A Rising Tide? Mixed families in Israel

Presentation

Over the past few years, scholars have shown a growing interest in mixed families and mixedness. This is reflected in numerous articles and books as well as in special issues of prominent journals devoted to the topic, such as The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2015, Ethnicities in 2016, and Recherches Familiales in 2017.

Quite surprisingly, and despite the growing interest in this issue, there is no agreed-upon scholarly definition of mixedness. A common definition of mixed families, however, is that they are constituted by unconventional and even forbidden marriage or by unions between individuals who belong to specific groups—such as race, nation, class, ethnicity, religion, or some combination of these—that are constructed, depending on the time, the place, and the context, as “different” and socially “distant.” Accordingly, it is also assumed that by their very nature mixed families threaten the social order and collective identities by challenging the prevailing endogamous marital norms and by creating new spaces that disrupt social hierarchies. Moreover, by forming bridges between different groups in society they redraw social boundaries that divide or demarcate individuals and groups and indeed may change societal mainstreams. Also, it is generally agreed that these “barrier-breaking” families are becoming more common, for not only are they part of the globalization process and its intense migration flows, they are also boosted by the continual development of knowledge exchange, global tourism, sports and art, transport, communication, and medical technologies; the emergence of transnational marriage markets; and the growing diversification of family forms.¹

At the current stage of research, it can be argued that the growing body of scholarship already provides us with pivotal insights into the ways that mixedness is formed, lived, contested, fought against, or celebrated, in terms of both the individual and society. It can also be assumed that in the future this research trend will continue, because, as scholars argue,² academia itself has a substantial role to play in conceptualizing these processes.

Yet, despite the ever-growing number of families that are mixed across national, cultural, racial, and religious boundaries worldwide, it appears that most of the existing research and theorizing on mixedness relates to Western countries, with a special emphasis on English-speaking, North American, and British contexts, where most of the research is carried out. Consequently, research on mixedness in the global village is not always referred to. In particular, not enough attention is paid to mixed families constituted in those parts of the world that are defined as deeply divided societies, such as, for instance, Bosnia, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, Pakistan, Serbia, Lebanon, and Israel. In those societies, divisions are severe enough to threaten the very existence or nature of the state—a fact that is often reflected in civil violence.³ Moreover, as scholars emphasize, even in “peaceful” times the fear of violence continues to shape attitudes, entrenching divisions in those societies that already lack consensus on their political institutions, while boundary making and maintaining are the stuff of everyday life. The chronic nature of the conflict in deeply divided societies affects all aspects of life, for the conflict is often formative in the social, cultural, and economic milieus of inhabitants and shapes how life is lived.⁴ Not surprisingly, against this background the family institution is seen as a site of struggle in the service of the gendered collective (be it racial, national, ethnic, religious, class, or some combination of these); mixed families are often perceived as a threat to the collective’s cultural and demographic survival; and women are variously reified as central to the collective’s reproduction or growth.⁵ Nonetheless, even in such societies, as argued by Jeroen Smits,⁶ the rate of marriage between members of different groups can be used as an indicator of the degree of positive or negative social contact, or ‘‘social distance,’’ between those groups, for even in deeply divided societies, boundaries can be fluid and permeable.⁷

Israel belongs to the category of deeply divided societies, that is, societies in which internal divisions are severe enough to threaten the very existence or nature of the state. This categorization is linked to the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has a permanent impact on Israeli society and upon every aspect of individual and collective life. In this constellation, the Palestinian citizens of Israel are often perceived as a “fifth column” that is undermining the state from within, while their status depends on a political calculation that takes into account the territory of the Jewish state, its demographic makeup, and its relations with the Palestinian Authority and the surrounding Arab states.⁸ Thus, in order to analyze mixed families in Israel, we must also refer to the scholarship that addresses the issue of mixedness in deeply divided societies and must point to some specific scenarios that appear in polarized societies. In doing so, we hope to develop a more comprehensive understanding of mixedness in Israel and to add some insights to the research on mixed families. Our presentation is structured as follows: In the first section, Mixed Families: Problematization, we address (some of) the main issues regarding mixed families that arise in the prevailing literature. In doing so, we also address the perspectives that the research on mixedness in divided societies adds to our understanding of this social phenomenon. In the second section, Mixed families in Israel: Contextualization, we briefly describe the Israeli context, that is, a society severely fissured along ethno-religious lines, and then present the papers included in this special issue.

