diaspora

Not too long ago I was standing in line in a holiday resort in the Dominican Republic when a man in front of me bellowed at his son: “Yuval, atah honek et ha-tur” [“Yuval, you’re holding up the line.”] Most American Jews have been here before: We overhear Hebrew, we discover a surreptitious Israeli in our midst, the Diaspora Jew’s sense of kinship is triggered.

A photo of Greg Kleven, dated April 1967, shows him posing in front of a tin-roofed hooch, wearing an undershirt so stained it matches the sand beneath his feet. In his right hand, he is holding an M-16 rifle. His shaved head is cocked to the left and he's sticking out his tongue in a half smile. The 18-year-old enlistee is three months into his tour of Vietnam in a Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance company, a special operations unit similar to the Navy SEALs. He looks brash and ready to take on any Viet Cong who cross his path.

Patterns of global migration and remittances have shifted in recent decades, even as both the number of immigrants and the amount of money they send home have grown, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of data from the United Nations and the World Bank. A rising share of international migrants now lives in today’s high-income countries such as the United States and Germany, while a growing share was born in today’s middle-income nations such as India and Mexico, the analysis finds.

This is the busiest time of year for travel along the United States-Mexico border. Many Mexican shoppers head north and unload their wallets at American stores. Americans with family ties in Mexico travel south to visit relatives, sometimes carrying loads of presents. During this year's holiday season the Mexican government is making it easier for southbound traffic to enter the country.

When discussing democracy in Israel, some people seek to distinguish between what happens within the Green Line and what happens beyond it – an undemocratic regime of occupation. They believe the occupation doesn’t weigh on Israel’s democratic character, both because it’s a temporary situation and because it has the distinction of taking place outside the state’s borders.

Malala Yousafzai has topped a list of the 101 most powerful British Asians and Asians resident in the UK, knocking Labour MP Keith Vaz off the number one spot he held last year. Yousafzai, who came to Britain from Pakistan after she was shot in the head by the Taliban for campaigning for girls’ education, is the only woman to feature in the top ten.

During the "Public Diplomacy of the Americas" conference hosted by the USC Association of Public Diplomacy Scholars, former Mexican Ambassador to the U.S. Arturo Sarukhán discussed U.S.- Mexico relations, highlighting the importance of increasing the digital component of Mexico's diplomacy to deal with issues such as trade relations, transnational crime, and immigration.

Jews across the world must ratchet up pressure on their governments to stand in the way of an impending "bad deal" on Iran's nuclear program, Diaspora Affairs Minister Naftali Bennett wrote Saturday night. In a letter sent to AIPAC, Jewish Federations of North America, Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Russian Jewish Congress, and other groups, and later posted on his Facebook page, Bennett said that "the Free World stands before a fork in the road."

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