The conference "Transnational Migration and Multiculturalism", which took place on the 28th and 29th of November 2011, was conducted in cooperation with the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem and the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Israel and dealt with the interrelations between nation state, immigration and the perception of multiculturalism in both countries.
Both states, Germany and Israel, possess a Law of Return. These tenets regulate immigration along ethnic principles and lead to very similar immigration policies. This was the tenor of Gabriel Motzkin's, Director of the Institute, introductory thesis.
In his opening lecture Rainer Ohliger (Network Migration in Europe, Berlin) disagreed with this statement. Especially during the last two decades, so Ohliger, a change of perception has taken place in unified Germany. National membership is no longer comprehended as being based on ethnic affiliation.
During his lecture "Immigration, Belonging and Cultural Diversity: Israel and Germany in a Comparative Perspective" Ohliger demonstrated how Germany adapted its Citizenship Law to the situation of immigrants who have been living in the country for two generations and how it has come closer to the ideal of a post-national citizenship law. For Israel he diagnosed a tradition of a settler community, which encouraged immigration since its foundation. However, this immigration insisted and continues to insist on membership of the Jewish people. Meanwhile ethnic diversity has become reality in both societies. At the outset of the century, after the Second Intifada, also Israel took in foreign workers (i.a. from South East Asia) and today more and more refugees from Africa are arriving in the country.
The implications of such a self-conception as settler community were underlined by Professor Yossi Yonah (philosopher, associate lecturer in Jerusalem, at the department of Education at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva and co-organizer of the conference). Most Israelis share the experience of immigration. Since the 1990s the differences between immigrant groups became, however, more evident: immigrants from the former Soviet Union constituted a large group (1 million in a country of 7 million inhabitants) and brought a new culture to Israel. They introduced a transnational element to Israel's culture of immigration: The ties to their former countries remained strong. The Russian government encourages the concept of a Russian Diaspora in Israel and attempts to foster the connection between the emigrants and their country of origin.
On the second day of the conference Chen Tannenbaum, a Ph.D. student from the Department of Education at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva, addressed the immigration of Ethiopian Jews who had come to Israel since the Mid 1990s. The group of black Jews from Africa, so her thesis, turned the question of racism in Israeli society into a virulent topic. From the very beginning their accelerated immigration to Israel had been controversial. The Jewishness of the Ethiopians had been questioned.
State institutions feared they could not adapt to their new environment. Only the pressure of the American Association of Ethiopian Jews, the AAEJ, finally determined Israel's conduct. Modern Zionism and Israel's official institutions, so Tannenbaum, continue to argue ethnically when speaking about immigration, but do not mention the color of skin. Through the intervention of the AAEJ immigration offices were confronted with the claim to include this group into the nation in order to prove that Zionism is "color blind".
The influence and the integration of Russian immigrants took a different shape, so Julia Lerner, anthropologist and sociologist at Ben Gurion University. She studied the religious ties of this group after the arrival in Israel. Having lived in the Soviet Union they hardly had ties to religious Judaism. They were therefore expected to strengthen the number of secular Jews in Israel. Lerner's empirical research revealed a different picture. Twenty years after their immigration to Israel one third of the immigrants call themselves religious with a strong commitment to their religious communities. They belong to orthodox and non-orthodox Jewish or Christian religious communities. Religious devotion often serves as proof for or as the possibility of belonging to a national collective. Israel's close link between religious belief and citizenship would explain their behavior. It does, however, not explain the fact that some embrace ultra-orthodox Judaism, a marginalized group, or different Christian denominations including Evangelical believes. Lerner interprets the membership in these religious communities with strict behavioral conduct as search for belonging in reaction to their immigrant experience. The desire to belong to a community is a phenomenon which can be found among other immigrant groups all over the world.
Zeev Rosenhek, sociologist at Israel's Open University, relates to contradictions and randomness, which characterize public conduct with regard to non-Jewish immigrants: These immigrants have come to work or as refugees and, since belonging is defined ethnically and nationally, live in a state of constant distress. They are exploited by the labor market. Their precarious legal status constantly threatens them and their families and makes them vulnerable to imprisonment and expulsion. This policy is accompanied by a demoting public discourse which presents them as competitors on the labor market or as "terrorist danger". Despite all this there have been major improvements in the status of those immigrants since 2004: An inter-ministerial decree enables children of these immigrants to gain Israeli citizenship, if they have "assimilated into the Israeli nation and culture". Rosenhek sees this as friction in the ethnic-national notion of Israeli citizenship, as part of a tendency to solve problems pragmatically and professionally. Different from Germany Israel does not apply a normative claim to universal human rights for all migrants in order to promote their rights. The chances for an integrative migration policy, which will grant migrants social and political participation, are embedded in this pragmatic approach to problem solving.
Dorothee Wierling, contemporary historian from Hamburg, addressed the developments in Germany. Her lecture presented the changes in Germany after the unification: In the years after 1990 not just two political German cultures clashed. On top of this refugees from Eastern Europe, especially from the former Soviet Union, were allowed to enter the country under the label of ethnic affiliation. This, however, did not guarantee their integration into everyday life. These people often remained embedded in their cultural heritage and were seen by others respectively. This led Wierling to the thesis that rather social status and membership of a certain social class determine social success. Even in the second generation Germans of Turkish origin are often defined as members of the lower class. Mehmet Daimagüler related, based on personal experience, how social advancement is either granted or refused. As a German of Turkish decent he managed to become a lawyer and a politician against all odds and biased attributions.
According to Wierling, German political culture responds to an ethnical justification of exclusion and discrimination – as attempted by Sarrazin not long ago – with contempt. After 2001 belonging is rather based on cultural affiliation, employing the term of "leitkultur" mainstream culture, as opposed to Islamic culture which has been diagnosed as foreign. Today Germans not only accept the diversity brought by immigrants in (urban) everyday life. It is regarded as normative also elsewhere. In light of the failure of public authorities dealing with Nazi terror attacks, the capacity of such a self-perception as an open society remains to be seen.
A significant example for the transformation of German postwar culture has been introduced by German-Canadian sociologist Michal Bodemann who referred to the Jews living in Germany: Until 1989 they had been a marginal group and functioned as "guardians of memory". For the German majority they were evidence of a new postwar Germany. Other than that they hardly played a role in Germany's everyday reality. The arrival of the immigrants from the former Soviet Union caused a revival of Jewish life. A new understanding of multiculturalism and the change of generations made Jewish life, its culture and the revival of religion more visible. In addition – and this seems to be the most striking change – Turkish-Muslim-Jewish alliances are being formed whenever questions of diversity and minority policies are discussed.
The conference revealed the great narratives of both societies – a democratically transformed, cosmopolitan postwar Germany on the one and an ethnically defined Jewish nation on the other side – whose social practices and regime of inclusion and exclusion are constantly being undermined, questioned or renewed.