Mixed families: Problematization

As described above, mixed families are “mixed” because they transgress collective norms and symbolic boundaries. This is related to the fact that by challenging the prevailing marital norms and group affiliations in a society, mixed families disrupt the social hierarchies and question the social order and collective identities based on gender, race, nation, class, ethnicity, religion, or some combination of these.⁹ In keeping with this approach, and to contextualize mixedness in Israel, we refer to five main issues that are specifically relevant to Israeli scripts. First, we address laws and informal sanctions and point to how they affect mixed families. Then we explore how mixedness occurs and is lived and negotiated by mixed couples; from that perspective we also address the question of integration. Following that, we consider how the arts, the media, and civil society contribute to shaping the social and legal climate. Next, we look at the second generation of mixed families. Here we ask how mixed children and young adults are able to navigate their complex world with regard to inclusion and identity building, amid different social dynamics and power relations. Finally, we turn to the issue of marital dissolution and ask how and to what extent mixedness is connected to it.

Laws and informal sanctions

As argued by Daphna Hacker,¹⁰ one of the main functions of the law is to guide behavior. This, of course, applies to mixed families, which are affected, and have been in the past, by the existence of formal sanctions such as anti-miscegenation laws and other forms of legal constraints.¹¹ In addition, informal sanctions such as (violent) rejection by the community are, and have been, frequently associated with mixedness.¹²

With regard to legal constraints, it is no surprise that in the past anti-miscegenation laws in countries such as Germany, the United States, and South Africa were elaborated and enforced by the state to maintain hierarchical boundaries by prohibiting the mixing of different groups through marriage, cohabitation, sexual relations, or procreation.¹³ Generally speaking, however, today mixedness is not combated by anti-miscegenation laws, but rather, even in Western democracies, mostly by citizenship laws.¹⁴ This is particularly the case with regard to mixedness and immigration. In that context, laws allocate differential rights and duties to different categories of migrants, along different axes, notably gender, nationality and/or religion, age, and socioeconomic status. By way of illustration, we can refer to Beate Collet’s 2017 analysis of the various means by which European immigration policies interfere with transnational couples’ citizenship, especially with regard to transnational couples in which one partner resides in his/her European home country and the other comes from a non-European country.¹⁵

With regard to informal sanctions by the community, it appears that even in the absence of any official law, the fear of mixedness may be articulated and manifested culturally on an everyday basis. Generally, this is done by disseminating the ideology of the degeneration of the “superior” and/or “pure” culture, religion, race, or ethnicity—or some combination of these—and by pathologizing mixed families and their members, thus legitimizing a variety of informal sanctions such as societal disapproval, denigration, exclusion, or discrimination, or some combination of these.¹⁶ In some deeply divided societies, it appears that even in “nonviolent” times informal sanctions may include physical violence against mixed families, and sometimes this may even lead to the killing of their members, as Hastings Donnan reported with regard to Northern Ireland.¹⁷

Laws and informal sanctions pertaining to mixed families must also be understood through the various ways they perpetuate the gender order. Because women birth the collective and reproduce its culture as well as its symbolic and legal borders,¹⁸ laws and sanctions regarding mixed families often subordinate women to men to maintain the gendered social order. For example, women’s legal subordination may be the consequence of restrictive legislation, especially citizenship legislation that serves to discourage women from intermarrying.¹⁹ Legal subordination of women may also reflect the governing of family relations by religious law, as is the case in societies, whether deeply divided or not, in which family laws are based on Sharia (Islamic law). In such societies, and this often includes Muslim communities in the West, the laws for Muslim women who wish to marry outside the faith are more restrictive than the laws governing Muslim men wishing to marry a non-Muslim. So are the informal sanctions: Women who marry non-Muslims may be ostracized by their community and even killed (by family members) in accordance with “honor killing” codes.²⁰ In addition, legal subordination of women may also be the consequence of the absence of any legislation, as is the case in the global mail-order-bride market. As Yuliya Zabyelina explains in her analysis of unregulated Eastern European internet marriage agencies, the prospective brides, driven by poverty, unemployment, and media images of Western lifestyles, “accept risky offers of marriage, hoping to find a better life. Although some mail-order brides finally find the opportunities they seek, many turn out to be the victims of violence, sexual exploitation, and even human trafficking.”²¹

Nevertheless, and despite what has been presented above, mixed marriages may sometimes be promoted by legal decisions. For instance, Betty de Hart points to the fact that in the Netherlands, despite strong historical and current opposition to dual citizenship, an exception is now legally made for mixed families.²² The rationale for allowing dual citizenship to migrants, once citizenship is obtained, is not only that mixed families have ties to more than one country but also that migrants married to Dutch citizens integrate more easily into Dutch society.

