Demographic behaviour of adults of mixed ethnic ancestry: Jews in Israel

Abstract

We examine demographic behaviour of Jewish adults of mixed ethnic ancestry, relative to those of the two major Jewish ethnic groups in Israel. Research has shown that for measures of socioeconomic status, such as educational attainment, outcomes for multi-ethnics are in between – and very close to the middle of – those associated with the two major ethnic groups. We find that, in contrast, the marriage and fertility behaviour of multi-ethnic adults is nearly identical to that of the more socially advantaged ethnic group and quite distinct from that of the less advantaged ethnic group. Through multivariate analyses, we explore factors associated with families of origin, including socioeconomic status and cultural indicators of family norms, which are associated with these patterns. We discuss interpretations of our findings.

Keywords:

• Ethnicity
• Israel
• intermarriage
• education
• marriage
• fertility

Acknowledgements

The research reported here was made possible in part by a grant from the Spencer Foundation. Funding was also provided by the Shaine Center for Research in Social Sciences and the Harvey L. Silbert Center for Israel Studies, both of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The authors thank Yinon Cohen, Dov Friedlander, Judah Matras and Guy Stecklov for comments on an earlier version of the paper, and Aziza Khazzoom for helpful discussions relating to the research. The data presented, the statements made and the views expressed are solely the responsibility of the authors.

Notes

1. For the sake of brevity, throughout the paper we refer to ethnic or racial intermarriage as ethnic intermarriage, and to ethnic or racial groups as ethnic groups.

2. Because rates of intermarriage between the Jewish and minority Arab populations of Israel remain strikingly low, we limit our analyses to adults with two Jewish parents.

3. We refer throughout the paper to Jewish ‘multi-ethnics’, although the term ‘bi-ethnics’ could be appropriate, as we refer to the children of inter-ethnic unions from what are now considered the two major ancestry groups. For the sake of generality, we prefer the term multi-ethnics.

4. See Okun and Khait-Marelly (2006) for details.

5. Because of the large number of inter-group comparisons, Bonferroni tests of statistical significance were employed in all multiple comparisons.

6. Women were considered as having high fertility if they were aged 22–4 and had at least one child, or aged 25–9 and had at least two children, or aged over 30 and had at least three children. Results obtained by considering women in separate age groups showed substantively similar patterns.

7. Israeli Census data provide information on children ever born for women only.

8. In all cases, we used robust standard errors to compute tests of statistical significance. Robust standard errors correct for clustering that occurs because siblings in the various subsamples have the same set of parents.

9. In this and all multivariate analyses reported, tests for multicollinearity were performed and results indicated that multicollinearity did not lead to problems in model estimation.

10. The Wald test statistic, which asymptotically has a chi-square distribution, is used to test hypotheses of the form c(θ) = 0 in regression models estimated by maximum likelihood techniques (Greene 2000, p. 152).

11. In analogous models not shown here, where Ashkenazi women are the reference group, there are no statistically significant differences between Ashkenazi women and multi-ethnic women (p = 0.17).