Word: diaspora
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...stereotypes of certain ethnic groups as specific interpretations of their cultural inheritance. The Irish passion for alcohol may have arisen from the futility of life in a land where whiskey proved cheaper than bread, as Jewish resourcefulness and guile may have from centuries of oppression across the diaspora. Yet, drawing these traits in light of their cultural origins is hardly original to Sowell's treatise. His digging can only add little insight to legends that have been around for centuries...
...Jewish Socialist Bund--"We're the young brigade of the proletariat," the children chant--stands at the fore of the trade union movement. There are labor Zionists on the left and revisionist Zionists on the right. Opposed to the Zionists are those who uphold the values of the Diaspora--the Jewish dispersion--and promote the cause of civil and political minority rights, supposedly enshrined by the Treaty of Versailles. Unified by tradition, the Jews were divided by geography, class and vision...
...Theirs are European images of chivalry on horse back, spirits with gleaming swords that conquered the land. Their dream of Michael's identity is that he is a sort of missionary figure to Indians. Son exposes Jadine to screaming nightmares filled with ghosts of the women of his past, "diaspora mothers with pumping breasts" who watch her mockingly. She flys from Son eventually, and the novel leaves them and their painful dreas separated...
Similarly, Elkin squeezes out comedy from lost causes, the tickling sensation that comes when backs rub against the wall. An old peddler named Isidore Feldman fetches up in Illinois. He tells his new neighbors that he is "in the last phase of the Diaspora. I have come to the end of the trail in your cornfields." And he gives his son some good advice: "Travel light. Because there will come catastrophe. Every night expect the flood, the earthquake, the fire, and think of the stock...
Your neighbors on the T are members of a growing community of Soviet immigrants, the vast majority of them Jews, who have settled in the Hub area over the past six or seven years. They are part of an on-again-off-again diaspora of Soviet Jews, whose numbers rise and fall with each chill and thaw in Soviet-American relations...