieth century, made a deliberate effort to build ties between Jewish communities in the United States and those in the Soviet Union. These transnational ties served to bring Soviet Jewry into the fold of the new global Jewish identity. In addition, the direct ties between American Jews and Soviet Jews fostered a particular kind of social and political context to evolve in the United States that allowed for extensive aid to be given to newly arrived Soviet Jewish refugees. This article investigates the relationship between the construction of social capital and identity formation within the Soviet Jewish Freedom Movement. As one key part of this larger transnational movement, I focus on the experiences, shifting identities, and social capital of key activists and Jewish refugees from the former Soviet Union who currently reside in Cleveland, Ohio. Cleveland was the birth place of what became the Soviet Jewish Freedom Movement and, thus, the city also developed a Jewish identity that welcomed the arrival of Soviet Jewish refugees into the community. This attitude was reflected in the strong support structures developed to aid refugees during the resettlement process. However, none of this would have been possible without the prior development of the transnational social capital that drew American and Soviet Jews together in spirit. 36 Methodology This study of the Soviet Jewish Freedom Movement is based on data gathered and analyzed from structured and unstructured interviews conducted on site in Cleveland during the summer of 2009. As discussed below, the city of Cleveland is one of the most significant resettlement sites for Jewish refugees from Russia and the former Soviet Union in the United States. Interviews were conducted with 23 of the city’s Soviet Jewish refugees between the ages of 40 and 81 years of age. The majority of respondents were women (18 out of 23) because they were easier to access and had learned English more quickly than their male counterparts. These informants left their homeland in the former Soviet Union to resettle in Cleveland between 1976 and 1995. I also interviewed eight community activists who were intimately involved with the Soviet Jewish Freedom Movement and Jewish resettlement efforts in the United States. The use of snowball sampling proved the most effective method for recruiting participants from this hard to reach hidden population because of their strong intra-ethnic social and cultural networks. Interview data was supplemented by archival information found in the Western Reserve Historical Society, the official document repository for most of the Jewish organizations in the Cleveland area. This collection includes information on the Soviet Jewish Freedom Movement from the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland and its subsidiaries, numerous synagogues in the area, the Cleveland Council on Soviet Anti- Semitism, and personal documents from individuals who were involved in the movement. In addition to paper documents, the Western Reserve Historical Society archives also include posters, photographs, tape recordings, and videos that proved useful for my study. 37 Shifting Identities Identity is flexible and dynamic with individual and group identities changing throughout time as well as with context and situation. Much scholarly literature has examined the role of social groups in the formation of individual identities and group interaction both from sociology’s identity theory (Stryker 1968; 1980; Stryker and Serpe 1982; Burke 1980; McCall and Simmons 1978) and social psychology’s social identity theory (Hogg 1993; Hogg and Abrams 1988; Tajfel 1979; Turner 1982). While these two theoretical approaches to group identity developed independently, there are many similarities between them, and both provide useful approaches through which to examine formation and contextualization of identity with relation to groups (see Hogg, Terry, and White 1995 for a comparison). However, since both approaches focus on either the effect of group membership on an individual’s identity or relations between different groups, neither attempts to provide a model of the process by which a group reproduces and changes its own identity. Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction provides a useful framework to model the way culture and group identity shifts over time. Likewise, his concept of habitus also provides a link between identity and the broader processes of social reproduction and political change (Todd 2005). Identity theory model focuses on the the concept of role identities, whereby an individual has a series of distinct, layered components that make up their identity as a multifaceted whole (Stryker 1968; 1980; Burke 1980; Stryker and Serpe 1982; Wiley 1991). These role identities are a direct result of the structural societal positions that a person occupies. Thus, according to this conceptualization, a person can simultaneously identify with many different roles. For example one might identify as a student, an 38 athlete, a Muslim, an American, and so forth. The particular identity that a person emphasizes over others at any given moment, and the hierarchy of identities that results, is highly contextual. Identity theorists refer to this flexible hierarchy as identity salience (McCall and Simmons 1978; Stryker 1968; Wiley 1991). It is important to note that role identities located at the top of the hierarchy at a given moment are more likely to influence behavior than those located lower in the hierarchy. In addition, identity salience is further determined by what identity theorists refer to as commitment. Commitment is the number of social relationships that an individual may have that are dependent upon a specific role identity (Stryker and Statham 1985). The greater the number of social interactions predicated upon a role identity, the more likely it is to be the salient identity in that context (Stryker 1980). Therefore, practice is influenced by a person’s salient identity, which in turn, is influenced by the societal roles an individual occupies and the number of social relationships that are predicated upon that role. In comparison, social identity theory focuses similarly on the concept of “identity categories.” One may view herself as belonging to multiple discrete social categories of varying importance (Hogg, Terry, and White 1995). These categories combine with a person’s beliefs about the nature of members of certain categories, or subjective belief structures, that influence group behavior. Through this process of self-categorization, therefore, an individual can then divide social relationships into in-group and out-group relationships. This process of othering influences intergroup relations by depersonalizing other people into representatives of the beholder’s subjective beliefs about their member group (Said 1979). 39 Human geographers interested in migration and population patterns and issues have a long tradition of categorizing groups into externally recognized identity categories such as race and ethnicity, in part due to their dependence on information from census reports and other government data sources (for example Meigs 1941; Jordan 1969; Jakle and Wheeler 1969; Villeneuve 1972; Estaville 1986; Haverluk 1998). In contrast, humanistic geographers have long argued for a more subjective view of identity that recognizes wide personal variability and necessitates fuzzy categorizations whereby different aspects of identity are emphasized over others depending upon context (Buttimer 1976; Tuan 1976; 1977; Hardwick 1993; Cerulo 1997; Brubaker and Cooper 2002). Despite differences in the data-driven approaches used by population geographers and the contextualized self-categorization used by humanistic geographers, both are rooted in approaches and models linked to social identity theory. While both identity theory and social identity theory strive to predict behavior based on identity, the latter emphasizes a person’s understanding of their own identity and self-categorization more so than daily performance of that identity. Immigration scholars within geography focus on place-based shifts in national identity categories, including transnational identities, which occur as part of the immigration process (Hardwick and Mansfield 2009). However, all of these models focus on the formation of an individual’s identity in relation to social structures and thus do not provide a general theory of how shifts in that identity may influence the same social structures that initially influenced its definition. This is where a greater emphasis on daily performance as an expression of identity is of more use to scholars interested in analyzing the shifting identities of immigrant and refugee groups as they adjust to new environments and places. 40 Todd (2005) argues that it is especially useful to construct a model that illustrates how identities function in order to recognize the constant shifting nature of identity as well as the ways in which identity is socially embedded within fixed categorizations. She suggests that the use of Bourdieu’s model of habitus provides a useful foundation for documenting the dynamic variability and constant reproduction of identity within the long term continuity of social identity and ethnicity. Through this use of habitus, Todd (2005) provides a linkage between the psychological and sociological conceptions of identity and Bourdieu’s broader social theory of social reproduction, thereby providing a new model whereby social identity and social structures constantly reproduce each other. Bourdieu and Social Reproduction Social theorist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction relates daily practice, as a reflection of accumulated life experiences and values, with structural influences (Bourdieu 1977; 1984; 1986; 1990; 1998). One of the primary reasons that Bourdieu’s model is useful for the study of identity and social change is that it does not predetermine which elements of social reproduction (habitus or field; social, cultural, symbolic, or economic forms of capital) are emphasized in any given context. Instead, the model simply lays out the theoretical framework of interactions and exchanges from which specific cases may be analyzed. Further, it allows for the different elements to work collectively or in opposition. Bourdieu conceptualizes habitus as the embodiment of an individual’s accumulated experiences throughout life (Bourdieu 1977; 1990). This way of viewing habitus provides the lens through which an individual views and interacts with the world as well as informing the decisions he/she makes in response to changes in the 41 surrounding world. As habitus is developed through the subconscious accumulation of experiences, it is necessarily place-based and dependent upon the social contexts in which an individual has lived (Holt 2008), as well as the geographical place in which it is produced and reproduced (see Tuan 1977). This lived experience forms the foundation for a person’s identity (Todd 2005) and is consistent with both sociological and psychological views of social identity. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is cast in relation to what he terms the field. The field is the external structure in which an individual practices at any given moment (Bourdieu 1977; 1990). According to Bourdieu, every field has a dominant hegemonic set of rules, which can be place based social norms (Cresswell 1996), coercive governmental regulations, or is located somewhere in between these two extremes. Additionally, each individual is able to perform their personal habitus in a number of different fields simultaneously. Indeed, the specific form a person’s habitus takes is always contextual to the field in which it is performed. This model is very similar to both role identity salience and the hierarchical nature of identity categorization from other disciplines. Thus, Bourdieu’s model of habitus provides a suitable model of a person’s performed identity. Habitus changes over time as the individual processes new experiences and, therefore, a person’s performed identity changes with new experiences. Bourdieu describes the process through which shifts in social reproduction, including habitus, transpire as a system of capital accumulation and exchange (Bourdieu 1986). Bourdieu (1984; 1986) divides capital into four different forms: economic, symbolic, cultural, and social. Economic capital includes money, tangible goods, land, and so on. Symbolic capital refers to an object having greater or lesser value attached to 42 it than the physical object itself. Cultural capital exists in three states: embodied, objectified, and institutionalized. Accumulation of cultural capital in the embodied state is the result of time spent on education, self-improvement, or simply acquired from life experience. Habitus is a form of embodied cultural capital. Cultural capital exists in an objectified state via objects that have a cultural value. Paintings are an objectified form of cultural capital where the value above, or below, that of a blank stretched canvas is due solely to the perception of the beholder. Institutionalized cultural capital is an official recognition of embodied cultural capital, such as a degree conferred from a university. Social capital is the access to resources that is “linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition – or in other words, to membership in a group” (Bourdieu 1986, 248–249). Social capital, as a network of relationships, has been established as a primary causal factor in immigrant and refugee chain migration, whereby new migrants settle in proximity to others in their network (MacDonald and MacDonald 1964; Coleman 1988; 1990; D. S. Massey 1999). Capital of any one form can be exchanged and converted to other forms (Bourdieu 1986). Since habitus is a form of cultural capital, it too can be converted to other forms of capital or, more importantly, changed through the conversion of other forms of capital to embodied cultural capital. Bourdieu thus provides a framework by which identity, rooted in habitus, shifts with the accumulation (or loss) of embodied cultural capital. Bourdieu’s conversion and exchange of forms of capital provide a clear route for social reproduction and evolution within the closed interaction of habitus with field, but in order for radical culture change to occur, outside intervention is necessary 43 (Todd 2005). This outside intervention can be as drastic as a foreign invasion, but it more likely takes the much simpler form of an idea: a global ideal that rubs a group of people at the core and changes the way they perceive themselves (Tsing 2005). Once a person’s internal conception of self has changed, one will either change the way identity or habitus is performed. In cases where the outward expression of this identity will be persecuted, an individual may be forced to live a life where subjective identity is out of phase with the official identity. The tensions created when an individual’s identity is at odds with the field in which it is performed can provoke significant change in their identity (Todd 2005). As identity shifts, so does the set of groups (role identities or categories) to which an individual feels attached. Anderson (2006) refers to this concept as an imagined community, although in his work, “group membership” refers only to a group with a shared language. In the Cleveland case study presented here, I found that it is also possible for an imagined community to be constructed from other shared identity categories. The study reported on in this article builds upon and expands Anderson, Bourdieu, and Todd’s foundational ideas and arguments based on a case study of the transnational social capital, resettlement experiences, identities, and habitus of Soviet Jewish refugees in Cleveland (Figure 1). Figure 1: Transnational networks of social capital 44 Case Study: From Soviet Outcasts to Global Jewish Identity Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people (Marx 2009). This Marxist view on religion was the core of the Soviet Union’s official atheistic policies whereby all religious belief was to be controlled, suppressed, and eventually eradicated. Under this policy, for fear of persecution, many families were forced to give up their religious traditions and could not pass them on to their children. The children then eventually lost their identification with the religion as well, and instead adopted a Russian cultural identity in response to the new societal role in which they found themselves. The loss of this religious identity category was noted in interviews for this study. For example, when asked about religion, Maiya, 1 a female informant in Cleveland, indicated that her family had lost its connection to their religious heritage: “From my mother’s side and from father’s side, like from two generations before that, they were rabbis. Then they were not rabbis, but at least knew something. Then, they knew very little and hide that to not hurt our lives. For us, nowhere was religion.” Similar stories were told by numerous other Cleveland respondents. With the disappearance of religion as a self-categorization, their habitus also shifted to reflect the loss of daily religious practice. The Soviet view of nationality was similar to that of religion. Despite the founding of the Soviet Union as a federation of individual nations, Lenin believed that eventually they would all merge into one shared nationality. To this end, internal Soviet 1 Pseudonyms are used throughout this article to identify interviewees involved in the project. 