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In recent years, a growing literature has suggested that self-employment is a viable means of solving economic problems for a wide range of groups who are subject to poverty, discrimination and other disadvantages. Yet African Americans have not developed an ethnic economy large enough to solve many of their economic problems. To explore the question, this paper reviews three of the most common explanations for black Americans’ low rates of entrepreneurship: the cultural/psychological perspective, the ethnic enterprise perspective and the critical race approach. While the first two are widely accepted, neither approach identifies black Americans as a racial group, instead defining them as a cultural or ethnic group. Accordingly, neither apprehends the full impact of racial inequality in limiting black Americans’ entrepreneurial opportunities. Following a discussion of race-based obstacles to entrepreneurship, the paper concludes that the critical race view provides the most convincing explanation ...

Shortly before the US entry into the Second World War, an experimental newspaper called PM was created in New York City. While the paper lasted less than 8 years, it produced many important innovat...

This article uses photo-elicitation interviews to explore Arab Americans’ reactions to a collection of photographs documenting ethnic community events in Detroit. Its goal is to gain insight into processes of identity construction that have occurred since 11 September 2001. Drawing on fieldwork and a review of journalistic and scholarly literature, the article examines connections to panethnic identity in respondents’ views of local geography, communal diversity, simultaneous involvement in United States and Arab culture, and understandings of racism.

While a growing body of literature addresses the experience of migrant women’s involvement in self-employment, this work has focused on relatively few groups and has emphasized gender to the neglect of other contextual factors, such as family, class and ethnic resources, structures of opportunity and the nature of migrants’ relations with networks in countries of origin and settlement. In this article, I draw on multi-sited ethnography to explore Vietnamese, Russian-speaking Jewish, and Israeli women immigrants’ patterns of self-employment. Results suggest that contrary to being an end in itself, in most cases self-employment is simply a strategy that immigrant women engage in to obtain income while coping with an array of opportunities, impediments, and obligations framed by the structure of opportunities and disadvantages as well as transnational concerns.

As recently as the late 1970s and 1980s, a broad consensus in both Israel and US Jewish communities asserted that Israel should be the primary destination for Jewish migrants. Hebrew terms like yordim (those who go down) and noshrim (dropouts) stigmatized “Jewish communal deviants” who chose to settle outside of Israel. Moreover, whether they established themselves in Tel Aviv or Los Angeles, Jewish migrants were expected to cooperate with the religious, economic, political, cultural, and national agendas created for them by their host communities. While migrants had their own preferences about resettlement, they had limited ability to act on them. However, by the mid-1990s, a series of political, economic, ideological and demographic developments had transformed the status and treatment of Jewish migrants. The United States had received hundreds of thousands of Jewish migrants, either in competition with, or from, Israel. The American Jewish community, in consort with migrant activists and Israel itself, extended an array of social, economic, and religious services to Jewish migrants. And in both Israel and the United States, migrant populations increasingly selected their own patterns of national, political, linguistic, cultural, and religious identity—conforming to the agendas of host communities only in ways that they themselves chose. The net effect of these recent transformations has been to greatly enhance the autonomy of Jewish migrants. In this, we see a movement away from nationally-bounded forms of Jewish identity within Israel, the United States and other settings, and their replacement with flexible and less geographically fixed forms of Jewish identification. This article draws on in-depth interviews with Jewish migrants and resettlement staff to discuss recent transformations among Jewish migrants in the United States. It reviews some of the causes of these changes and considers their impacts. It concludes that skilled Jewish migrants with access to multiple places and ways of settlement have a great deal to offer the American Jewish community, but also considerable freedom to decide how and where they will live. Such factors transform established understandings of American Jewish life and need to be considered by scholars and policy makers involved in Jewish population research.

In recent years, scholars have worked to understand the persistence of racial inequality in societies characterized by the condemnation of explicit racism, growing diversity, and anti-discrimination policies. Many theorists generally agree about the multiple dimensions of racism and challenge assertions about the incipient colourblindness of the current context. However, they also disagree about the nature of the racial hierarchy in the USA. One approach continues to emphasize a bipolar model, with blacks at the bottom and whites on top, as sufficient to explain diverse patterns of inequality. An alternative formulation sees racialization as contextual, yielding a less stable and more complex ranking system. This article summarizes both positions and concludes that while the bipolar model continues to present useful insights, a more nuanced understanding of racial inequality is achieved when the bipolar approach is replaced by one that comprehends the multiple and even contradictory nature of racial disad...

Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 47 Jewish communal activists in Los Angeles and Detroit, this paper examines women’s involvement in Jewish philanthropy. It considers their approaches to fund-raising and the ways organizations have attempted to respond to women’s altering perspectives and needs. Findings suggest that communal organizations must continue to adapt if they are to attract a significant proportion of younger Jewish women.

This paper uses pairs of photographs taken in public settings to develop macro‐level generalizations about social life in two U.S. cities: New York and Los Angeles. Drawing from the work of Erving Goffman, my analysis of these photographs is based on the assumption that social life consists of a series of setting‐based contests for social status which, in their totality, combine to form what Randall Collins has called “The Microfoundations of Macrosociology.” The paper concludes by addressing some of the similarities and differences between the O.S.’s two largest cities and closes on a reflexive note: these depictions of two environments may tell as much about my own orientation while residing in them as they reveal about the cities themselves.

This paper uses photo‐elicitation to study the relationship between two sub‐populations of Vietnamese refugees; the highly entrepreneurial Chinese‐Vietnamese and the more numerous ethnic Vietnamese. Drawing from in‐depth interviews based upon photographs of Vietnamese and Chinese‐Vietnamese refugees, the project seeks to find if and how refugees can visually determine a person's ethnicity, the traits respondents associate with either of the two sub‐population, and if younger, Americanized refugees understand ethnic boundaries differently than the older, Vietnam‐oriented generation. Result indicate that the Chinese‐Vietnamese and ethnic Vietnamese generally can determine the ethnicity of persons shown, that their characterizations of both themselves and the “other” group are fairly consistent, and that ethnic boundaries appear to be of diminishing importance with the passage of time in the U.S.

(1997). Migration and Identity: International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories, Volume III. Edited by Rina Benmayor and Andor Skotnes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. 223 pp. Hardbound, $57.00. The Oral History Review: Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 137-139.

Perspectives on Refugee Adaptation Soviet Jews Background and Migration Experience Vietnamese Refugees Background and Characteristics The Soviet Jewish Enclave Recently Arrived Vietnamese Resettlement Agencies and Refugee Communities Self-Employment and Refugee Communities Patterns of Community Organization Conclusions Appendix Photographs

Certain members of new immigrant families have access to the skills, education and collective traditions that allow their quick economic adjustment to American society. At the same time, however, such families also contain individuals who encounter major difficulties in adapting to the new country. These difficulties—the dependency of youth and the aged, intergenerational conflict, role reversals, and status loss—often result from the rapid adjustment experienced by other family members. Such problems affect not only the individuals themselves, but, strain the entire immigrant family unit.

(1986). Student critiques and teaching visual sociology. Visual Sociology: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 8-10.