Also, the relationship between laws and mixedness is often characterized by fluidity. As Catherine Therrien emphasizes in her research on mixedness in Morocco, a gap usually exists between legal texts, the way people adapt to them, and the reality of mixed couples.²³ This is the case even when the law appears to be rigid, because quite often the individuals in mixed couples and the people who have the power to enforce the law know how to exercise flexibility through informal behavioral codes. This legal fluidity also exists in deeply divided societies, in which (some) individuals dare to defy powerful social norms and sanctions and choose life partners from across the divides.²⁴

Informal sanctions are also characterized by fluidity. In Western societies, where mixed families are increasingly common and the family institution has been transformed by processes of individualization, it is generally argued that “attitudes toward interracial relationships have relaxed.”²⁵ This may imply that negative sanctions are becoming less frequent—except for the discourses and actions of populist, far right, or fundamentalist movements.²⁶ Some fluidity is also part and parcel of deeply divided societies. Thus, accommodation for mixedness may exist and reduce negative informal community sanctions. Actually, one may argue that in daily life multiple sites of pragmatic transactions, coexistence, and sometimes even tolerance may be found.²⁷

Mixed couples: “Lived mixedness”

As has been widely observed, mixedness is constantly constructed through various social encounters and various kinds of interactions.²⁸ From this perspective, an extensive literature relates the experiences of different social actors and allows us a better grasp of their daily lives.

Intermarriage

One of the issues amply discussed is the occurrence of intermarriage. As argued, intermarriage is more likely to happen among individuals with similar sociodemographic characteristics (age, education, income) who have the opportunity to experience encounters and social interactions in micro-publics²⁹ such as residences, schools, workplaces, youth centers, sports teams, and university campuses, or some combination of these, because such spaces enable the mingling of diverse groups in everyday life. Though encounters and social interactions do not necessarily erode prejudices—and sometimes lead to the exact opposite—this category of individuals, who have more interracial/interreligious/interethnic contacts, is more apt to commit to intermarriage. This also holds for conflict-affected societies in which semi-public spaces, or at least some of them, are used on average in a neutral and nonconfrontational manner, “[and where] oppositional communities deploy civility, dissembling and exceptions to reduce tension and enhance quality of life.”³⁰

Family reaction to intermarriage

Another issue widely discussed in academic research is how family members react to the crossing of boundaries. Mixed couples are considered “different” and arouse some degree of disapproval because they forge new boundaries for the community and impose attitudes and concrete behaviors that are not necessarily acceptable to their family members. The reactions and relationships created have a pivotal impact on “lived mixedness.” However, these reactions vary enormously and include a warm welcome, curiosity, rejection, threats of violence, or actual violence, often depending on the status of the “new member” as determined by such factors as gender, race, ethnicity, country of origin, religion, caste, or class. Moreover, relationships themselves are not fixed and may change over time. As Therrien explains in analyzing relationships between mixed couples and their families in Morocco, “There can be periods of discomfort, coldness, conflicts, a distance created, a break (definitive or temporary), a reconciliation, resuming contact, regret about initial reactions, and eventually harmonious relationships.”³¹ It seems that, on the whole, this script also fits mixed couples in deeply divided societies. The main difference may be related to the higher frequency of rejection, threats of violence, or actual violence, even in “quiet” times.³²

Strategies adopted by mixed couples

The various strategies adopted by mixed couples in negotiating and going about their daily lives are another important subject of research. Because cultures, religions, and races in contact are rarely positioned at the same level of social prestige, mixed couples’ strategies and negotiations are anchored in the inequality of status between the partners. In fact, as in the case of gendered hierarchies, inequality stems from the fact that one of the partners belongs to a majority and the other belongs to a minority or is an immigrant. On this unequal basis, partners must constantly make various and delicate choices such as the best place for the couple to live, the allocation of roles and responsibilities, the language spoken at home, the religious orientation (which may or may not include conversion), the relations with their respective families and friends, the number of children (if any), the names of the children, the cultural transmission to the children, and the culinary/musical/furniture style at home.³³ Beate Collet suggests an analytical model based on three main patterns that help clarify the different strategies adopted by mixed couples. The first pattern consists of the minority partner’s adopting the dominant or majority culture and keeping the attributes and practices of his or her original culture to a minimum. At the other extreme, the second pattern implies that the majority partner slips into the culture of the minority spouse. The third pattern is a quest for balanced relationships, organized around reciprocal and equal exchanges, thus building new spaces situated outside pre-established molds. Collet also reminds us that, except for the third pattern, “whatever her status […], a woman will tend to adjust by adapting to the man’s culture, whether he is part of the majority or of a minority.”³⁴