45 passports included two entries for the nationality: one that identified the bearer as a citizen of the Soviet Union, and another line identifying the specific nationality. For example, a person might be identified as both a Soviet citizen and Ukrainian. However, despite the official stance that religious identity was to be subservient to Soviet identity, more than two million Soviet citizens had passports where the line for specific nationality read “Jew”. Thus, while the Soviet Union had removed the religious identity role from the Jewish habitus, it simultaneously forced a new Jewish identity category that served the sole exclusionary purpose of casting the Jew as “other”. Gal Beckerman (2010) tells the following story of Yosef Mendelevich’s childhood in the 1950s: In Mendelevich’s first-grade class, he was the only one of the forty students who had Evrei – Jewish – written on that fifth line. When the teacher asked the children to stand up and state their nationalities, Mendelevich considered lying, but his nose and his name gave him away. “Mendelevich?” the teacher asked. “Jewish,” he whispered. The class started to giggle. … The teacher made no attempt to quiet the class. (Beckerman 2010, 21) Mendelevich’s experience was by no means anomalous. He was the only Jewish child in his class of 41 first-grade students. As with many children, he simply wanted to fit in with his classmates, but that was not to be. The identification of Jewish heritage as different and inferior, even for those who had long ago lost their religious heritage, affected the lives of millions of people in the Soviet Union. Jews had fewer job prospects and fewer chances for advancement, although many found ways to succeed professionally despite these challenges. As another respondent, Victoria, indicates, even those that were satisfied with their incomes felt excluded. “Our life was not bad. Much better than other people’s life. We had good salary, we had almost everything. But, it 46 was not good there, just to be a Jew. I always felt that at my job, and everything at the time, I was a second class citizen. And I had a good position.” She continued to indicate that she feared for her son’s life because he was approaching the age of 18 when all men in the Soviet Union were mandated to serve in the military. Victoria was especially afraid that her son might be drafted because so many Jews had been killed by other soldiers in the military simply because of their Jewish identities. The treatment of Jews had been less than ideal for the entire history of the Soviet Union, but anti-Semitic sentiments worsened over time, further casting the Soviet Jews into a socially inferior role. The government’s official policy was that all peoples of the Soviet Union should identify as Soviet above all else. Yet the identification and discrimination of Jews meant that they were constantly reminded of their inferior social role, leading to the role identity of second-class citizen becoming a salient identity. The salience of the Jewish identity, concurrent with the removal of an accompanying religious practice, resulted in tension between the official identity category and the self- categorization. This identity dissonance caused by the inferior salient role also led many Jews to no longer identify themselves with their Soviet national identity category. The 1948 formation of the nation state of Israel provided a new national identity category for Soviet Jews. A few bold Jews declared allegiance to Israel by writing letters to the Soviet Central Committee renouncing their Soviet citizenship and asking to leave for Israel. These Jews were swiftly arrested and many were sentenced to long prison terms or exiled to Siberia; others were simply fired from their jobs (Beckerman 2010). The Soviets made it clear that participation in the Zionist movement and declaring the new global Jewish identity as salient would be punished. Furthermore, any attempt to 47 leave the Soviet Union, or even to ask for permission to leave, would have dire consequences. Those Jews who requested, but were refused, exit visas became known as Refuseniks. Thus, many Jews were barred from performing their new found Zionist identity. Following Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Days War, the excitement over their victory and the resultant stability it indicated for the state of Israel (combined with the deterioration of conditions for Jews in the Soviet Union) emboldened them. More and more Soviet Jews, most of whom had become entirely secular, now embraced the Zionist Jewish identity to fill the void left by decades of exclusion, and shifted their habitus to reflect the performance of this newly salient identity. The Zionist movement also gave Soviet Jews a nation state with which they could identify. As another Cleveland interviewee, Jacob, put it when telling a colleague why he wanted to leave the Soviet Union: Jewish people [have] lived on the present territory of Ukraine now for the last eight centuries. Over eight hundred years. And this period of time wasn’t good enough, or enough for me to feel at home here. I am still being treated like an outsider. I don’t want to wait anymore and I don’t want my kids to be strangers in the country where we live already for generations. The identification of Israel as a new Jewish homeland was so great that Yosef Medelevich, whose childhood story is quoted above, joined a group of 16 Jews from Riga, Latvia, headed by Eduard Kuznetsov and Mark Dymshits in 1970, in an attempt to hijack an airplane. They intended to fly the plane to Sweden, gain asylum, and then continue on to Israel. The KGB discovered their plan, however, and they were arrested as soon as they arrived at the Smolny airport. Ultimately, this group of Jews was charged with high treason punishable by death (Beckerman 2010). The Six-Days War and global 48 Zionist movement, therefore, provided the external influence necessary to force a radical shift in social identity categories from that of “Soviet outcasts” to globally identified “Jews.” It also provided the drive to shift to a new habitus to reflect the practice of this new identity. Globalizing the Consciousness of American Jewry During this same time period, there was a concomitant shift in the identities of Jews in the United States. In the early 1960s, the Jewish community’s salient identity role was aligned more with social struggles and activist movements underway in the United States instead of with Jewish struggles in other parts the world. While being staunch supporters of Israel, the Jewish community had come to identify more strongly with the United States than with international Jewry. The primary issue that mobilized the Jewish community in the United States, in fact, was providing support for the ongoing Civil Rights Movement for African Americans. As had been the case for Soviet Jews, influences occurring outside the United States were necessary to shift the salient social identity of American Jews towards a global Jewish identity. Despite the Soviet Union’s attempts to show their treatment of Jews in the best light, Israeli diplomats became well aware of the extremely difficult living conditions there for Soviet Jews. Israel also understood that in order to survive as a Jewish nation, they needed an influx of Jews to bolster the population. The Israelis did not have the political clout to pressure the Soviet Union into changing its Jewish policy to allow emigration, but they knew that the United States, was in the best political position to place the necessary diplomatic pressures on the Soviet Union. At that time, with the United States providing much needed financial and military support, Israel could not risk 49 the political fallout of asking the U.S. government to change its diplomatic policy towards the Soviet Union. Instead, Israel chose a less direct method of influencing U.S. opinion by clandestinely funding Jewish American writer Moshe Decter through a secret Israeli office. Decter used these funds to organize the Jewish Minorities Research organization. The Israelis also sent Decter regular updates on the status of Soviet Jewry collected by their diplomats and spies and he consequently wrote and published hundreds of articles through Jewish Minorities Research using the data secretly passed from Israel with the goal of shifting the American Jewish identity to align more closely with global Jewish causes (Beckerman 2010). In Cleveland, Decter’s work did not go unnoticed. In 1961, Lou Rosenblum, a NASA scientist and president of Cleveland’s Beth Israel was leading a small study group and social action committee. After studying the Holocaust and fearing that the Soviet Jews were in danger of facing a similar fate, this group decided to study Moshe Decter’s articles. This resulted in their decision to turn their collective activist energies toward securing the freedom of Soviet Jews. Shocked to learn that that there were no other local, national, or international organizations focused on these issues, they convinced the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland (JCFC) to set up a sub-committee on Soviet Jewry (Rosenblum 2008). After the first few meetings of this new sub-committee, the Beth Israel members decided to separate from the Federation to start their own organization called the Cleveland Committee on Soviet Anti-Semitism (CCSA) headed by Rosenblum and congregation member Herb Caron (Rosenblum 2008). The CCSA spent the next few years raising awareness in Cleveland about the plight of Soviet Jews through the dissemination of pamphlets and newspaper 50 advertisements, and a series of standing room only public meetings with as many as 2,200 people showing interest (Figure 2). They also sent out a survey to two thousand rabbis around the country and were appalled after tallying the results to discover that they were the only grassroots organization combatting Soviet anti-Semitism (Beckerman 2010). In an attempt to become involved at the national level, Rosenblum and Caron attended a conference of national Jewish leaders in Washington, D.C. to discuss issues of Soviet Jewry. In spite of their efforts to draw attention to the Soviet Jewry issue, it became clear after the conference that the hegemonic powers of the American Jewish community had little interest in doing much more than paying lip service to the cause due to what they claimed was a “lack of evidence” that the Soviet Jews actually wanted their help (Beckerman 2010). About the same time as Cleveland’s Rosenblum was organizing the CCSA, Yaakov Birnbaum was also reading Moshe Decter’s articles in New York City. Birnbaum was outraged when he heard about the lack of interest that followed the Jewish conference in Washington. He particularly abhorred the hypocrisy of the Jewish leadership who were engaged in direct action in support of the Civil Rights Movement, but would not do the same for Soviet Jews, who Birnbaum viewed as Jewish kin (Beckerman 2010). Birnbaum translated his passion for working with youth into a fight for Soviet Jews by recruiting students from Yeshiva and Columbia universities to participate in regular meetings of what became the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry. The first public meeting drew more than 150 students – far more than Birnbaum had even dared hope for. Birnbaum asked for suggestions from the crowd, and a student suggested holding a rally. Four days later, the Student Struggle took to the streets of New York 51 with a marching demonstration targeting the Soviet mission to the United Nations. The rally drew coverage from all the major news organizations and was hailed as a huge success. Taking a page from the Civil Rights Movement, Birnbaum and the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry made these sorts of noisy protests their standard mode of operation (Beckerman 2010). Figure 2: Photo of the crowd at the first CCSA rally in 1965. Source: Cleveland Jewish News 1965 As it became apparent that the national Jewish leadership was not going to support the forms of activism encouraged by the CCSA and the Student Struggle, both organizations independently decided to scale up their operations. Rosenblum and Caron put together a guide on how to form committees on Soviet anti-Semitism for grassroots organizations in other cities and eventually founded the Union of Councils for Soviet Jewry (UCSJ) with Rosenblum elected as chair (Rosenblum 2008). 