Transnational studies have burgeoned in recent years both in Latin American Studies (Roniger, 2025). and in Jewish Latin American Studies (Bokser Liwerant, 2025). While a major focus of these studies has been the role of networks and interactions within and across the Americas (Casaús Arzú y García Giráldez, 2005; Goebel, 2013; Roniger, 2022), the study of political exile and migration has projected the transnational optic beyond those boundaries, into Europe, Asia, Africa and even Oceania (Yankelevich y Jensen, 2007; Sznajder y Roniger, 2013; Oliva Medina y Moreno Rodríguez, 2018; Overmyer-Velázquez y Sepúlveda III, 2018; Feldmann, Bada, Durand and Schütze, 2023). The articles in this dossier can be seen as part of this growing interest in processes of transnational relocation. They are the product of an innovative teaching and research collaborative experience developed by Professor Hugo Simkin involving students in Argentina, Chile and Israel, which raise several important methodological and conceptual issues for transnational studies.

These texts address the social representations of a handful among the thousands of Jewish Argentinians who relocated to Israel, either pushed by sociopolitical circumstances and economic crises in Argentina or attracted by identitarian or ideological motivations as they migrated to Israel. Through semi-structured interviews of a small number of informants, the authors highlight several fascinating aspects of how those immigrants reflect on their past and present lived experiences in their country of origin and their country of relocation.

Basewicz Rojana, Banon and Maron approach the migrants’ pre-migration imaginaries and their transformation after living for some time in Israel (Basewicz et al., 2025). They indicate that “before immigrating, participants carried with them a set of ideas and expectations about Israel shaped by family narratives, community education, and collective memory. These representations often combined ideological and emotional elements. Israel was imagined not only as a secure Jewish homeland, but also as a symbolic space of belonging.” The images of Israel as a technologically advanced nation also added appeal for some of the interviewees. Once relocating there, however, the picture became more complex. Adaptation involved, along with a growing sense of familiarity, facing bureaucratic difficulties, language barriers and emotional uncertainty. During the interviews, some of them emphasized the collective solidarity and emotional warmth of the host society, while others focused on disillusion from politics, the bureaucracy or the religious tensions they encountered. Beyond these differences, all of them recognized that they had to renegotiate their sense of belonging, reflecting and making sense of shifts in their imaginaries and lived experiences. Through this process, the authors indicate that “Israel is progressively represented not only as a symbolic homeland, but as a lived social space structured by everyday practices, relationships, and institutional participation.” Also progressively, an inversion of identity markers develops. Jewishness, a differentiating marker of identity while living in Argentina, becomes implicit in Israel and nationality – being defined as an Argentinian or a South American – becomes more salient.

Gambino, Gerstein and Ghasemisarukolai’s study of social representations of technology brings to the fore the challenges that Jewish Argentinians face when relocating to a technologically advanced environment (Gambino et al., 2025). The interviewees reported their ambivalence towards the widespread use of technology and social media in Israel. On the one hand, they praised some of it as a practical tool of communication, as in the case of WhatsApp. Yet, concomitantly, they see technology as a double-edged sword that poses significant barriers to integration, as it makes it difficult at least for some of them to approach state agencies, bank branches and post offices. In their conclusion, the authors recommend that institutions and civil society should help the new immigrants develop the digital literacy needed for a full participation in society. Of equally special relevance is their discussion of the growing use of AI, which for some is very functional and effective, while at the same time raising concerns of cognitive dependency and of threats to professions and occupations where authorship and evaluation operated before.

Finally, Lev, Lotan and Martin’s text focuses on the distinctive social representations of violence that Jewish Argentine migrants to Israel have of their country of origin and the country of relocation (Lev et al., 2025). Their findings raise awareness of how different the images of violence attributed to Argentina and Israel by the interviewed migrants are. In the case of Argentina, representations prevail of everyday criminal violence with a random and unpredictable yet pervasive character. “In Argentina, you cannot stay distracted”, was one of the opinions gathered by the research team. In the case of Israel, interviewees stress the institutional and symbolic presence of violence as resulting from a possible terrorist attack, as reflected in the ubiquitous presence of soldiers and police in urban landscapes.

From an emic perspective, those interviewed by the research team described Argentina as dangerous or more dangerous than Israel, indicating that they felt safer in the latter, even if there was more likely to face a terrorist attack in Israel rather than in Argentina. The researchers found that the mediating variable was the sense of collective solidarity and the view of the armed forces as entrusted with protecting society. This finding, of course, raises awareness of the gap between emic and etic perspectives in qualitative research with interviewers, and it specifically highlights the lack of distinction between types of violence that some international country rankings follow, while underscoring the importance of acknowledging the local attribution of meanings.

Interviewing individuals with a transnational experience provides hindsight into processes of representation, reconstruction of memory and anchoring of present experiences using pre-existing categories of thought and knowledge. The small N of in-depth interviews backing these research projects does not allow generalizations, but – as displayed in the articles – is a key instrument for unearthing social representations. Using semi-structured interviews permits understanding the categories of interpretation that these migrants have adopted as well as the variance in meanings that they attribute to their past and present living experiences.