Mixed couples who live in deeply divided societies may be much more limited in their negotiations, choices, and strategies.³⁵ In conflict-affected societies, everyday acts and decisions have the potential to create difficulties and generate friction, because social practices are part of creating and reinforcing collective (racial, national, religious, class, or some combination of these) boundaries, often at the price of individual autonomy. Thus, mixed couples must navigate very carefully to avoid conjugal conflict as well as familial reprobation and/or social exclusion, especially if they wish to create their own private (egalitarian) space.

Mixedness and integration

Another aspect of mixedness that is also one of the most widely addressed in the literature links mixedness and integration, that is, being a full and equal member of the society, and as Richard Alba and Nancy Foner emphasize, “coming to feel like an ‘insider’ and being treated like one.”³⁶ The existence of marriages and unions between members of different groups in society has long been considered the marker of integration, the ultimate indicator of a group’s integration into the wider society, and a sign of the diminishing barriers to social interactions across groups.³⁷ Moreover, as Matthijs Kalmijn notes,

A mixed marriage connects the families and social networks of the two partners, which will lead to more interethnic contact and possibly more mutual acceptance and lower ethnic prejudice in the two origin groups. High rates of intermarriage also muddle official definitions of ethnic groups in a society, which in turn may lead to a lower salience of ethnic or racial boundaries.³⁸

With regard to the Yugoslav wars in the last decade of the twentieth century, Smits even found that ethnic groups with relatively high rates of intermarriage were less involved in armed combat against each other.³⁹

However, several studies question the direct link between intermarriage and integration and point to the complexity and multidirectional nature of this connection.⁴⁰ Some studies have pointed to the fact that integration (economic, cultural, social, or legal) precedes intermarriage, whereas other studies have pointed to the opposite, that is, that intermarriage comes first and then results in integration and the individual’s sense of belonging. Other researchers have argued that in many social contexts, in both Western countries and deeply divided societies, the mainstream society into which minorities and immigrants are expected to integrate is increasingly difficult to identify, because these societies are multicultural and diverse, and because deeply divided societies, at least, are adversarial. Moreover, as Collet argues, mixedness may make the couple’s difference from the mainstream society even more salient, especially when the majority partner adopts the culture of the migrant or minority spouse.⁴¹ Thus, we may conclude that the link between intermarriage and integration is not always palpable⁴² and that therefore there is a need for more research that will also take into account the individual narratives of integration, identity, and belonging.

The arts, the media, and civil society

Because the arts, the media, and civil society contribute to the social and legal climate regarding mixed families—that is, the acceptance or lack thereof shown to mixed families and their members—they constitute another issue that is now on the mixedness research agenda. According to studies that explore how the arts and mainstream media relate to mixedness in Western societies, it appears that in the second decade of the twenty-first century these cultural fields contribute to the legal and societal acceptance of mixedness. Generally speaking, they tend to challenge negative constructions of mixed families and to depict mixed intimacies as legitimate and as part and parcel of the ongoing global societal transformation.⁴³ The same can be said of studies that refer to civil society organizations, which, by deconstructing laws and/or populist discourses, promote the rights of mixed couples and sometimes even succeed in influencing political decisions.⁴⁴ However, the situation is quite different in deeply divided societies. There the cultural and media discourses about mixedness are not yet on the academic agenda, at least as far as publications in English or French are concerned, with a few exceptions: Some research mentions how mixedness is reflected in the arts, though it is not the main focus, as in Tania El Khoury’s paper on Lebanese film,⁴⁵ and other studies relate (briefly) to the role of mainstream media in promoting mutual tolerance in South Africa⁴⁶ and Bosnia.⁴⁷ The same can be said with reference to studies that relate to civil organizations in defense of mixed families. Accordingly, for the moment at least, it is difficult to evaluate the impact of the arts, the media, and civil society on the issue of mixedness in deeply divided societies. However, to understand this issue better, one must also consider social media. For example, Fiaz Hussain and Bushra Qureshi describe the use of social media to affect policy making in Pakistan, and this includes debates about transgender persons and honor killing.⁴⁸ So it may well be that debates about mixedness already appear or will soon appear on these platforms. In other words, in the future, to grasp the legal and social climate in deeply divided societies, that is, the acceptance of mixedness or lack thereof, analysis of social media must also be included.