52 The Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry scaled up by demanding an ever increasing amount of attention through non-violent demonstrations and the occupation of public space. However, a rabbi, Meir Kahane, saw the passion and dedication of these youths, some of which had armed themselves in response to escalating tensions with the Black Panthers, and decided to re-organize this group to pursue a more violent means of drawing attention to the plight of Soviet Jews including the bombing of offices of a company that traded with the Soviet Union (Beckerman 2010). Kahane’s organization, the Jewish Defense League modeled after the Black Panthers, launched its efforts by traveling to Washington D.C with a thousand youths to march on the Soviet Embassy in a display of civil disobedience. This gathering resulted in mass arrests. The Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry and the Jewish Defense League on the one hand, and the Union of Councils for Soviet Jewry on the other, provided examples of two very different forms and identities expressed by the Soviet Jewish Freedom Movement. Throughout this process, Israel had virulently attempted to control the process of both directions, first through the writings of Moshe Decter and later by direct pressure on Rosenblum and Birnbaum. However, these activists refused to bow to the Israelis. At that point, Moshe Decter began working behind the scenes to push the Jewish leadership in the direction of the non-violent UCSJ, which became the dominant model for the Soviet Jewish Freedom Movement. This would not have happened without the leadership being faced with the violent alternatives of the JDL. The combination of these movements, awakened by the external influence of Decter’s writings, caused a dramatic shift in the Jewish American identity. Following the march in 1971 discussed above, 53 Kahane captured the nature of this radical shift in identity that raises the Jewish role to salience when he wrote: What marked March 21, 1971, as so different was that instead of being arrested for Vietnam, Angola, Chicanos, Blacks, Indians, or Eskimos, for the first time, huge numbers of young Jews were beginning to look at themselves not with self-hate or disinterest but with pride and self-respect. From a period of time when young Jews looked at themselves and asked, ‘Who am I?’ and answered either: ‘I don’t know,’ or, worse, ‘I don’t care,’ we had moved to thousands of young Jews marching off to jail after looking at themselves in the mirror and saying ‘I am a Jew and I am beautiful. I am a Jew and Jewish is beautiful. I am a Jew and I give a Jewish damn. (quoted in Beckerman 2010, 232) Between the shift in Soviet Jewish identity that caused the group to associate closely with the Zionist movement and the Israeli homeland, and the reawakening of the Jewish identity in America, a global Jewish imagined community was born. Unlike Anderson’s definition of an imagined community (2006) whereby the members of a group identify by a shared language, the group identity category required for this transnational imagined community of Jews was based on three other factors – their shared ethnicity, idealized homeland (Israel), and religious heritage. Despite the successful effort to globalize the Soviet Jewish cause, in order to secure their freedom, the identity portion of the imagined community needed to be converted into an actionable form of capital. This process, and the ever shifting political and social context that helped define and shape it, is discussed in the section that follows. Constructing Transnational Social Capital In the years following the Six-Days War, while the American Jewish movements discussed above were ramping up their activities, the Soviet Jews did not sit idly by. The sentencing to death of Dymshits and Kuznetsov for planning to hijack a plane drew 54 international attention and became a political catastrophe for the Soviet Union. Bowing to pressure, their sentences were commuted to prison terms of 15 years. Thereafter, in an attempt to regain some political capital, the Soviet government decided to allow some immigration to Israel under the guise of family reunification. As some of the early Refusenik leaders began to attract a following and continued to make noise within the Soviet Union, the Soviets decided the best way to prevent the movement from gaining traction was to use this family reunification process to remove the most vocal leaders from the Soviet Union. As word got out that these leaders had been allowed to leave, the Soviet Central Committee was flooded with letters from its Jewish population requesting permission to emigrate from the former USSR to join other family members in Israel (Beckerman 2010). Copies of some of these letters and pleas for help managed to make their way out of the Soviet Union and into the United States. The broadcast of these letters put to rest once and for all the discussion over whether the Soviet Jews wanted help. These letters also raised sufficient awareness in the American Jewish community about the plight of Soviet Jews. After this success, the Soviet Jewish Freedom Movement then turned its attention to the more concrete, yet more difficult, task of securing the right of exit for Soviet Jews. The Union of Councils for Soviet Jewry decided the best course of action was to encourage the U.S. government to exert pressure on the Soviet Union. In order to secure the necessary political capital, it was imperative to keep the American Jewish community engaged so they would be able to put political pressure on their representatives as well as to make sure the Refuseniks knew that they had not been forgotten. Both of these tasks were accomplished through the conscious building of transnational social networks and 55 the resultant accumulation of social capital that could be mobilized and converted to other forms as needed. Throughout all the years of the Soviet Jewish Freedom Movement, Israel had continued to use diplomats and spies to gather information about Soviet Jews to gather the names and addresses of all known Refuseniks. These lists of names were then passed on to the UCSJ and the Jewish Federations, which distributed them to all of the individual councils for Soviet Jewry (18 councils in 1973 and 32 at the UCSJ’s height in 1985). During this phase, it is clear that leaders of the Soviet Jewish Freedom Movement were aware of the power of social capital and were thus conscious of the importance of making the kinds of social connections between American and Soviet Jews needed to allow the movement to jump scale to the international level (Cox 1998; Swyngedouw 1997). The Cleveland Council for Soviet Anti-Semitism was one of the most active councils in this global effort and therefore provides a good example of how these lists were used to consciously construct transnational social networks. The CCSA first divided up the names of Refuseniks and then gave each Cleveland area synagogue the contact information for people on their list. These congregations would then work to contact specific families and “adopt” them. Most congregations then sent letters and greeting cards to each person on their assigned list. Once contact had been made, synagogues began their needs assessment of how best to help the family. A second innovative method used to build social capital was a process that became known as “twinning.” Twinning was the brain child of a Chicago based synagogue that quickly spread throughout the country. The basic idea was that any time the synagogue performed a Bar or Bat Mitzvah, an empty chair would be placed on the stage, or bima, 56 and the ceremony would then “include” a child from one of the Refusenik families. The synagogue would write to the family in the Soviet Union to let them know their son or daughter had received a Bar or Bat Mitzvah. The connections between American and Soviet Jews were also enhanced when Soviet Jews who had managed to get out would travel to America and speak to various congregations. While the experiences of each synagogue and each adopted family differed, the details of one such process, as relayed during an interview with Norm 2 , will concretize just how extraordinary an effort was required to build these connections. He relates that in 1969, the Young People’s Congregation (age 36 and under) at Fairmont Temple in Cleveland received the contact information for five known Refusenik families. One family was from Kaunas, Lithuania, and had three children. The letter sent to the synagogue indicated that in 1967 they had tried to leave, but as punishment, both parents were fired from their jobs and then joined the ranks of the Refuseniks. After an initial period of written communication, the congregation discovered that the family would be allowed to leave if they could get a guarantee of five thousand U.S. dollars to be paid after their release. To raise the money, Fairmont Temple organized a concert by Theodore Bikel, a well-known Jewish folk singer. The concert sold out the 1600 seat synagogue, netting the needed five thousand dollars. However, despite the financial backing, the family was once again refused exit visas. In response, members of the congregation wrote letters to the Soviet Office of Visa and Registration (OVIR) on the family’s behalf, purposely structuring them to look like official documents coming 2 A pseudonym 57 from important U.S. organizations. Many of these letters routinely included clippings of selected U.S. newspaper articles about the family. In the meantime, a rabbi from Fairmount Temple on a trip to Israel, discovered that the oldest daughter of the family, Mila, had been allowed to immigrate to Israel after staging a hunger strike in Moscow. The congregation used the interest that had accrued from the $5000 they had raised to help get her family out, to bring Mila to the U.S. to tell her story and meet the congregation that had been working to help her family. It was also arranged for Mila to meet with a State Department representative in Washington D.C. to discuss her family’s case. But, at this meeting that it was discovered that Mila’s father was on a list of people who would not be permitted to emigrate. Despite the setback, the congregation did not give up hope. The publicity surrounding Mila’s visit brought forward a distant cousin of Mila in Cincinnati and, once this familial connection in the U.S. had been established, the synagogue could then organize the necessary paperwork for Mila’s family to apply for exit visas through the family reunification path. Even with the immense effort put into obtaining the necessary paperwork, the papers needed to be hand-delivered since the Soviet postal system was notorious for ‘losing’ documents that the KGB did not want delivered. A wide variety of organizations, some Jewish and some focused around other themes, regularly organized trips to the Soviet Union. Interviewees recalled that the Jewish community in Cleveland recruiedt activists to participate in these trips to try to make contact with Refusenik leaders and strengthening U.S.-USSR transnational networks. These activists also smuggled items both into and out of the Soviet Union and updated records on the status of Refusenik families. It was through one of these trips made by Dr. Alan Riga that the 58 papers were hand delivered to Mila’s family. When her family then carried this paperwork to the OVIR to use to request their exit visas, the OVIR pulled out a stack of the hundreds of letters and news clippings originally sent from Cleveland and forwarded from Moscow with instructions to grant the family exit visas because of all the embarrassing attention they had caused for the Soviet Union. While Mila’s family’s story is somewhat atypical since it was not always possible to arrange visits for escaped relatives, the tremendous effort put forth by the synagogue to develop and maintain transnational social capital was not anomalous. The collection of these letters at the OVIR’s office illustrates the effectiveness of the transnational social capital that was painstakingly manufactured by the Soviet Jewish Freedom Movement. In addition, the activists who made trips to the Soviet Union provide another example of how Bourdieu’s system of capital exchange led to the transnational accumulation of Jewish social capital. The American Jewish Community recruited activists to make the trip through networks of social capital and then helped them develop the cultural capital necessary to navigate the trip successfully. One example of this process was Dr. Riga’s recruitment by Lou Rosenblum and his dozens of hours of briefing on what to expect, how to act, and what techniques to use to smuggle items in and out. Riga also took medicines and prayer books to reinforce the Refuseniks’ Jewish identity, as well as various university course catalogs to help them determine which courses would best prepare them for a smooth transition into jobs within their fields upon arrival in a new country. In this way, Riga not only constructed social capital through the connections made in the Soviet Union, he also provided the materials necessary for the 59 Refuseniks to accumulate cultural capital through education in both embodied and institutionalized forms. On the return trip, Riga then brought information about the Refuseniks into the United States, including lists of contact information that would be distributed to synagogues to develop further transnational social capital. After two trips,– by now suspected by the KGB – Riga was refused an entrance visa for a third trip, leading him to recruit and train other activists to continue to missions the mission in much the same way Rosenblum had recruited and trained him. These little known efforts undertaken by individuals and congregations in Cleveland and other parts of the United States such as those taken by the Fairmont Temple were extraordinary. Yet, it soon became clear to the activists that securing freedom of the Soviet Jewish population one family at a time was proving to be inefficient – and that this movement still needed to effect change in U.S. diplomatic policies to pressure the Soviet Union. Throughout the process, the construction of transnational social capital was key to influencing these policies. With Cleveland at the epicenter of the Soviet Jewish Freedom Movement, Charles Vanik, a congressman from Cleveland, soon took action to try to help the Soviet Jews as a result of hearing from his constituents that federal governmental action was needed. Vanik joined Senator Henry Jackson from Washington State to sponsor an amendment to the 1974 federal Trade Act. The resultant Jackson-Vanik amendment denied, and continues to deny, the trade status of Most Favored Nation to countries that restrict emigration and has been credited with beginning the political process that eventually led to free emigration from the Soviet Union. However, getting the amendment passed in the U.S. congress would have been 60 impossible if it had not been clear that the freedom of Soviet Jews was a primary issue that would drive voting decisions for American Jews. All of these related processes were a direct result of a shifting identity salience toward a global Jewish imagined community, and the mobilization of this identity through social networks to form a political lobby. As the above evidence indicates, it is no coincidence that Charles Vanik, the co-sponsor of the amendment that made this all possible, represented the city where the Soviet Jewish Freedom Movement had been born. Conclusions The success of the Soviet Jewish freedom movement was due in large part to the conscious efforts of the Cleveland Jewish community to construct transnational social networks linking American and Soviet Jews and the accumulated social capital that resulted. Their remarkable efforts, however, would not have been successful, nor would they even have been attempted, were it not for the creation of a global Jewish imagined community. In turn, this imagined community arose from a radical shift in the Jewish identity category (instead of an identity as either “Soviet” or “American”) in the identities of both Soviet and American Jews. Without these related shifts in identity, it is quite possible that Jews who formerly lived in the former Soviet Union would have suffered more extensively, and/or that the Jewish community in Cleveland and elsewhere in the United States would never have become involved in their defense. On a broader scale, the integration of the theoretical literature on identity, habitus, and social reproduction, has helped inform the findings of this case study as they may relate to other groups of immigrants or refugees in other parts of North America. 