The Liability of Ethnicity in Israel

Abstract

This paper examines the inequalities in status attainment between Israeli Oriental-Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews in the early 1960s; replicates Duncan's (c) methods of regression and component analyses; and compares the Israeli findings with Duncan's (c) for American blacks and whites for the same period. The most important causes of the observed inequalities arefound to differ between the two countries: lack of equal educational attainment of OrientalSephardim in Israel; discrimination against blacks in the United States. They have less education, jobs of lower skill, prestige, and pay; less upward intergenerational mobility, and lower incomes. They are segregated in sections of large cities and isolated in smaller communities. They have very large families, more juvenile delinquents and adult criminals. Others do not want to live near them nor send their children to school with theirs. 1 Who are they? While these characteristics might well describe the conditions and the consequences of inequality for blacks in the United States, they also-variously referred to as Orientals, Sephardim, or Asian-Africans, in contrast to another group of Jews, who are referred to as Westerners, Europeans, or I shall usually refer to them, respectively, as Oriental-Sephardim and Ashkenazim. Although their historical, cultural, and social roots differ, both the United States and Israel have identifiable superordinate and subordinate groups with inequalities in their socioeconomic attainments and power. In the United States, the major division is drawn racially between blacks and whites, while in Israel, one important cleavage is ethnic, between Jews from the West (primarily Europe) and those from Asia and Africa.2 The purpose of this paper is to analyze status attainment in Israel in