The crumbling of the USSR has set Russian-speaking Jews free to emigrate. From the threat of antisemitism to economic disaster, their "good reasons" to do so were numerous and within one and a half decade most of them moved out and scattered throughout the world. This book is about the million that settled in Israel, the half million now in the US and the 200.000 who settled in Germany. This book presents the comparative work of an international team of researchers which delves into the building of communities, the formulation of collective identities and the articulation of public discourse...

This is a book about how people understand each other. Like Simmel's writings and works written by Foucault and Goffman toward the ends of their careers, this book depicts interactions as behavioral forms. Its novelty is that it grounds these forms in linguistic structure, particularly in the ubiquitous presence of modality in discourse within all mass societies. Its concluding argument is that all persons, situations, and cultures have mutual significance in accordance with four fundamental modal forms: ability (most common in the United States), necessity (most common in the socialist...

The Walls between Conflict and Peace discusses how walls are not merely static entities, but are in constant flux, subject to the movement of time. Walls often begin life as a line marking a radical division, but then become an area, that is to say a border, within which function civil and political societies, national and supranational societies. Such changes occur because over time cooperation between populations produces an active quest for peace, which is therefore a peace in constant movement. These are the concepts and lines of political development analysed in the book. The...