61 Expanding on the work of Bourdieu (1977; 1984; 1986; 1990; 1998), Todd (2005), and other scholars, the outcome of the Cleveland case study presented here provides evidence that the integration of a model of social political change rooted in changes in identity salience has the potential to place shifts in social identity firmly at the center of political action, the foundation of the accumulation of social capital, and the formation of imagined communities. The accumulated social capital that comes directly from identity- based ethnic group membership then becomes of paramount importance in the resettlement process for refugees, since it makes an understanding of the processes of identity transformation central to resettlement patterns of refugees and the long term integration of refugee populations. These related processes then, in turn, affect the success of newly incoming groups in the capital accumulation process at the root of Bourdieu’s model of social reproduction. As the Soviet Jewish refugee experience in Cleveland has shown, these interrelated processes continue to shape and reshape the habitus of future generations as well as their constantly shifting social identities. The first two articles in this dissertation provide related insights into the ways in which social capital can be deliberately constructed and then subsequently form the foundation for the integration, adaption, and potential assimilation of Jewish refugees from the former Soviet Union who now reside in the United States. Prior work has shown that immigrants who arrive with capital, especially economic capital, tend to achieve greater economic outcomes after their resettlement in the United States (Nee and Sanders 2001). My research on Soviet Jewish refugees in Cleveland as presented in these first two papers provide ample evidence that transnational social networks similarly can provide access to social capital that functions similarly to help immigrants become 62 established in their new homeland. Arrival with social capital also provides more interaction with established native-born populations which, in turn, leads to a different trajectory in the redevelopment of daily practices and cultural reproduction than occurs for groups with less social and economic capital. Based on this more flexible and relational understanding of immigrant and refugee capital and its impact on culture, the final article in this dissertation that follows provides an expansion of my primary arguments related to the assimilation of immigrants and refugees in the United States, and augments them to account for this more flexible perspective in an urban context. 63 CHAPTER IV SCALAR ASSIMILATION: TOWARD A SOCIO-SPATIAL REPRODUCTION FRAMEWORK Few terms in the social sciences evoke as visceral a reaction as that of assimilation. Since the term’s inception in 1921, many conflicting theories have arisen, and patterns of recent immigration appear so different from those of the early twentieth century that Nathan Glazer (1993) has asked “is assimilation dead?” If assimilation appeared to be dead in 1993, then recent scholarship has resurrected it, albeit in an altered state. Many of the core tenets of the standard assimilation theories have been shown to be empirically false, while others hold true only for certain populations. One thing is for certain: if assimilation is to return from the dead, its theoretical approach needs to be more dynamic, flexible, and place sensitive than in the past. In order to reconceptualize assimilation theory in a meaningful way, it is necessary to begin by examining the core assimilation theories and their major critiques over the past century to identify the root issues and the shortcomings of the initial framework. These critiques suggest it is necessary to separate assimilation as a process by which cultures meld together from expected outcomes of well-being for the descendants of immigrants. This separation allows for a further departure from the Chicago School’s ecological model, which emphasizes competition over resources as the foundational approach to group interaction and assimilation. Instead, this article proposes working from a social reproduction framework. However, while the flexibility of a social reproduction framework allows for place specific processes, the strong ties 64 between assimilation and place at varying scales require these spatial processes to be more strongly foregrounded in any attempt to restructure assimilation theory. By working from a combination of Bourdieu’s social reproduction model and Lefebvre’s concepts of the social production of space, the new scalar assimilation framework presented here is explicitly social and spatial, simultaneously structured and flexible. This article is meant to be primarily of a synthetic nature; thus the empirical case study presented on the following pages is not meant to provide overwhelming evidence in support of this framework, but is instead offered to provide a brief illustration of how this framework might be operationalized. Data analyzed in this case study were collected from a series of 23 formal interviews with Soviet Jewish refugees (18 women and 5 men ranging in age from 40 to 81) and additional informal interviews with native-born Jews involved in these refugees’ resettlement process in Cleveland, Ohio. These interviews are supplemented with 2005-2009 data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Core Assimilation Theories The concept of assimilation has been around for a very long time, but contemporary assimilation theories are rooted in the work of Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, the founders of what is known as the Chicago School of Sociology. Observing immigrants in early twentieth century Chicago, Park and Burgess (1921) attempted to apply ecological principles to develop a “natural” or “organic” theory of urban life. They describe a process where immigrants compete, both with other immigrant groups and with the majority population, to gain advantages over one another. Eventually, 65 competition over resources reaches equilibrium, a state referred to as accommodation, and the equilibrium is then destabilized by cross-group friendships and social networks until the two groups have become similar. This process became known as Social Assimilation, defined as “the process or processes by which peoples of diverse racial origins and different cultural heritages … achieve a cultural solidarity” (R. E. Park 1930, 281). It is important to note that neither this definition nor Park and Burgess’ (1921, 281) earlier definition require a group to entirely abandon their ethnic heritage, which is a common criticism of assimilation (Warner and Srole 1945; Steinberg 2001). The notion of assimilation as unidirectional (often being conflated with the term “Americanization”) and inevitable was not part of Park and Burgess’ original theory, but was advanced by later students of the Chicago School (Burgess 1925; Wirth 1928; Warner and Srole 1945). Instead, Park and Burgess’ early formulation of assimilation more generally describes the cultural merging of two groups until members of once disparate cultures view each other as co-ethnics over a time frame of multiple generations. A myriad of theories about and definitions of assimilation arose following this initial Chicago School conceptualization, leading to a general state of confusion about how best to apply the concept (Barkan 1995; Gordon 1964). This state persisted until Milton Gordon’s book, Assimilation in American Life (1964), which was built on Park and Burgess’ theory, became the standard view of assimilation. In this widely cited publication, Gordon described seven stages of assimilation: 1) acculturation, 2) structural assimilation, 3) marital assimilation, 4) identification, 5) attitude reception, 6) behavior reception, and 7) civic assimilation. By separating the final four stages, Gordon imposes an overly complex structure on the assimilation process (Gans 1999). Stages three 66 through seven can all be viewed as facets of what Alba and Nee (1997) later called identificational assimilation. Identificational assimilation is the end point where previous members of the minority group are identified, both by themselves and others, as members of the majority population. Gordon’s concept of structural assimilation is defined as the incorporation of immigrants into majority cultural institutions, such as social clubs. This definition has been expanded more recently to include economic and labor market inclusion (e.g. Castles and Miller 2003; D. S. Massey 2007), political involvement (e.g. Foley and Hoge 2007), and access to housing markets as indicated by geographical residential distributions (e.g. D. S. Massey 1985; D. Massey and Denton 1988). Gordon argues that this structural assimilation will invariably lead to identificational assimilation into the majority culture, although Shibutani and Kwan (1965) suggest that Gordon has reversed the causal process: that structural assimilation (Gordon’s stage 2) is predicated upon a reduction in social distance and, therefore, a reduction in discrimination (Gordon’s stages 5 and 6). Shibutani and Kwan’s line of reasoning subsequently was expanded upon by other scholars who focus on the importance of out-group social networks, also referred to as bridging social capital, to circulate new information, particularly related to employment opportunities (Granovetter 1973; 1983; 1995; Phillipson, Allan, and Morgan 2004). Acculturation was not a new concept in 1964, having been used earlier by scholars at the University of Chicago during Park and Burgess’ era (Gans 1999); however Gordon formalized the term as the outward acquisition of cultural behavior and a part of the process of immigrant adaptation of their daily practice in an effort to function in the 67 host society. Acculturation, also called external assimilation (Johnston 1963) or Americanization, is a one-sided process, and thus can be accomplished by ethnic minorities on their own, in contrast to assimilation, which in Gordon’s view, has a prerequisite of mainstream cultural acceptance of the ethnic minority group (Gans 1999). In Gordon’s account, acculturation is to some degree inevitable and is a requirement for assimilation; although he allows for the possibility that acculturation does not necessarily lead to any form of assimilation. While Gordon indicates structural assimilation will inevitably lead to all other forms of assimilation, he allows for the possibility that acculturation does not necessarily lead to structural or identificational assimilation and a group could remain in the acculturation stage indefinitely. From this model, Gordon delineated three possible outcomes for an ethnic group. The first, what he termed Anglo-Conformity, suggested that a group could abandon its ethnic culture entirely and replace it with the cultural practices, values, and identity of the host culture. The second, the Melting-Pot outcome, described “an idealistic vision of American society and identity arising from the biological and cultural fusion of different peoples” (Alba and Nee 1997, 832). For the third possible outcome, Gordon presented a possibility of Cultural Pluralism, whereby American society would consist of a multitude of ethnic groups, each retaining their own cultural practices and identity, where individuals would live most of their lives within the social and cultural structures of their own group. Gans’ (1973) straight-line assimilation model advanced Gordon’s (1964) framework by arguing that the assimilation process is driven by a mechanism of the births of successive generations in the host country, with each generation progressively 68 assimilating structurally and, eventually, identificationally. When faced with evidence from critics that ethnic identity can experience resurgences in subsequent generations (Glazer and Moynihan 1970; Yancey, Ericksen, and Juliani 1976; Greeley 1977; Conzen et al. 1992), Gans (1992) redeveloped his theory as bumpy-line assimilation. A final element of the core assimilation theories is of particular note to geographers. Park and Burgess’ initial conceptualization of assimilation includes a spatial element whereby immigrants tend to settle in ethnic enclaves and geographically disperse among the mainstream native population as part of the assimilation process. Massey (1985) formalizes this concept with the term spatial assimilation and uses residential distributions as a proxy for cultural distance to measure assimilation. This concept has been cited and used in the work of numerous population and demographers due to their reliance on analyzing readily available census data for the study of immigrant settlement and assimilation (e.g. Frey 1995; Nogle 1997; Wong 1997; Jones 2003). Criticisms of Core Assimilation Theories and Responses Shortly after Gordon published his views on assimilation theory (1964), a new wave of mass immigration brought a variety of ethnic groups from Asia, Latin America, and Africa into the United States. The racial visibility and greater cultural differences of the new immigrants and refugees as compared to earlier European groups sparked heated criticism of the continued utility of assimilation among scholars culminating in Nathan Glazer’s (1993) much quoted publication entitled, “Is Assimilation Dead?” Since Glazer’s focus on the death of assimilation, there has been a resurgence of scholarly work 69 on the topic defending its continued utility, although with a more nuanced and open ended interpretation of the assimilation process. One of the primary critiques of the traditional core assimilation theories is that they all assume identificational assimilation is of benefit for immigrants (Rumbaut 1997; 1999). To the contrary, recent scholarship shows that immigrants who arrived as children and the first generation born in the United States have a measurable advantage in educational and economic outcomes over both their immigrant parents, later generations, and often even over the racially comparable native-born population (Kasinitz et al. 2008; Oh and Min 2011). Another critique of assimilation theory relates to the assumption of a monolithic, and often static, mainstream culture into which ethnic minorities are expected to assimilate (Zhou 1997). An extension of this criticism argues that assimilation’s use of middle class WASP culture to represent majority culture in the U.S. not only privileges whiteness, it actually perpetuates the racial, class, and ethnic boundaries that prevent ethnic minority groups from assimilating (see for example, Lieberson 1980; Jacobson 1998; Lipsitz 1998; Wright and Ellis 2000; Wright, Ellis, and Parks 2005). Portes and Zhou (1993) and Zhou (1997) seek to address this critique through the concept of segmented assimilation, which posits that ethnic groups can assimilate into any segment of society (upward or downward), not just the WASP middle class, or attempt to maintain their separate ethnic identity. Kasinitz et al. (2008) have questioned the reality of a downward assimilation trajectory based on their findings that all ethnic groups in New York have better educational and economic outcomes and fewer instances of perceived discrimination than the native-born African American population. 