{"id":1197,"date":"2020-11-11T16:44:54","date_gmt":"2020-11-11T14:44:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/?p=1197"},"modified":"2020-11-11T16:44:54","modified_gmt":"2020-11-11T14:44:54","slug":"israels-russian-wave-thirty-years-later-mosaic-magazine-nov-2-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/2020\/11\/11\/israels-russian-wave-thirty-years-later-mosaic-magazine-nov-2-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel\u2019s Russian Wave, Thirty Years Later (Mosaic Magazine, Nov. 2, 2020)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Three decades ago, a million emigres from Eastern Europe arrived in Israel, increasing its population by 20 percent almost overnight and changing its culture forever. What\u2019s their story?<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\"Russian<\/a><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

G<\/span>reat changes in Jewish history have manifested themselves in pillars of smoke, talking bushes, royal edicts, and divine scriptures, but probably never in TV crime dramas\u2014at least not until a few weeks ago. I was about a minute into the first episode of\u00a0Manayek<\/em>, a new Israeli hit, watching the main character navigate a hospital ward. I was not expecting any great sociological insight, but insight came when I heard one of the characters speaking Russian. It was just a few Slavic syllables whispered in a woman\u2019s voice.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t that the sound of the language stood out. Like most Israelis, I hear Russian almost every day. It was the fact that it had no importance to the plot. The character had no ties to the Russian mafia, as you might expect in a crime series. There was no mention of immigration at all. Russian was there only because no authentic portrait of Israel in 2020 would be complete without it. It was a small detail that threw into relief a momentous change now celebrating its 30th anniversary\u2014one that deserves far more attention than it has received. The character wasn\u2019t speaking a foreign language, like English. She was speaking an Israeli language.<\/p>\n

Thirty years ago, the final crumbling of the Soviet Union began a human wave that you remember if you were alive and paying even casual attention at the time. The prologue was the arrival in Israel of the gulag hero Natan Sharansky after his release by Gorbachev, blinking in the Middle Eastern light, a little man auguring a great exodus: hundreds of thousands of stunned arrivals descending from airliners in useless winter coats, landing here along with the Scuds of the first Gulf War. Within a decade more than 1 million people immigrated to a country whose population in 1990, at the beginning of the wave, wasn\u2019t even five times that number. \u201cTo appreciate the scale of the accomplishment,\u201d one observer wrote, \u201cimagine the great United States absorbing in one decade roughly all of France and Holland.\u201d<\/p>\n

But few have thought much about it in recent years. If you\u2019re looking for new statistics and research on the arrivals, for example, there isn\u2019t much. Government funding, research hours, and media attention go to problems, and the absorption of a million Russians into Israel\u2014astonishingly\u2014no longer qualifies as a problem. A million Russians came, changed the country, and changed themselves, all within the lifespan of a young person, and it\u2019s taken more or less for granted.<\/p>\n

A third of the newcomers came from Russia proper, a third from Ukraine, and the rest from the smaller Soviet republics. Here in Israel all became known as \u201cRussians.\u201d Just 30 years ago, that Hebrew word,\u00a0rusim<\/em>, referred to a strange group of foreigners. An outsider might assume that still to be the case\u2014the word does refer explicitly, after all, to people from a foreign country. But in today\u2019s Israel, it actually means something very different: a kind of native. Israel can no longer be understood without its Russian component, and Israel\u2019s \u201cRussians\u201d can only be understood as a type of Israeli.<\/p>\n

Russian, or at least Russian-accented Hebrew, can be heard not only on my television but at every school and government office. Looking back at daily life just over the last week or two, I\u2019ve spoken to a Russian orthopedic specialist who looked at my kid\u2019s fractured wrist, a Russian construction engineer, and my Russian dental hygienist. (I\u2019m using \u201cRussian\u201d here in the Israeli sense, because the immigrants themselves have embraced it, and because the more accurate \u201cimmigrants from the former Soviet Union\u201d takes up too much space.)<\/p>\n

Russian characters are staples of Israeli dramas like the Netflix hit\u00a0Shtisel<\/em>, and movies like\u00a0Zero Motivation<\/em>. In that 2014 masterpiece about young women soldiers at a godforsaken army base in the desert, the show was stolen by Irena, a Russian immigrant played by Diana Golbi, an actress who came to Israel from Moscow when she was five. \u201cLose your antiquated ways of thinking, you\u2019re in the West now,\u201d one of the Israeli girls patronizes Irena in response to some blunt Russian advice about how to lose one\u2019s virginity. \u201cIdiot, open an atlas,\u201d Irena says. \u201cI was in the West. Now I\u2019m here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Irena is part of what\u2019s known as Generation 1.5\u2014 people who were born in the Soviet Union, immigrated as children and are now grown up, a hybrid between old-country parents and the kids born Israeli. To understand the cultural transformation of the last three decades, members of Generation 1.5 are the ones to watch. With personalities forged both there and here and by the uprooting that happened in the middle, they\u2019re shaping not only what it means to be Russian in Israel, but also what it means to be Israeli for the rest of us.<\/p>\n

The move of 1,042,000 people from Eastern Europe to the Middle East in the space of a few years is one of the biggest demographic dramas of Jewish history. It\u2019s also arguably the most important single development for Israel since its creation. There are essays to be written about how Russian nurses and doctors became the backbone of the health system, or how Russian engineers helped fuel the tech boom, or what the addition of a million productive citizens has meant for our economy and strategic position in the Middle East.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019d rather look at popular culture as a window into the broader spirit of what\u2019s happened, using a few human stories to get at the whole. This isn\u2019t, in other words, a broad survey or academic analysis. It\u2019s an impressionistic account by a writer who isn\u2019t himself Russian but who, having come to Israel in 1995, a lone Canadian teenager in the Soviet wave, has been on the margins of this population movement for many years, through the absorption bureaucracy and army courses for immigrant soldiers to ordinary life in the distinctly Russian country that emerged with the new century.<\/p>\n[Read the rest here<\/a>.]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Three decades ago, a million emigres from Eastern Europe arrived in Israel, increasing its population by 20 percent almost overnight and changing its culture forever. What\u2019s their story?   Great changes in Jewish history have manifested themselves in pillars of smoke, talking bushes, royal edicts, and divine scriptures, but probably never in TV crime dramas\u2014at least not until a few …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1197"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1197"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1198,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1197\/revisions\/1198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}