De-coupling or remaining closely coupled to ‘home’: educational strategies around identity-making and advantage of Israeli global middle-class families in London

Abstract

This article makes an empirical contribution to the study of the global middle class (GMC), and sheds light on the complex relationships that are constructed and sustained by these families with their ‘home nation’ through their educational strategies. Drawing on an inductive analysis of 20 in-depth interviews with Israeli migrant mothers in the United Kingdom who constitute a specific fraction of the GMC, this article examines families’ identity constructions and how these shape their educational practices. The participants constitute a growing phenomenon – highly educated, mobile middle-class families who live and move around the world, and position themselves using global frames of references. We emphasise how country of origin acts as a symbolic object in the cultivation of their children’s identity and how different types of attachment to ‘home nation’ are perceived as offering valuable capital for the GMC. The article therefore contributes much-needed empirical analyses on education strategies within the GMC, and challenges the suggestion that critical to the definition of the GMC is that they are ‘rootless’.

Keywords:

• Global middle classes
• cultivation strategies
• national identity

Notes

1. The Jewish presence in Palestinian territories is a result of the 1967 war between Israel and neighbouring Arab nations. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains the most explosive issue and form of disruption  within Israel, and has led to significant cleavages within Israeli Jewish society over the future of those territories, the peace process and financial governance of the country (Zembylas and Bekerman 2011).

2. Colour-blindness is a frequently recurring phrase in our study, as a description of exposure and acceptance of difference. We acknowledge here that colour-blindness might be interpreted as a discriminative practice due to elimination of differences within society (Mizrachi 2012).