70 Alba and Nee (1997; 1999; 2003) respond to many of these critiques by showing how traditional conceptualizations of assimilation, while rooted in empirical observations of white majority culture and largely monodirectional assimilation, can be generalized beyond these place and time specific conditions. They return to Park and Burgess’ original definition of assimilation as the cultural fusion of two ethnic groups, arguing that assimilation, when it occurs, results in a bidirectional culture shift whereby the ethnic minority retains a portion of their ethnic identity that is exercised symbolically and in specific situations, but is not part of primary daily practice (see Waters 1990). They further show that the historical understanding of race in the early twentieth century defined many ethnicities who are now viewed as part of the white mainstream culture as undesirable minorities. Thus, the racial and ethnic boundaries that differentiate new waves of immigrants are not entirely different from those of the past and they may be redefined in the future to include current racial minorities. Geography’s contribution to the assimilation debate has primarily focused on examining spatial patterns of immigrant households to test and measure levels of assimilation (Estaville 1986; Wong 1997). This work is based on Massey’s (1985) spatial assimilation theory, which postulates that assimilation is accompanied by geographic dispersal away from ethnic enclaves. These methods have been subjected to criticism for reasons similar to other assimilation theories. Wright and Ellis (2000) and Wright, Ellis, and Parks (2005) leveled the criticism that spatial assimilation uncritically uses geographic proximity to the WASP middle class as representative of the American mainstream. They further argue that the measurement of spatial patterns based on residential locations overlooks places of employment as a primary site of out-group 71 interaction, and show that work place segregation in Los Angeles is much lower than residential segregation (Ellis, Wright, and Parks 2004). In a recent Brookings Institution publication, Singer, Hardwick, and Brettell presented evidence that the majority of today’s immigrants no longer reside in ethnic enclaves located in the central city, but instead are settling in more dispersed patterns in the suburbs of North American cities (2008). Further scholarship has indicated that many immigrants are maintaining their ethnic identities despite dispersed settlement patterns (Zelinsky and Lee 1998; Zelinsky 2001; Skop and Li 2003; Hardwick 2006). Despite these studies of the residential patterns of immigrant groups in North American cities during the past decade or so, geographers have published very little work centered on the concept of assimilation or challenged Massey’s proposed spatial assimilation theory. Instead, most immigration scholars in the field have focused attention on other related issues and topics such as segregation, transnational networks, and ethnic identity. Even within sociology many scholars avoid the term assimilation in favor of studies of immigrant incorporation. However, these measures of incorporation, such as educational attainment, income, access to housing markets, and language acquisition, are primarily measures of Gordon’s conceptualization of structural assimilation. Further evidence indicates that some immigrant and refugee groups in the U.S., such as the descendants of Jews from the Soviet Union, are culturally merging with native-born populations (Kasinitz et al. 2008). This indicates, as Alba and Nee (1997; 2003) have argued, that assimilation, conceptualized as the process of social and cultural change by which two distinct groups become one, is still relevant. 72 Also of importance in new conceptualizations of assimilation is Ellis, Wright, and Parks (2004) argument that the out-group interactions that are part of the process of assimilation are highly spatialized in ways that go beyond the typical focus on residential settlement patterns. These spatial interactions operate at a variety of overlapping and interconnected scales. Ellis and Wright (2005) have shown that shifting from mapping concentrations of ethnic individuals to instead focus on the household level dramatically changes the patterns of segregation. At a much broader scale, they warn that scholarship on assimilation must avoid what Agnew (1994) terms the territorial trap whereby society norms and identities are often, wrongly, assumed to be cohesive (Ellis and Wright 1998). Thus far, none of the assimilation frameworks has explicitly incorporated the spatiality of social interactions or the scalar nature of identity and political interaction. In this realm, geographers are particularly well positioned to contribute to the debate over assimilation. Toward a Socio-Spatial Reproduction Framework In light of evidence that assimilation does not equate to a greater command of resources, the Chicago School’s ecological model, based on competition for resources, is no longer a suitable model for assimilation in the U.S. Since it seems prudent to return to the conceptualization of assimilation as “the decline, and at its endpoint the disappearance, of an ethnic/racial distinction and the cultural and social differences that express it” (Alba and Nee 1997, 863) over the course of generations, the focus should now lie on the mechanisms by which culture is reproduced. Thus the end point of assimilation in this framework is the alignment of cultural reproduction between two groups. For this, Bourdieu’s (1977; 1986; 1990; 1998) theory of social reproduction 73 provides an apt starting point from which to work toward a socio-spatial reproduction framework. Bourdieu’s framework is built around two interrelated parts: a partitioning of forms of capital that can be accumulated, exchanged, and partially transferred between generations; and a co-constitutive dialectic of habitus and field. As discussed below, this framework can be further extended to explicitly spatialize the intrinsic social relationships through Lefebvre’s (2007) concept of the social production of space. Bourdieu (1986) divides capital into three fundamental forms, the accumulation and exchange of which structure the character of how society is reproduced through the practice of everyday life: economic capital, social capital, and cultural capital. Economic capital consists of one’s physical possessions that may be traded for other goods, particularly those that can be directly monetized. Social capital is defined as “the aggregate of the actual and potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition, or, in other words, to membership in a group which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectivity-owned capital” (Bourdieu 1986, 248–9). It is important to note that within Bourdieu’s conceptualization, the prerequisite group membership for mobilization of social capital is very flexible and can include loosely defined memberships such as in an ethnic group or an employment-based social network of coworkers. This viewpoint is in stark contrast to some of the more recent scholarship on social capital, such as that by Putnam (2000), which strictly limits social capital to easily quantifiable forms, such as formal membership in a bowling league or other such organization. As Holt (2008) has suggested, however, Bourdieu’s network-based 74 definition of social capital is more useful for modeling ethnic capital accumulation processes. Bourdieu’s third form of capital, cultural capital exists in three states: 1) objectified, 2) institutionalized, and 3) embodied. The objectified form consists of culturally meaningful objects, such as artwork or a printed text, which have value beyond the physical components that constitute the object. This value can only be consumed by an individual who has the ability to recognize the symbolic meaning of the object. For example, a book is physically made of ink, glue, and paper. It is worthless to an individual who does not possess the embodied knowledge, or cultural capital, to read what is written within. Embodied cultural capital is thus the accumulation and incorporation of experiences and knowledge through a time consuming process that can only be undertaken by the beneficiary. Embodied cultural capital can be transferred from one individual to another, but not instantaneously. The process of accumulating embodied cultural capital is often performed unconsciously through the absorption of language, cultural norms, and values that are learned during childhood. Other times the embodied cultural capital accumulation process is undertaken consciously, such as through formal education, observation, or practice. Bourdieu’s final form, institutionalized cultural capital, is the objectification of embodied cultural capital, such as an academic degree that represents the time taken to embody cultural capital. Capital of any form may be exchanged for any other form, although the specific character of the capital may be limited. For example, the acquisition of embodied cultural capital may require the exchange of economic capital in the form of a tuition payment, but admittance to the educational institution may require other qualifications 75 such as the institutionalized cultural capital present in a diploma. Similarly, embodied cultural capital may be acquired through the mobilization of social capital to persuade a friend to teach a new skill. Or social capital may be accumulated through the cultural capital required to engage in an informed conversations about politics, or through the exchange of economic capital for membership dues in an organization. Bourdieu’s forms of capital are ideal for discussing the advancement of immigrants and their descendants because they provide a flexible framework through which to examine both the mobilization of resources needed to accumulate more capital within a generation, and the mechanisms through which that capital can be passed on to the next generation. Bourdieu’s capital exchange framework has already been used in the work of other immigration scholars such as Nee and Sanders (2001) who suggest a Forms-of-Capital model of immigrant incorporation. Working with Asian immigrants in Los Angeles, they empirically showed how immigrants arriving with high stocks of cultural capital that is fungible in the host society are more likely to find employment in the mainstream economy. In contrast, those with cultural capital that is not fungible in the host society are more likely to turn to ethnic entrepreneurial opportunities. Nee and Sanders also found that immigrants who arrive in the United States without a family were disadvantaged in the development of social capital and were thus more likely to be employed in less desirable low wage positions (see Granovetter 1995 for more on the impact of social networks on employment opportunities). The second part of Bourdieu’s framework that is most useful in re-visioning assimilation theory is his emphasis on the co-constitutive elements of habitus and field. Bourdieu (1977; 1984; 1990; 1998) conceptualizes habitus as the subconscious 76 dispositions and behaviors acquired throughout the lifetime of an individual. Habitus provides the lens through which an individual views the world, part of which can be regarded as publicly practiced identity (Todd 2005). The field represents the world external to the body, including physical objects as well as social structures, rules of behavior, and boundaries that frame the practice of everyday life. Habitus and field are intertwined through the process of capital accumulation and exchange. Field in Bourdieu’s view dictates the conditions under which capital is accumulated, but itself is constituted by the habituses of others; i.e. the field is socially constructed by the habituses of society, but also structures the construction of the habitus for each individual. In this way, the reproduction of habitus is structured by the “historically and socially situated conditions” (Bourdieu 1977, 95) that allow for core cultural elements to be reproduced (and changed) throughout time. Similarly, an individual simultaneously practices daily life, as informed by his habitus, within multiple fields that structure interlocking and overlapping scales, and are constantly shifting throughout time and space. Key to studies of immigrant assimilation is recognizing that habitus and field are constructed in a scalar fashion that orders and is ordered by spatial behavior. However, this very general theorization is too amorphous to be of much use. Lefebvre (2007) provides the necessary concepts to develop a formal structure through which the spatiality of habitus/field and the capital accumulation process can be examined. In Lefebvre’s conceptualization of the social production of space, three dimensions of space are identified: spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces (Lefebvre 2007, 38–39). Spatial practice is the way physical objects flow throughout society, conveyed by Harvey (1991, 218) as material spatial practice. Representations of 77 space are the language and concepts through which it is possible to communicate spatial ideas. These representations are used by planners and hegemonic representatives to construct the physical dimensions that dictate material spatial practice, but can also be used by subjugated groups during times of conflict to disrupt material spatial practices. Finally, representational spaces overlay physical spaces and give meaning to specific places. The material space of a church is just a large building in which people congregate and through which capital flows. However, the physical space is structured differently than a similarly sized warehouse because the architect represented the space of the church differently to meet the expectations of society that imbue the church, as a representational space, with the symbolic meaning of a house of worship. To complete the circle, the physical space of the church is designed to invoke a sense of awe and convey symbolic meaning to the people who flow through it. Lefebvre’s spatial dimensions are inherently linked to Bourdieu’s system of social reproduction to structure the practice of everyday life. Without embodied cultural capital specific to the scale of the space in question, an individual does not know how to practice in the material space, does not understand the symbols to communicate about the space, and does not have the personal experience with the space to fix it as a representational space that becomes a place with meaning. In short, Lefebvre’s spatial dimensions are the field in which Bourdieu’s habitus is practiced (Fig 1). If the daily practice of the habitus does not align with the field, as is often the case with immigrants upon arrival in their new home, the individual will transgress social and territorial boundaries (Cresswell 1996). These transgressions can lead to resentment by the native population because they 78 interrupt the ordered flow of that space, and thus interfere with the routines associated with practicing everyday life. In assimilation terms, acquiring the habitus required to successfully function within a material space (field) and to understand the symbols needed to communicate about that space is acculturation. The active participation in the production of that space leads to a shift in the field, thus restructuring the daily practices (habituses) developed within that field. At the final stage of assimilation, there are certain spatial imaginaries, or symbolic meanings to representational spaces, that must be reproduced to root culture to place (Malkki 1997; Bonnemaison 2005). Which specific spatial imaginations must be reproduced depends on the two cultures that are assimilating and are place specific and scalar. Assimilation into the WASP middle class in New York, for example, might require reproduction of an “American” national imagination, but also a reproduction of the habitus that is specific to New York. Assimilation into the WASP middle class in rural Georgia might require a very different version of the American national imagination and would certainly require a different habitus through which to filter daily practice. Thus, it is possible for an ethnic group to assimilate with another population in a specific place, operating at a local scale, but not assimilate into the national scale imaginary in such a way that their identity Figure 1: The relationship between Bourdieu's habitus/field and Lefebvre's production of space is manifested through the practice of everyday life. 79 transfers to other local scales. For example, unless they choose to engage with their Jewish identities, secular Jews are arguably assimilated into the identity of many major U.S. cities, sharing a habitus and engaging in the production of spaces with the WASP populations in many ways that they are invisibly embedded in the rhythms and practices of daily life. However, the assimilation of secular Jews in urban places may be quite different than their much less seamless assimilation process in more rural places where non-Jewish identities and religious beliefs may be more dominant. The ways in which these kinds of symbolic meanings are reproduced (if they are reproduced at all), is a function of the way in which capital is accumulated and mobilized to form daily practices within a set of fields. Which fields the habitus most closely aligns with dictates the outcome for an individual or group, which is likely closely tied to the outcomes for family members and other members of the same group due to the use of social capital in the accumulation process. Habitus is developed throughout life, but the longer a habitus is developed in relation to a specific set of fields, the more difficult it is to redevelop the habitus in a way that the practices and rhythms of a new field become natural, which is one of the greatest challenges faced by transnational migrants. Since habitus is developed from birth, economic and social capital are usually passed on by parents to the next generation. Therefore, the decisions made by the first generation of immigrants can have lasting impacts on the trajectories of future generations. It is important to note that while these trajectories may include assimilation with other ethnic groups, that trajectory is not assumed by the scalar assimilation model proposed here because this model allows for the possibility of a capital accumulation process that sets an ethnic group on a trajectory of maintaining a strong separate ethnic identity. 