[lbo-talk] article idea

Wendy Lyon wendy.lyon at gmail.com
Thu Aug 18 11:22:04 PDT 2005


On 8/18/05, Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:


> While the expats tend to assimilate to
> the host country culture, the refuges are mentally still in their old one,
> fighting the old battles they lost over and over again. ...
>
> I think certain elements of Jewish diaspora in the US belongs to the second
> category, but interestingly, this is mostly the second or third generation
> of Jewish immigrants. The first generation was more of the expat kind (cf.
> Finkelstein's comments in _The Holocaust Industry_)...
>
> I am not sure if the same process can be observed in other ethnic minorities
> - certainly NOT in Germans or Poles (and other Eastern Europeans) who
> assimilated quite easily and the subsequent generations would not give two
> shits about their "old world" countries and battles

It's too early to speak about subsequent generations, but the first generation Croatian Serbs from the Krajina, refugees from the 1991-95 war, who are now living in Serbia certainly fall into the first category. It is in the part of Serbia where most of them live that the ultranationalist Radical Party is strongest.

(Of course, these refugees aren't an *ethnic* minority there, but they are a minority of sorts, easily distinguishable from Serbian Serbs by accent and some other factors.)



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