Elizabeth Moorhouse-Stein

Research Interests

Diaspora Political Mobilization, Ethnic and Diaspora Lobbying, Ontological Security, Nationalism, Israel-Jewish Relations

LECR - Laboratory for Ethnic Conflict Research

Project Description

My research identifies how and why some national Jewish populations have become politically and organizationally fragmented over Israel whereas others retain a certain degree of cohesion. I compare patterns of organized activism and political mobilization among Jews in the U.S., Canada, and France since the 1980s. I examine ‘establishment’ Jewish and Israel-advocacy organizations which support Israel and its government policy irrespective of its substance; ‘pushback organizations’ which support Israel in principle but are critical of what they perceive as a rightward, hawkish, and illiberal drift in recent decades; and non-Zionist or anti-Zionist organizations which reject the very premise of Israel as central to Jewish identity and promote government policies to undermine or weaken Israel. Each broad type of organization advocates and lobbies that its respective government take a particular foreign-policy approach toward Israel. 
 
My dissertation explains why ‘pushback organizations’ receive significantly less backing from Jews in Canada than they do in the US, and considerably less in France, despite important structural similarities among the cases.

I have received funding for this research from the Fonds de recherche du Quebec, the Government of Ontario (Ontario Graduate Scholarship), the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry, the International Studies Association, and several grants from Queen's University School of Graduate Studies and the Political Studies Department.

Publications

"Attitudes and Activism Concerning Israel," in Canada's Jews in Comparative Perspective, edited by Schnoor, Randal F. and Robert Brym. University of Toronto Press, 2023.

(With David Haglund) "Ethnic Diasporas and US Foreign Policy," Oxford Bibliographies in Political Science, rev. and updated 2020. DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780199756223-0069.

Moorhouse-Stein, Elizabeth and Aviad Rubin. 2016. “The Index of Identity Group Institutionalization, or the IGI Index:  A New Tool to Quantify the Institutionalization of Identity Groups in Democratic Societies,” Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement 128 (2): 929-955. DOI: 10.1007/s11205-015-1063-x