80 An Assimilation Case Study This illustration draws on a series of interviews with 23 Soviet Jewish refugees and additional informal interviews with key U.S. born Jews involved in the refugee resettlement process in Cleveland, Ohio. This population provides a good opportunity to examine the accumulation process of first generation immigrants who have been economically successful, and whose children and grandchildren appear to be on a trajectory toward assimilation with the native-born, white middle class population in Cleveland. The different trajectory of Soviet Jewish refugees in Cleveland and New York City illustrates the place specific scalar nature of assimilation processes. Once granted an exit visa to emigrate from the Soviet Union, Jews were only allowed to take the equivalent of a few hundred dollars and two suitcases with them upon departure. These restrictions meant that Soviet Jewish refugees arrived in the United States with very little economic capital. Although most had obtained a college level education in the Soviet Union, the symbolic capital of the degree was not honored in the United States and the embodied cultural capital, well aligned with the Soviet fields of specialization, was of little use in comparable fields in their new country of residence. The primary resource Soviet Jews had was the social capital that came from their identification as “Jewish.” This identity provided them with access to a variety of Jewish social services in Cleveland. Jewish Family Services Association arranged housing, furniture, and food for the first three months after arrival, thus mobilizing social capital to begin the accumulation of economic capital. New refugees from the former Soviet Union also had access to English as a second language courses through the Jewish Community Center and the local community college. These language classes helped with the 81 accumulation of embodied cultural capital, and they also provided the material space where many refugees met new people and accumulated additional ethnic social capital. Jewish Family Services Association also helped new arrivals find employment, although it was rarely in their previous field of specialization. Since jobs were located through native Jewish networks more often than through ethnic networks, the workplace became a site of out-group cultural capital accumulation. As one respondent explained, “When they were talking by phone, I was listening, this is the way we should [do it]. That was very important for me, to get that skill, American skills, from my colleagues there.” To illustrate how Bourdieu’s habitus/field relationship is of immediate importance to my argument, it is useful to contrast the experience of Soviet Jewish refugees in the city of Cleveland with New York City. Although the Soviet Jewish community much larger in New York City as compared to Cleveland, the majority of post-Soviet era refugees who settled in New York had access to similar social services through Jewish organizations and therefore were able to integrate reasonably well. The first generation in New York has achieved a higher educational attainment than all other groups including native whites (53% vs. 48% with college degrees or higher), and higher incomes (about $40,000 for Soviet refugees vs. $50,000 for native whites) and employment rates (about 75% for Soviet refugees vs. 78% for native whites) than all groups except native whites (Kasinitz et al. 2008). Soviet Jewish refugees’ achievements in education, income, and employment in Cleveland are similar to this group’s socioeconomic characteristics in New York. In Cleveland, Soviet Jews have higher educational attainment than native whites (58.2% vs. 49.9% with college degrees or higher), and slightly lower incomes ($30,000 vs. $36,500) 82 and employment rates (52.5% vs. 60%) (American Community Survey (ACS) 2005). Despite similar levels of economic, educational, and employment attainment, most of the Soviet Jews in New York moved into an ethnic enclave in Brighton Beach (Kasinitz et al. 2008). However, Soviet Jews in Cleveland rapidly became more spatially dispersed. This is likely due to differences in the specific urban histories of New York City and Cleveland. New York has a long tradition of ethnic neighborhoods and enclaves whereas Cleveland’s settlement history has been framed by a very different socio-spatial construction. These differences in the production of immigrant spaces is echoed in the literature for other groups in other cities, such as with Russian Baptist and Pentecostal refugee communities in Sacramento and the Pacific Northwest (Hardwick 1993, 2006; Singer, Hardwick, and Brettell 2008), or Chinese immigrants in Californian ethno-burbs (Li 1998; Skop and Li 2003) While it was established above that residential spatial patterns may not be correlated with assimilation, many of the families that settled in Cleveland chose not to settle in New York due to the spatial concentration of Soviet Jews there. As one respondent explained, “We didn’t want to go to New York because we heard about a large Jewish Russian kind of ghetto community, where you basically are inside of your own language, your own culture, and it takes a while to get actually assimilated.” This sentiment was echoed by numerous other respondents in my study. In other words, Soviet Jews who chose to settle in Cleveland consciously decided to locate themselves within a field that would provide a structure in which their habitus would be more likely to launch their children on a trajectory for assimilation. 83 The related outcomes to this decision to settle in a field that provides opportunities for assimilation can be specifically recognized through examples from two respondents. One woman, who resides in a suburb in Cleveland with roughly equal white and African American populations, mentioned that her two daughters are both dating African American men. She indicated that this has been difficult for her because there were very few blacks in the Soviet Union, but she refuses to even discuss her difficulties with her daughters because she believes that accepting interracial dating is part of the assimilation process. With this statement, she has indicated that her habitus, as it has been redeveloped in her new home at the scale of this inner ring suburb, is structured by the racial composition of the space. In contrast, other respondents chose to relocate to primarily white outer suburbs and, therefore, have their habituses structured by spaces that are products of a different set of social processes. For example, a couple living in one of the outer suburbs with a strong Jewish presence told the story of how their daughter married an orthodox Jew and has developed orthodox Jewish practices. This habitus has been reproduced in the respondents’ granddaughter, who they consider to be assimilated into the orthodox Jewish American culture. In this way, the capital accumulation process and related decisions made by the first generation have strong implications for the trajectories of incorporation or assimilation for future generations. Conclusions Assimilation theory has seen a resurgence in recent years following Alba and Nee’s (1999; 2003) refinement of Park and Burgess’ (1921) conceptualization of assimilation as a strictly cultural practice detached from economic outcomes, which 84 renders the Chicago School’s resource competition based ecological model obsolete. Instead, the social reproduction model discussed in this article provides a better foundational framework from which to examine assimilation. Despite the compelling role of place as a key element of identity and assimilation theories (Malkki 1997), geographers have contributed very little to the identity-assimilation debate in recent years. This silence has been compounded by the observation that the spatial elements of core assimilation theories, while appropriately empirically based, were the product of a specific period of time when the spatial organization of U.S. cities and immigrant settlement patterns differed from those of today. As the primary body of scholarship on assimilation has moved away from spatial processes, geographers have become increasingly well positioned to contribute to the debate over the core elements of assimilation theory. Clearly a great deal of work remains to be accomplished by geographers and scholars in other related fields on spatial assimilation theory as it relates to the patterns and adjustment experiences of immigrants and refugees in North American cities. The socio-spatial reproduction framework based on the work of other theorists such as Bourdieu, Harvey, and Lefebvre discussed here provides a foundation with the necessary structure for precisely these kinds of future inquiries into assimilation processes because it is dynamic and flexible enough to predict and explain a myriad of possible outcomes. The primary advantages of the proposed scalar assimilation framework for future research is that it shifts the focus from strictly outcome based measures of structural incorporation to instead examine the processes by which each generation makes decisions about the ways they will reproduce habitus and field. Since 85 these decisions are most often framed in terms of capital exchange, many existing economic models could be applied to empirical studies of immigrant settlement and integration. Secondly, the explicit spatialization of this framework allows for the specificity of place as well as generalization to other scales of inquiry. This scalar assimilation framework also foregrounds spatial reproduction in a way that allows comparison of groups that have had differing outcomes. It encourages inquiries into such questions as why do the capital exchange decisions of Chinese immigrants tend to lead to high economic outcomes within a spatially concentrated ethnic economy while the decisions of Soviet Jews lead to similar outcomes in a spatially dispersed pattern? Finally, the habitus/field interaction provides a framework by which the experiences of individuals, structured by the socio-spatial norms and territories of a specific field, provide a conduit from individual assimilation experiences to larger scale community processes. 86 CHAPTER V CONCLUSION The initial formalized models of assimilation that emerged from the Chicago School of Sociology sought to explain the process by which people from diverse cultures merged into a single culture (R. E. Park and Burgess 1921; Burgess 1925; R. E. Park 1930). The expectation was that this process would occur over multiple generations. Furthermore, it did not suppose an abandonment of the immigrants’ culture, but instead proposed a shift in both immigrant and native cultures. Much later, the standard view of assimilation required immigrants to abandon their culture in favor of adopting that of the native-born population (Gordon 1964). Critics of this model point out the assumption of a monolithic mainstream culture (Zhou 1997) that not only privileges whiteness, but reinforces racial, class, and ethnic boundaries (Lieberson 1980; Jacobson 1998; Lipsitz 1998; Wright and Ellis 2000; Wright, Ellis, and Parks 2005). These critiques led many immigration scholars to drift away from examinations of assimilation theory in favor of models of multiculturalism that propose the maintenance of ethno-cultural identities within the host society, depicted as a “salad bowl” to contrast with assimilation’s “melting pot” (Glazer and Moynihan 1970). The transition away from assimilation also necessitated a shift to measures of immigrant incorporation that examine immigrant participation in economic and labor markets (Castles and Miller 2003; D. S. Massey 2007), political activity (Foley and Hoge 2007), and segregation (D. S. Massey 1985; D. Massey and Denton 1988; Zelinsky and Lee 1998; Zelinsky 2001; Hardwick 2006). Many of these measurements of incorporation are tied to cultural 87 practices. However, this approach leads to the backgrounding of questions concerning culture and identity. On the other end of the spectrum, other scholarship has directly engaged issues of immigrant cultural practice and identity by focusing primarily on the ways in which ethnicity is maintained and expressed in a multicultural society (Waters 1990; Hardwick 1993; 2003; Arreola 2004). Geographers’ examinations of immigrant ethno-cultural practices have primarily focused on spatial settlement patterns (Estaville 1986; Wong 1997; Ellis and Wright 2005), and their relation to immigrant incorporation (Zelinsky 2001; Skop and Li 2003; Singer, Hardwick, and Brettell 2008). Despite the importance of this scholarship, it still places processes of culture change in the background. Seeking to foreground these processes, Alba and Nee (1997; 1999; 2003) have called for a revival of assimilation theory as envisioned by Park and Burgess (1921), i.e. as a process by which members of different cultures become more similar until they merge. This dissertation seeks to remedy geography’s lack of engagement with assimilation theories through the development of a scalar assimilation that foregrounds culture change processes as well as the spatial contexts through which they occur. In combination, the papers in this dissertation provided a new understanding of assimilation that avoids the reduction of cultural practices to economic or political measurements. Instead, by working from Bourdieu’s framework of cultural reproduction, it contextualizes the Soviet Jewish refugee experience while maintaining enough structure to allow comparison with other ethno-cultural groups. By combining this with Lefebvre’s work on the production of space, this framework scales from the daily practice of individuals to the impacts their actions have on collective identity and culture 88 and, from there, to changes in the social structures that, in turn, shape the practice of everyday life. In sum, it is the integration of Bourdieu’s important conceptualization of cultural reproduction (1973; 1977; 1984; 1986; 1990; 1998) and Lefebvre’s contributions to our understanding of the production of space (2007)that hold the greatest promise for reframing the assimilation process – for Soviet Jewish refugees in Cleveland and other cities in the U.S. as well as for many other immigrant and refugee groups in the North American context and elsewhere in the world. The first paper, Social Capital and the Redevelopment of Habitus: Place and Social Network