The Infiltrators

I spent the day in Tel Aviv, as I get ready for tomorrow’s General Assembly (GA) of the Jewish Federations of North America. 

On my way to lunch with a friend, I walked through Levinsky Park, the “Eritrean/Sudanese” area of Tel Aviv. Most of the thousands of people congregating are immigrants – African refugees who have crossed the border. It’s often called “the State of Levinsky” because of the internal rules and laws the immigrants have set for themselves.

I wanted to see this place for myself. There have been some prominent comments by Israeli politicians that these “infiltrators” are an enormous strain on Israel’s welfare system, that they carry disease, they’re rapists, a plague, a cancer. Levinsky is, ironically, in the heart of the Neve Sha’anan neighborhood – an Oasis of Serenity. But it’s never been much of a serene place – the Central Bus Station turned the area into an oasis of prostitution, crime and vandalism long before African immigrants came. Poor social and urban planning can do that. And now many of the migrants sleep on the floor, in the park. 

Most aren’t allowed to work or get official residency rights, so they’re trapped in a spiral of despair and poverty.

My colleagues in JDC’s The Centerfor International Migration and Integration (CIMI) have spent some time looking at this issue. Here’s the bottom line: if we don’t recognize that there’s a problem here … we’re probably never going to resolve this.  

If we don’t let them work, the situation’s going to get worse.  

And if they’re here, we have obligations towards them. We should be helping Israel meet this challenge and enhance protection for asylum seekers.

Jews Move ...

I gave a briefing the other day on the Jewish world and how it has changed in the last twenty years.

One of the most interesting aspects of this change has been the dynamic focus of Jewish migration.

Jews are a migratory people. In fact, for the last 150 years or so, you can see a clear trend of Jewish migration, every 20 or 30 years. But what we’ve seen in the last 20 years is a massive exponential growth in global Jewish migration.

So much so, in fact, that Jews are now the most migratory people in the world.

One quarter of Jews in the world today live in a country other than the one in which they were born.

Think about that for a moment and what it represents.

Change, diversity, opportunity. Risks, challenges, new horizons.

All of this is happening right now.

And this means that the vast majority of Jews today live in a very small number of places. Since the early 1990s, one of the most interesting trends of Jewish life has been consolidation.

Most of us live in a very small number of countries. The vast majority of us (some three-quarters) live in just the US and Israel.

And there's a positive side to this contraction, in that Jews have moved and are moving to wealthier, more stable, more accepting societies. They're moving away from dangerous and under-developed places to “better” homes.

There's also a negative side, because we’re going to lose a lot of history and culture.

But what really fascinates me is that when we talk about consolidation, we’re looking not only at what's happening between countries but also inside them.

Urbanization is a critical component of this contraction, of this consolidation.

We’re becoming an increasingly urbanized people. 80% of the world’s Jews live in only 24 cities. That’s the twenty-first century Jewish migration. And 52% of us live in only five cities … Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, New York and Los Angeles.

By the way, the equivalent percentage for the world’s population as a whole is something like 50%. In other words, whereas something like 90% of Jews live in cities of a million people or more, only 50% of the world’s population live in big cities.

And as we move to the big cities, to the stable countries, the nature of Jewish life is going to change dramatically …


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