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Calvin Goldscheider: Israeli Society in the 21st Century: Immigration, Inequality, and Religious Conflict - Springer
Article
Contemporary Jewry
October 2015, Volume 35, Issue 3, pp 323-325
First online: 12 October 2015
Calvin Goldscheider: Israeli Society
in the 21st Century: Immigration,
Inequality, and Religious Conflict
Brandeis University Press, 2015, 304 pp, $35.00
Bruce A. Phillips 10.1007/s12397-015-9151-4
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Calvin Goldscheider is an original thinker and I have found his previous work
on American Jewry to be intellectually adventurous and consistently
compelling. I opened his new book on Israeli society with high expectations,
and was not disappointed.
The first section of the book establishes the role of demography in the
foundation and background of Israeli society. The second section discusses
urbanization, religion, and gender roles as structural and cultural factors that
are key ingredients shaping social change and inequality. The third section
provides an analysis of “inequalities based on gender, ethnic, and religious
characteristics.” It includes a discussion of the structure of social class in Israel
and the generational transmission of social class inequalities. The final section
looks at marriage and family formation. The final chapter on “emergent Israeli
society” reviews three “externals” that enhance “the understanding of internal
developments in Israel’s changing society:” the relationship of Jewish
communities outside of Israel, the “Palestinian question” (the relationship of
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Calvin Goldscheider: Israeli Society in the 21st Century: Immigration, Inequality, and Religious Conflict - Springer
Israel to the territories it administers), and the impact of the Palestinian
Diaspora.
Most of what is written about Israeli society tends to be passionate. Ari Shavit’s
widely read My Promised Land: the Triumph and Tragedy of Israel is a case
in point. Goldscheider, by contrast, takes a straightforward, dispassionate
approach, and this is one of the book’s great strengths. His discussion of Arabs
is one example. First of all, he refers to them as Arab Israelis, not Israeli Arabs.
Where others argue about whether or not Israel is an “apartheid” state,
Golscheider provides a detailed, factual, and nuanced discussion of the sources
of inequality for Arab Israelis and its impact on their identity. He shows, for
example that economic returns to education are not the same for them as for
Jewish Israelis: “The lack of translation of education into jobs is one form of
structural discrimination.” He further observes that residential segregation has
led to “increased levels of economic deprivation, hopelessness, and
deterioration, precisely at the time when objective conditions were becoming
better relative to what they had been” (p. 73).
Another strength is the sophistication of Goldscheider’s analysis. He uses the
word “disentangle” a lot, and this is how he arrives at a deeper understanding.
He “disentangles” that which is unique to Israel from what is shared with other
developed nations. For example, he notes that the transition to small family
size is found in all developed nations, but this process took a century to unfold
in Sweden, but only a generation in Israel. Similarly, he notes that the societal
impact of immigration is not unique to Israel but the rate and scale are
unprecedented there. He also “disentangles” what aspects of ethnicity are
explained by national origins from the ethnic variation that results from
exposure to Israeli society. Goldscheider disentangles social processes at the
national level from those at the communal, group, and even family level. He
notes that while patterns of socio-economic change appear balanced at the
national level (the move to the professions and high tech) they vary by national
groups so that all Israelis do not participate equally in an expanding economy.
He also disentangles process from outcomes. For example, the Central Bureau
of Statistics reports that the vast majority of Arab Israelis live in large urban
places, which sounds like they have moved to big cities. Not so explains
Goldscheider. This is the result of residential segregation; as a residentially
segregated Arab population expanded through natural increase, small
communities became large urban areas. He also disentangles educational
mobility nationally from communities. While it is true that the average level of
education has increased, it is not uniform across groups: “At the upper levels of
education, […] the ethnic gap at the beginning of the twenty-first century was
about the same for the first and second generations [in the twentieth century]”
(p. 157). His discussion of education also disentangles immigration from
Israeli society: “…ethnic differences among the second and later generations
are not simply a carryover from places of origin but are the result of an Israeli-
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Calvin Goldscheider: Israeli Society in the 21st Century: Immigration, Inequality, and Religious Conflict - Springer
generated stratification system, reinforced by a complex combination of people
and institutions…” (p. 163).
Central to Goldscheider’s analysis is identifying “linkages” among disparate
social and population processes. He links ethnic origins with gender roles and
labor force participation: “The differing ethnic origins of the Jewish population
represent different exposures to the openness of their societies of origin to
women’s employment, status, and roles in society and the family” (p. 136). He
also shows how differential patterns of military service for men and women
lead to differences in subsequent occupational prestige based in part on social
networks established in the army. I found the linkages between urbanization,
residential concentration and nation building to be particularly interesting.
Israel’s pervasive ethnic residential segregation is, on the one hand, “a positive
statement about the value of family, economic, and neighborhood networks,”
but is also associated with a concentration in poverty among Asian and African
neighborhoods. This ethnic residential clustering is linked with nation building
in that it reinforces the cohesion of ethnic communities.
After reading a pre-publication copy of the manuscript over the summer, I
decided to assign the book for a course on Israeli culture and society I teach at
the University of Southern California. This decision helped my course receive
credit as a sociology elective in addition to Judaic studies and Middle East
studies. I consider myself knowledgeable on the subject of Israel, but I came
away knowing much more. In some instances this was in the form of research
and trends with which I was not familiar. In other instances I was pushed to
think about the familiar in new and deeper ways, which is why I appreciated
reading this book.
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© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
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