Formation among Soviet Jewish Refugees in Cleveland, Ohio, examines the processes through which Soviet Jewish refugees adjust their daily practice upon arriving in the United States. Their migration from the Soviet Union was more than just a transnational journey. Refugees were delivered from communism to capitalism, from secular persecution of religion to a multi-religious nation, and most importantly from a life where fear was part of the everyday routine to safety. The simple act of learning how to live in the new field of the United States is a major feat, one that was eased through the efforts of volunteers and resettlement organizations. Soviet Jewish refugees, limited by the exit regulations of the Soviet Union, arrived in the United States with little of economic value. However, their membership in a global Jewish imaginative conferred a significant amount of social capital upon them. By working through Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and process of capital exchange, it became clear that this social capital, evidenced by access to the vast resources of the Jewish community in Cleveland, Ohio, was instrumental in their successful resettlement. By placing social capital at the foundation of the Soviet Jewish 89 refugee capital accumulation process in Cleveland, including the geographic element of places and spaces in which capital was accumulated, led to cultural shifts that put these families on a trajectory towards assimilation into different native cultural groups. Thus, my first paper established the role of place in the capital accumulation process that characterizes the adjustments to habitus required for life in the new homeland. The modified habitus then leads to decisions about place, such as where to live or work, that in turn lead to other modifications to habitus. The end result is that the first generation of immigrants sets the trajectory that structures the daily practices and, thus, the culture of future generations in a process driven by the social capital with which the first generation arrived. The second paper in this dissertation, Engineering Soviet Jewish Freedom: Identity, imagined community, and the construction of transnational social capital, examined the origins of the social capital that underlies the processes described in the first paper. This social capital was derived from the membership of Soviet Jewish refugees in a global Jewish imagined community. However, membership in this global Jewish identity required dramatic shifts in the identities of both Soviet and American Jews, who had previously identified more strongly as either “Soviet” or “American” instead of “Jewish.” This transformation was painstakingly engineered through the efforts of the Soviet Jewish Freedom Movement, centered in Cleveland and New York City. The Cleveland Council on Soviet Anti-Semitism, which formed the foundation of the Union of Councils for Soviet Jewry, employed a variety of methods in the conscious construction of transnational social networks linking American and Soviet Jews. These social networks helped to strengthen the Jewish identity category for Soviet Jews as well 90 as to shift the focus of American Jewry from secular domestic issues to the plight Jews throughout the world. This article generalizes the processes from this case study of Soviet Jewish refugees in Cleveland, expanding on the work of Bourdieu (1977; 1984; 1986; 1990; 1998), Todd (2005), and other scholars, to provide evidence that the integration of a model of social political change rooted in changes in identity salience has the potential to place shifts in social identity firmly at the center of political action, the foundation of the accumulation of social capital, and the formation of imagined communities. The final paper in this dissertation, Scalar Assimilation: Toward a socio-spatial reproduction framework, assembled the evidence from the first two articles to develop a model of scalar assimilation that is rooted in Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction, but also foregrounds the spatiality of these processes through Lefebvre’s work on the production of space. The initial formalized models of assimilation that emerged from the Chicago School of Sociology sought to explain the process by which people from diverse cultures merged into a single culture (R. E. Park and Burgess 1921; Burgess 1925; R. E. Park 1930). The expectation was that this process would occur over multiple generations. Furthermore, it did not suppose an abandonment of the immigrants’ culture, but instead proposed a shift in both immigrant and native cultures. Much later, the standard view of assimilation required immigrants to abandon their culture in favor of adopting that of the native born population (Gordon 1964). Critics of this model point out the assumption of a monolithic mainstream culture (Zhou 1997) that not only privileges whiteness, but 91 reinforces racial, class, and ethnic boundaries (Lieberson 1980; Jacobson 1998; Lipsitz 1998; Wright and Ellis 2000; Wright, Ellis, and Parks 2005). These critiques lead many immigration scholars to drift away from examining assimilation theory in favor of models of multiculturalism that propose the maintenance of ethno-cultural identities within the host society, depicted as a “salad bowl” to contrast with assimilation’s “melting pot” (Glazer and Moynihan 1970). The transition away from assimilation also necessitated a shift to measures of immigrant incorporation that examine immigrant participation in economic and labor markets (Castles and Miller 2003; D. S. Massey 2007), political activity (Foley and Hoge 2007), and segregation (D. S. Massey 1985; D. Massey and Denton 1988; Zelinsky and Lee 1998; Zelinsky 2001; Hardwick 2006). Many of these measurements of incorporation are tied to cultural practices, but this approach leads to the backgrounding of questions concerning culture and identity. On the other end of the spectrum, the recent scholarship directly engaging issues of immigrant cultural practice and identity has focused primarily on the ways in which ethnicity is maintained and expressed in a multicultural society (Waters 1990; Hardwick 1993; 2003; Arreola 2004). Geographers’ examinations of immigrant ethno-cultural practices have primarily focused on spatial settlement patterns (Estaville 1986; Wong 1997; Ellis and Wright 2005), and their relation to immigrant incorporation (Zelinsky 2001; Skop and Li 2003; Singer, Hardwick, and Brettell 2008). Despite the importance of this scholarship, it still places processes of culture change in the background. Seeking to foreground these processes, Alba and Nee (1997; 1999; 2003) have called for a revival of assimilation theory as envisioned by Park and Burgess (1921), i.e. as a process by 92 which members of different cultures become more similar until they merge. The third paper in this dissertation seeks to remedy geography’s lack of engagement with assimilation theories through the development of a scalar assimilation that foregrounds culture change processes as well as the spatial contexts through which they occur. This final paper combined Bourdieu’s cultural reproduction model (1977; 1984; 1986; 1990; 1998) with Lefebvre’s work on the social production of space (2007) to describe a framework of socio-spatial reproduction whereby culture and space are produced and reproduced through the practice of everyday life. From this socio-spatial reproduction framework, rooted in the practice of everyday life, assimilation can be defined as the alignment of the daily practices of participants from once disparate ethnic groups. In other words, an alignment of habitus between individuals that results from shared experiences and membership in the same imagined community and identity and reproduces the same social and spatial constructs. Since these end constructs, as well as the practice of everyday life, take different forms when operating at different scales, this model is inherently scalar. The strength of this scalar assimilation model is twofold. In its flexibility, it allows for a variety of outcomes and does not assume a trajectory toward assimilation, while in its structure, it shifts the focus of related research questions away from outcome based measures of incorporation to focus instead on processes by which each generation makes decisions about the reproduction of everyday practice. The flexibility of the scalar assimilation model that forms the major theoretical contribution of this dissertation is of great import when generalizing the experiences of individual immigrants and refugees to account for the overall trajectory of an ethnic group. At the root of much of the contemporary debate over the utility of assimilation are 93 observations that not all newly arrived ethnic groups appear to be on a path of assimilation (Portes and Zhou 1993; Nee and Sanders 2001; Kasinitz et al. 2008). By approaching assimilation through the lens of socio-spatial reproduction, the scalar assimilation model allows for possible outcomes whereby two groups meld entirely, partially, or not at all. Thus, they may reproduce all of the same spaces and social structures, some of the same spaces and social structures within a place or operating at a specific scale, or maintain their separate ethnic identities by reproducing different spaces or social structures. Any outcome along this continuum of multiculturalism on one end and assimilation on the other can be explained through the scalar assimilation model presented in this dissertation. The second strength of the scalar assimilation model lies in its structure. By working within Bourdieu’s framework of capital exchange (1986), the components of this reproduction process can be categorized into four forms of capital. While attempts to quantify any form other than economic capital are non-trivial, many scholars have already been working on the derivation of these measures (for example, Fukuyama 1995; Fernandez, Castilla, and Moore 2000; Onyx and Bullen 2000; Putnam 2000; Lubben and Gironda 2004). Once a workable method of quantifying the less tangible forms of capital is accomplished, the exchanges of capital can be modeled via existing sociologic and economic models. Thus, by providing a structured framework, the scalar assimilation model can be empirically tested, although much future work is needed. The organization of future work is another strength of this structured framework because it provides a road map for the future. First, methodologies that quantify social, cultural, and symbolic capital must be refined. Second, economic models of market 94 functionality can be adapted to include non-economic forms of capital. Since the scalar assimilation model is derived from the individual practice of everyday life, the capital exchange models that are most applicable will likely be rooted in individual decision making processes. Recent work on actor network theory (such as Law and Hassard 1999; Latour 2007) offers a promising approach. Finally, these models can be applied to various immigrant and refugee groups in North America and evaluated. 95 REFERENCES CITED Agnew, John. 1994. “The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International Relations Theory.” Review of International Political Economy 1 (1) (April 1): 53–80. Alba, Richard, and Victor Nee. 1997. “Rethinking Assimilation Theory for a New Era of Immigration.” The International Migration Review 31 (4): 826–874. ———. 1999. “Rethinking Assimilation Theory for a New Era of Immigration.” In The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience, ed. Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz, and Josh DeWind, 137–160. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. ———. 2003. Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration. Harvard University Press. American Community Survey (ACS). 2005. “Public Use Microdata Sample.” U.S. Census Bureau -- ACS. http://hdl.handle.net/1902.3/4JOML. Amin, Ash. 2005. “Local Community on Trial.” Economy and Society 34: 612–633. Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Verso. Arreola, Daniel D. 2004. Hispanic Spaces, Latino Places : Community and Cultural Diversity in Contemporary America. 1st ed. Austin :: University of Texas Press. Barkan, Elliott R. 1995. “Race, Religion, and Nationality in American Society: A Model of Ethnicity: From Contact to Assimilation [with Comment, with Response].” Journal of American Ethnic History 14 (2) (January 1): 38–101. Beckerman, Gal. 2010. When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Bell-Rose, Stephanie, and Frank D. Bean, eds. 1999. Immigration and Opportunity: Race, Ethnicity, and Employment in the United States. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Berdi a ev, Nikolaĭ. 1960. The Origin of Russian Communism. University of Michigan Press. Bonnemaison, Joel. 2005. Culture and Space: Conceiving a New Geography. I. B. Tauris. 96 Bourdieu, Pierre. 1973. “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction.” In Knowledge, Education, and Cultural Change: Papers in the Sociology of Education, ed. Richard K. Brown, 71–84. London: Tavistock. http://www.scribd.com/doc/39994014/Bourdieu-1973-Cultural-Reproduction- and-Social-Reproduction. ———. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1984. Distinction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1986. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education,ed. John G. Richardson, trans. R. Nice, 241–58. New York: Greenwood. ———. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 1998. Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Brubaker, Rogers, and Frederick Cooper. 2002. “Beyond ‘Identity’.” Theory and Society 29 (1): 1 – 47. Burgess, Ernest W. 1925. “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project.” In The City, ed. R. Park, E. Burgess, and R. McKenzie. Chicago: University of Chicago. Burke, Peter J. 1980. “The Self: Measurement Requirements from an Interactionist Perspective.” Social Psychology Quarterly 43: 18–29. Buttimer, Anne. 1976. “Grasping the Dynamism of Lifeworld.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 66 (2): 277–292. Castles, Stephen, and Mark J Miller. 2003. The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World. New York: The Guilford Press. Cerulo, Karen A. 1997. “Identity Construction: New Issues, New Directions.” Annual Review of Sociology 23 (January 1): 385–409. Coleman, James. 1988. “Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital.” American Journal of Sociology 94 (Supplement): 95–121. ———. 1990. Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Conzen, Kathleen Neils, David A. Gerber, Ewa Morawska, George E. Pozzetta, and Rudolph J. Vecoli. 1992. “The Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspective from the U.S.A.” Journal of American Ethnic History 12 (1) (October 1): 3–41. 97 Cox, Kevin. 1998. “Spaces of Dependence, Spaces of Engagement and the Politics or Scale, Or: Looking for Local Politics.” Political Geography 17 (1): 1–23. Cresswell, Tim. 1996. In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression. Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press. Ellis, Mark, and Richard Wright. 1998. “The Balkanization Metaphor in the Analysis of U.S. Immigration.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88 (4) (December 1): 686–698. ———. 2005. “Assimilation and Differences Between the Settlement Patterns of Individual Immigrants and Immigrant Households.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102 (43) (October 25): 15325 –15330. doi:10.1073/pnas.0507310102. Ellis, Mark, Richard Wright, and Virginia Parks. 2004. “Work Together, Live Apart? Geographies of Racial and Ethnic Segregation at Home and at Work.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94 (3): 620–637. Estaville, Lawrence E. 1986. “Mapping the Louisiana French.” Southeastern Geographer 26: 90–113. Fernandez, Roberto M., Emilio J. Castilla, and Paul Moore. 