Series for Film Group Discussions

Clash of Lifestyles

IMMIGRATION:
SENTIMENTAL AND UNSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS

Throughout their history, oppression and persecution have led Jews to migrate from one land to another in an attempt to find religious freedom and better living conditions. Two significant migrations have had historic implications for our own time.

At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, about two and a half million Jews left Russia and Eastern Europe to settle in America--part of a movement that brought twenty million Europeans to the United States over four decades. The world they carried with them, the world they found, and the often painful conflicts and changes occasioned by adjustments to American life have been addressed in a number of fine films, both feature and documentary.

The other great migration is the one that followed the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, which brought Jews there from all over the world. That remarkable ingathering, its historical and emotional significance for the Jewish people, and its effects on individual Jews and Jewish families, are documented in these films.

In America

To the Land of Israel

Discussion Questions

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