Israelis in the New York area labor market

Abstract

Among the new waves of immigrants to New York, the Israelis are among the least understood. Casual observation makes it clear that in New York they are engaged in car and taxi services, in diamond trading, and in retail enterprises dealing in photo and electronic goods. These are not, however, the Israelis who were traditionally sampled in social science studies. Influenced by the 1970s focus on the "brain drain" as an important phenomenon in immigration, these studies were mostly limited to students and well-educated population segments, and their results served to reinforce the conclusion that Israeli immigrants were highly educated, cosmopolitan types (see, for example, Ritterband 1969, 1978; Fein 1978). Kass and Lipset (1982) provide an example of how this conclusion has influenced discussions of reasons for leaving Israel. They see the basic problem in Israel's large population of educated people, more of whom aspire to professional status than the country can employ, with the implication that there is a group of secular intellectuals who do not have enough scope for their talents and who thus become prime candidates for emigration. The authors, however, did notice that Sephardic Jews, whose origins are on the Mediterranean littoral and the Near East and who have lagged behind the primarily European and/or Western Jews (Ashkenazim) in educational achievement and social status, were also emigrating to the United States. So wedded are they to the "brain drain" thesis that they have to turn the evidence around through a paradox: the success of the dominant Ashkenazi population "in transmitting its achievement values ... is manifest in the growing number of Israeli born Sephardim among immigrants to the United States" (Kass and Lipset 1982, 284). Of course, the conventional wisdom is never wholly incorrect; an