2000. “Social Capital at Work: Networks and Employment at a Phone Center.” American Journal of Sociology 105 (5): 1288–1356. Foley, Michael W., and Bob Edwards. 1999. “Is It Time to Disinvest in Social Capital?” Journal of Public Policy 19: 199–231. Foley, Michael W., and Dean R. Hoge. 2007. Religion and the New Immigrants: How Faith Communities Form Our Newest Citizens. New York: Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972- 1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1984. “Docile Bodies.” In The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, 179–187. New York: Pantheon Books. Frey, William H. 1995. “Immigration and Internal Migration ‘Flight’ From US Metropolitan Areas: Toward a New Demographic Balkanisation.” Urban Studies 32: 733–757. Fukuyama, Francis. 1995. Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. New York: Free Press. 98 Gans, Herbert J. 1973. “Introduction.” In Ethnic Identity and Assimilation: The Polish Community, ed. Neil Sandberg, vii–xii. New York: Praeger. ———. 1992. “Second-Generation Decline: Scenarios for the Economic and Ethnic Futures of the Post-1965 American Immigrants.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 15 (2): 173–92. ———. 1999. “Toward a Reconciliation of ‘Assimilation’ and ‘Pluralism’: The Interplay of Acculturation and Ethnic Retention.” In The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience, ed. Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz, and Josh DeWind, 161–171. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Glazer, Nathan. 1993. “Is Assimilation Dead?” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 530: 122–136. Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel P. Moynihan. 1970. Beyond the Melting Pot, Second Edition: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. 2nd ed. The MIT Press. Gordon, Milton. 1964. Assimlation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins. New York: Oxford University Press. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971a. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. Q. Hoare Smith and G. N. New York: International Publishers. ———. 1971b. “On Education.” In Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Q. Hoare Smith and G. N, 24–43. New York: International Publishers. Granovetter, Mark. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” The American Journal of Sociology 78 (6): 1360–1380. ———. 1983. “The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited.” Sociological Theory 1: 201–233. ———. 1995. Getting A Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Greeley, Andrew M. 1977. The American Catholic: a Social Portrait. Basic Books. Hardwick, Susan. 1993. Russian Refuge: Religion, Migration, and Settlement on the North American Pacific Rim. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 2003. “Migration, Embedded Networks and Social Capital: Toward Theorising North American Ethnic Geography.” International Journal of Population Geography 9 (2): 163–179. ———. 2006. “Nodal Heterolocalism and Transnationalism at the United States- Canadian Border.” The Geographical Review 96 (2): 212–228. 99 Hardwick, Susan, and Ginger Mansfield. 2009. “Discourse, Identity, and ‘Homeland as Other’ at the Borderlands.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99 (2): 383–405. doi:10.1080/00045600802708408. Harvey, David. 1991. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Wiley-Blackwell. Haverluk, Terrence W. 1998. “Hispanic Community Types and Assimilation in Mex- America.” Professional Geographer 50: 465–80. Hogg, Michael A. 1993. “Group Cohesiveness: A Critical Review and Some New Directions.” European Review of Social Psycology 4: 85–111. Hogg, Michael A., and Dominic Abrams. 1988. Social Identifications: A Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations and Group Processes. London: Harvester/Wheatsheaf. Hogg, Michael A., Deborah J. Terry, and Katherine M. White. 1995. “A Tale of Two Theories: A Critical Comparison of Identity Theory with Social Identity Theory.” Social Psychology Quarterly 58 (4): 255–269. Holt, Louise. 2008. “Embodied Social Capital and Geographic Perspectives: Performing the Habitus.” Progress in Human Geography 32 (2): 227–246. Jackman, Robert W, and Ross A Miller. 1998. “Social Capital and Politics.” Annual Review of Political Science 1: 47–73. Jacobson, M. F. 1998. Whiteness of a Different Color. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jakle, John A., and James O. Wheeler. 1969. “Residential Structure of the Dutch Population in Kalamazoo.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 59: 441–60. Johnston, Ruth. 1963. “A New Approach to the Meaning of Assimilation.” Human Relations 16 (3): 295–297. Jones, Richard. 2003. “The Segregation of Ancestry Groups in San Antonio.” The Social Science Journal 40: 213–232. Jordan, Terry G. 1969. “Population Origins in Texas.” Geographical Review 59: 83–103. Kaplan, David H, and Wei Li. 2006. Landscapes of the Ethnic Economy. Lanham :: Rowman & Littlefield. Kasinitz, Philip, John H. Mollenkopf, Mary C. Waters, and Jennifer Holdaway. 2008. Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age. Harvard University Press. 100 Kliger, Sam. 2004. “Russian Jews in America: Status, Identity, and Integration.” In Bar Ilan University, Israel. http://www.ajcrussian.org/atf/cf/%7B66BD09D8-5251- 4553-8C19-5FC7BEAF0E76%7D/russian_jews_in_america.pdf. Latour, Bruno. 2007. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network- Theory. Oxford University Press, USA. Law, John, and John Hassard. 1999. Actor Network Theory and After. 1st ed. Wiley- Blackwell. Lefebvre, Henri. 2007. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Li, Wei. 1998. “Anatomy of a New Ethnic Settlement: The Chinese Ethnoburb in Los Angeles.” Urban Studies 35 (3) (March 1): 479–501. doi:10.1080/0042098984871. Lieberson, S. 1980. A Piece of the Pie: Blacks and White Immigrants Since 1880. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lipsitz, G. 1998. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit From Identity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lubben, James, and Melanie Gironda. 2004. “Measuring Social Networks and Assessing Their Benefits.” In Social Networks and Social Exclusion: Sociological and Policy Perspectives, 20–34. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company. MacDonald, John S., and Leatrice D. MacDonald. 1964. “Chain Migration Ethnic Neighborhood Formation and Social Networks.” The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 42 (1): 82–97. Malkki, Liisa H. 1997. “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity Among Scholars and Refugees.” In Culture Power Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, ed. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, 52–74. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Marx, Karl. 2009. “Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right 1844.” Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm. Massey, Doreen, and N. A Denton. 1988. “The Dimensions of Residential Segregation.” Social Forces 67 (2): 281–315. Massey, Douglas S. 1985. “Ethnic and Residential Segregation: a Theoretical and Empirical Review.” Sociology and Social Research 69: 315–350. 101 ———. 1999. “Why Does Immigration Occur? A Theoretical Synthesis.” In The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience, ed. Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz, and Josh DeWind, 34–52. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. ———. 2007. Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Mattingly, Doreen. 1999. “Job Search, Social Networks, and Local Labor Market Dynamics: The Case of Paid Household Work in San Diego, California.” Urban Geography 20 (1): 46–74. McCall, George, and Jerry Simmons. 1978. Identities and Interactions. Revised. New York: Free Press. Meigs, Peveril. 1941. “An Ethno-telephonic Survey of French Louisiana.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 31: 243–50. Morton, Marian J. 2002. Cleveland Heights: The Making of an Urban Suburb. The Making of America Series. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing. Nee, Victor, and Jimy Sanders. 2001. “Understanding the Diversity of Immigrant Incorporation : a Forms-of-capital Model.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 24 (3): 386– 411. Nogle, June Marie. 1997. “Internal Migration Patterns for US Foreign‐Born, 1985– 1990.” International Journal of Population Geography 3 (1) (March 1): 1–13. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1099-1220(199703)3:1<1::AID-IJPG55>3.0.CO;2-L. Oh, Sookhee, and Pyong G Min. 2011. “Generation and Earnings Patterns Among Chinese, Filipino, and Korean Americans in New York.” International Migration Review 45 (4) (December 1): 852–871. doi:10.1111/j.1747-7379.2011.00870.x. Onyx, Jenny, and Paul Bullen. 2000. “Measuring Social Capital in Five Communities.” The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 36 (1) (March 1): 23–42. doi:10.1177/0021886300361002. Orleck, Annelise. 1999. The Soviet Jewish Americans. Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture, and Life. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press. Park, Robert E. 1930. “Assimilation, Social.” In Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. Edwin Seligman and Johnson, 281–83. New York: Macmillan Publishers Limited. Park, Robert E., and Ernest W. Burgess. 1921. Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 102 Phillipson, Chris, Graham Allan, and David Morgan, eds. 2004. Social Networks and Social Exclusion. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company. Portes, Alejandro. 1998. “Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology.” Annual Review of Sociology 24: 1–15. Portes, Alejandro, and Patricia Landolt. 1996. “The Downside of Social Capital.” The American Prospect 26: 18–23. Portes, Alejandro, and Julia Sensenbrenner. 1993. “Embeddedness and ImmigrationL Notes on the Social Determinants of Economic Action.” The American Journal of Sociology 98: 1320–1350. Portes, Alejandro, and Min Zhou. 1993. “The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and Its Variants.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 530 (1) (November 1): 74 –96. doi:10.1177/0002716293530001006. Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New Yo: Simon & Schuster. Remennick, Larissa. 2007. Russian Jews on Three Continents: Identity, Integration, and Conflict. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Rosenblum, Louis. 2008. “Cleveland and the Freeing of Soviet Jewry.” Cleveland Jewish History. http://www.clevelandjewishhistory.net/sj/index.htm. Rumbaut, Rubén G. 1997. “Assimilation and Its Discontents: Between Rhetoric and Reality.” Int Migr Rev 31 (4): 923–960. ———. 1999. “Assimilation and Its Discontents: Ironies and Paradoxes.” In The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience, ed. Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz, and Josh DeWind, 172–195. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Said, Edward W. 1979. Orientalism. 1st ed. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Sanders, Jimy, and Victor Nee. 1987. “Limits of Ethnic Solidarity in the Enclave Economy.” American Sociological Review 52 (6): 745–773. Sheskin, Ira. 2010. “Assimilation of Jews from the Former Soviet Union.” In Washington, D.C. Shibutani, Tamotsu, and Kian Kwan. 1965. Ethnic Stratification. New York: Macmillan Publishers Limited. 103 Singer, Audrey, Susan Hardwick, and Caroline Brettell, eds. 2008. Twenty-First Century Gateways: Immigrant Incorporation in Suburban America. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution. Skop, Emily, and Wei Li. 2003. “From the Ghetto to the Invisiburb: Shifting Patterns of Immigrant Settlement in Contemporary America.” In Multicultural Geographies, ed. John W Frazier and Florence Margui, 113–124. New York: Academic Publishing. Steinberg, Stephen. 2001. The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America. Beacon Press. Stryker, Sheldon. 1968. “Identity Salience and Role Performance: The Importance of Symbolic Interaction Theory for Family Research.” Journal of Marriage and the Family 30: 558–64. ———. 1980. Symbolic Interactionism: A Social Structural Version. Palo Alto: Benjamin/Cummings. Stryker, Sheldon, and Richard T. Serpe. 1982. “Commitment,, Identity Salience, and Role Behavior.” In Personality, Roles, and Social Behavior, ed. W. Ickes and E. S. Knowles, 199–218. New York: Springer-Verlag. Stryker, Sheldon, and Anne Statham. 1985. “Symbolic Interaction and Role Theory.” In The Handbook of Social Psychology, ed. G. Lindzey and E. Aronson, 311–78. 3rd ed. New York: Random House. Swyngedouw, Erik. 1997. “Neither Global nor Local: ‘Glocalization’ and the Politics of Scale.” In Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local, ed. Kevin Cox, 137–66. Tajfel, Henry. 1979. “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict.” In The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, ed. W. G. Austin and S. Worchel, 33–47. Monterey: Brooks-Cole. Todd, Jennifer. 2005. “Social Transformation, Collective Categories, and Identity Change.” Theory and Society 34 (4): 429–463. Trotsky, Leon. 1924. “Literature and Revolution.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/ch08.htm. Tsing, Anna L. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tuan, Yi Fu. 1976. “Humanistic Geograpy.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 66 (2): 266–276. 104 ———. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press. Turner, John C. 1982. “Towards a Cognitive Redefinition of the Social Group.” In Social Identity and Intergroup Relations, ed. Henry Tajfel, 15–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Villeneuve, Paul Y. 1972. “Propinquity and Social Mobility Within Surname Groups in a French-Canadian Colony.” Proceedings of the Association of American Geographers 4: 100–3. Warner, W. Lloyd (William Lloyd), and Leo Srole. 1945. The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups / by W. Lloyd Warner and Leo Srole. Yankee City Series ; Vol. 3. New Haven, : London, :: Yale University Press ; H. Milford, Oxford University Press. Waters, Mary C. 1990. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. University of California Press. Wiley, Mary G. 1991. “Gender, Work, and Stress: The Potential Impact of Role-Identity Salience and Commitment.” Sociological Quarterly 32: 498–510. Wirth, Louis. 1928. The Ghetto. Transaction Publishers. Wong, David W. S. 1997. “Spatial Patterns of Ethnic Integration in the United States.” Professional Geographer 50 (1): 13–30. Wright, Richard, and Mark Ellis. 2000. “Race, Region, and the Territorial Politics of Immigration in the U.S.” International Journal of Population Geography 6: 197– 211. Wright, Richard, Mark Ellis, and Virginia Parks. 2005. “Re‐Placing Whiteness in Spatial Assimilation Research.” City & Community 4 (2) (June 1): 111–135. doi:10.1111/j.1540-6040.2005.00107.x. Yancey, William L., Eugene P. Ericksen, and Richard N. Juliani. 1976. “Emergent Ethnicity: A Review and Reformulation.” American Sociological Review 41 (3) (June 1): 391–403. doi:10.2307/2094249. Zelinsky, Wilbur. 2001. “Heterolocalism.” In The Enigma of Ethnicity, ed. Wilbur Zelinsky. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press. Zelinsky, Wilbur, and B. A Lee. 1998. “Heterolocalism: An Alternative Model of the Sociospatial Behavior of Immigrant Ethnic Communities.” International Journal of Population Geography 4: 281–298. 105 Zhou, min. 1997. “Segmented Assimilation: Issues, Controversies, and Recent Research on the New Second Generation.” International Migration Review 31: 975–1008. Zinoviev, Aleksandr. 1986. Homo Sovieticus. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press.