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From 1990 until 2008, about 200,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union migrated to Germany. At the same time, Germany re-unified and took its place at the centre of the new Europe. In a global world, in which people maintain multiple homes, languages, identities and means of communication across thousands of miles, these migrants challenged German Jewish notions of identity, rootedness and community. Their particular Soviet and post-Soviet approaches to these issues also challenged the liberalising tendencies of an emerging European Jewish identity. This review essay examines how Soviet and post-Soviet Jewish migration to Germany interacted and intersected with new notions of European Jewish identity in Germany, with special focus on Berlin, the largest, most cosmopolitan Jewish community in Germany. Rather than continuing to bemoan the 'failed integration' of post-Soviet Jewry into some notion of fixed German Jewish identity or into liberal European notions of identity, a global approach would allow for the co-existence of many Jewish identities in a diverse German Jewish community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Age and school-type differences (primary school and three types of secondary school) in self-related beliefs about ability, effort, and difficulty were investigated in a study of 1723 Berlin youth. Consistent with selective ability-stratified schooling, multi-group structural equation models revealed: (1) mean-level belief differences reflecting assimilation effects among secondary school students, (2) belief variances were mostly narrower among secondary school students reflecting restricted social comparison opportunities, and (3) school type moderated relationships between beliefs. Primary school students thought ability was fixed, that effort paid off, and they used normative task difficulty for gauging how effortful they were. Haupt-/Realschule and Gesamtschule students thought they were less effortful and put in less effort. Haupt-/Realschule student achievement was unrelated to their agency belief in ability and personal difficulty, reflecting a pattern of educational goal disengagement. Gymnasium school students seemed to maximize the use of their ability through effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]