The multi-faceted situatedness of privilege in the Danish Jewish migration to Israel

Danish Jews, a great majority of whom survived the Holocaust due to the mass rescue operation that involved their more or less overnight clandestine move to the neighboring Sweden, have always been a tiny minority of the larger Danish population. Especially in the last few decades of the 20th century their very modest numbers shrunk further, primarily due to moving to Israel. While their ability, as Jews, to gain an almost immediate access not only to residency but also to formal citizenship and a slew of other benefits due to their ethnicity in Israel makes for one of the most striking examples of contemporary privilege in transnational migration, it is also bound with a generalized precarity as an often persecuted minority. This paper, however, moves beyond this generic framework of privileged precarity of diasporic Jewish migration to Israel. It analyzes specifically the multi-faceted situatedness of migration-related privilege that specifically the Danish Jews experience, albeit they do so differently due to their own positionalities, especially (but not only) the socio-economic ones. I stress also the crucial role of changes in legal frameworks that underpin privilege and structure the contours of transnational mobility, such as the relatively recent acceptance of dual citizenship in Denmark. Theoretically, I focus on highlighting the relational and deeply time-space-dependent nature of privilege as experienced by migrants in everyday life.