Browsing by Author "Uotila, Julia"

Jewish immigration to Israel is a phenomenon that raises discussion and there are multiple ways of approaching the study on the subject. Yet, there are sides to the story that are often left unheard, one of them being that of the Jewish immigrants themselves. This Master's thesis examines the ways in which Jewish immigrants make sense of their immigration to Israel, by analysing stories of ten immigrants that have moved to Israel from different countries, during the recent decades. The study draws upon narrative research and social constructionism and is located to the field of social scientific qualitative research on immigration that uses storied data and gives value to the meaning-making and the subjective constructions in the context of immigration. The research attempts to reply to the main research question of ‘how the immigrants make sense of their immigration to Israel in their narratives' by focusing on the meanings constructed for the immigration in the stories and on the ways in which the immigrants structure their immigration experience. Close reading, including an actant analysis (Greimas 1980/1966), was conducted for each of the stories individually, followed up by the construction of meaning-categories based on the principal ways of making sense of the immigration in the stories. The principal ways of making sense of the immigration were constructing it as an enabler, as an ideological fulfilment, as homecoming or as an unfortunate turn of events. The immigrants drew upon various different narrative resources in constructing their stories, such Zionist narratives, family history or the Bible. Indeed, the stories were very different from one another and were given also individual titles to provide an additional dimension to the interpretation and manifest their uniqueness. For some Jewish immigrants, return migration seems like the appropriate lens through which to analyse their immigration, while for others the concept of return seem altogether unbefitting: their stories weren't stories of return, but of new beginnings in their new home country or even of a temporary stopover in their journey. Indeed, I would view other lenses, such as those of transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, more suitable for analysing some of the stories. References: Greimas, A. J. & Courtés, J. (1982). Semiotics and language: An analytical dictionary. (L. Christ, D. Patte, J. Lee, E. McMahon II, G. Philips, M. Rengstorf, Trans.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (Original work published 1979.)