Co-sponsors: The Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and East European Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Bernard Forum of Migration, The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies (Columbia University), Harriman Institute (Columbia University), East Central European Center (Columbia University), supported by Genesis Philanthropy Group
In the nineteenth century Imperial Russia was home to the largest Jewish community in the world. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, millions of Russian Jews migrated to new homes scattered throughout the globe transforming the demographic centers of world Jewry. From the United States to Argentina to Palestine, Russian Jewish immigrants transformed the politics and cultures of their new host countries. The concluding conference of the first stage of the international research project for the study of migration looked at the various waves of this emigration from Russia in order to ask how singular this population shift was. It compareed it with some other population shifts in the region and highlighted the most recent wave, by looking at the autobiographical materials they had produced.