Belonging Through Time

Abstract

This article addresses the links between national identity, temporal order, and the re-socialization of migrants. Anchored in an ethnographic account of encounters between Israeli Jews and migrants from the former Soviet Union, it looks at ways in which temporal re-ordering was rendered crucial to the moral transformation required of the newcomers. A close look at these encounters reveals that at the heart of this re-socialization project lay the endeavour to link the lives of the newcomers with the life of the Israeli nation-state by persuading them to bracket off their present circumstances in favour of a shared, imagined, past and future.