In This Issue

Diaspora 9:2 2000 In This Issue Shain traces the evolution of the relationship between JewishAmericans and Israel from the perspective of conflicting views of Jewish identity. He shows that the arena in which secular and variously religious Jewish identities struggle is transnational, and he argues that reciprocal influences that interpenetrate homeland and diaspora together constitute the possibilities available to evolving Jewish identities. Shain concludes that "debates over the nature of Israeli Jewish identity propel, coincide with, and are nurtured by internal diasporic changes ofJewish identity." He also shows that a growing dependence of diasporic Jewish identity on Israel is fully compatible with attempts "to develop a new, indigenous Judaism that builds on American diasporic innovation." He explores what is at stake for the Reform and Conservative movements ' attempt "to develop and disseminate their creed inside Israel [as] the 'ultimate test of Jewish authenticity for Progressive Judaism' in the Diaspora." Smith addresses questions about transnational migration that have assumed a certain urgency in the past two years: Is it a genuinely original phenomenon of the era of globalization, or a newly inflected form of earlier, equally massive migrations, such as those that occurred in the nineteenth century? And do the answers to these questions matter only as refinements in theory, or because they also make us understand differently the effects of migration and subsequent processes on the sending and receiving countries? He addresses this complex of questions through a comparison of recent migration from Ticuani, Mexico, to New York City with migration from Rattvik parish, Sweden, to Isanti and Clay counties in Minnesota in the nineteenth century. He develops a number of dimensions along which valid comparisons can be made and offers a richly textured study of the factors that old and new transnationalisms share, as well as those that make them different. Yang revisits and reassesses the concept of "the sojourner," exploring its past meanings and its implications for the current study of migration, diaspora, and transnationalism. He offers a detailed account of the origins of the "sojourner hypothesis" in scholarship and ofits application to Chinese migrants to the United States after 1849. His essay explores the personal, familial, social, 161 Diaspora 9:2 2000 cultural, and economic bases of sojourning, and the debates about it, and underscores the role of white nativism and persecution in prolonging Chinese sojourning. Yang offers statistical data on early Chinese return migration and contrasts it with data about the high rates of acceptance of citizenship and home ownership as measures ofthe decline in sojourning among post-1965 Chinese immigrants. In addition, he challenges notions of Chinese exceptionalism by offering comparative data showing that before 1924 sojourning was not a distinctively Chinese penchant but, rather, a common phenomenon among many groups of first-generation immigrants. Finally , he challenges some current uses of the term "transnational," affirms others, and concludes by pointing to similarities between the not fully settled behavior of early sojourners and that of contemporary transmigrants. Klimt offers a diachronic account of the attitudes of Portuguese migrants in (West) Germany from the 1960s to the 1990s toward three possible forms of"belonging": to Portugal, to Germany, and/or to Europe. She underscores the persistent commitment to an ideal of returning "home" even among second-generation Portuguese, which endures even when the Portuguese government of the later 1990s stops promoting the idea of eventual return and urges integration into Germany. Klimt explores the migrants' reasons for their choice of commitments and, in particular, their view of themselves as good participants in the national German capitalist economy as opposed to the society. This, in their view, justifies their remaining to work without choosing full integration into Germany while taking full advantage of the new possibilities of living across the spaces of the new Europe. Kokotovic reads John Beverly's Subalternity and Representation in the context of the debates in which Beverly has engaged in the past two decades and which have, in various degrees and combinations , shaped much of current Latin American Studies: the role of the scholar's and intellectual's work in representing, and perhaps creating, subalternity; the work of Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Spivak, and the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group; Florencia Mallon...