The second generation

Research on mixed children is now a growing part of the academic literature on mixedness, exploring how children’s mixed origins shape their lives and their identities.⁴⁹ Though relatively little has been documented regarding mixed children, various studies in recent years display important insights into their experiences. One of these insights concerns their status and achievements, pointing to the fact that mixed children are generally caught between different mechanisms of integration and stigmatization. Consequently, they stand in between, that is, between children who belong to the majority and children who belong to minorities or who come from migrant families. Nonetheless, it seems that the effects of intermarriage on children are more positive for children of higher-status backgrounds than for children from lower-status backgrounds, especially on the social and economic dimensions of integration.⁵⁰ Another insight highlights the question of agency. In that context, researchers analyze the degree to which individuals can determine their identities and choose their affiliations and the degree to which they must accept particular categories assigned to them by dominant groups. Accordingly, some studies point to how the descendants of mixed couples develop multiple, hyphenated, or mixed identities.⁵¹ Other studies report what Dan Rodriguez-Garcia terms an “identity mismatch,” which occurs when the self-identification of the individual and the externally assigned identification do not coincide.⁵² One example consists of children born to one African-American parent and one white parent, who tend to self-identify as mixed but are viewed as black. As Alba and Foner explain regarding this configuration in the United States, “[The children] find that they are often seen as black only, underscoring the continued stigma attached to African ancestry in the United States and suggesting that the ‘one-drop rule’ is not altogether a relic of the past.”⁵³

A third insight pertains to the union of individuals who are the children of intermarried couples. It appears that focusing on the case of mixed children and their partners enables us to address important questions about generational change, multiple axes of identity, difference, and commonality, and points to the necessity of reconsidering how to conceptualize mixedness.⁵⁴

It seems that this research, which emphasizes agency and choice, is only partially adapted to mixed children who live in deeply divided societies, that is “[who] live in a polarized social context where they belong to both—or neither—of the polar categories.”⁵⁵ Actually, mixed children in conflict-affected societies have more difficulty in determining their identity (or identities), especially in troubled times, when they may be the first to be rejected by both sides. Their difficulty with regard to agency and self-definition increases in such societies that have a patrilineal system, where children inherit their group identity and status only from their father, irrespective of their mother, and are categorized only according to their father’s designated identity.⁵⁶ Obviously, further research is needed to construct a more comprehensive understanding of this very complex issue.

Marital dissolution

Although there is a growing number of studies on mixedness, much less is known about marital dissolution of mixed marriages and its causes. Overall, according to current scholarship, mixed couples have higher rates of divorce, related to specific challenges faced by these couples in comparison to endogamous couples.⁵⁷ Among these challenges is the fact that intermarriage does not necessarily imply renunciation of the partners’ different beliefs and attitudes, including mutual racist prejudices and stereotypes, a fact that can result in conflict and, sometimes, marital dissolution. Another challenge may be the lack of support from friends, colleagues, and family. In this context, the rejection of the intermarriage by the parents appears to be a crucial factor explaining marital dissolution. Social discrimination, isolation, and marginalization may be viewed as other factors fueling spousal conflicts that may lead to divorce.

In deeply divided societies, however, marital dissolution is not always an individual and familial matter. It may also be a collective matter that mobilizes collective identities and involves the different communities, challenging the fragile inter-community bridges that may have been built, generally through families, friends, and neighbors.⁵⁸ In addition, when outbreaks of identity-based violence occur, when radical projects derive their legitimacy by focusing on “moral and racial/religious/ethnic purity,” marital dissolution—through divorce or killing of a partner—is imposed on mixed couples from above, as was the case not only in Nazi Germany but also in Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia.⁵⁹

Before addressing the issue of mixed families in Israel, it is important to mention some of the topics that have not been addressed in this brief overview. Among these topics, and because our focus was only on heterosexual families, is mixed LGBT families. Likewise, mixed dating, mixed cohabiting couples, mixed living-apart-together families, and mixed stepfamilies are also topics that have not been addressed. The same is true of mixed multigenerational families, mixedness and adoption, mixedness and assisted reproductive technologies or violence in the mixed families. We hope that these topics and many others will be addressed in the near future, advancing the scholarship on mixedness from the global South and the global North.

Mixed families in Israel: Contextualization

As we have seen, raising the question of “who intermarries with whom” is a challenging question everywhere, for it means exploring different experiences of barrier-breaking together with various elaborations of (disruptive) new spaces. Raising the question of “who intermarries with whom” in Israel is all the more challenging, because, as argued above, the population of Israel—a small country with nearly 8,300,000 inhabitants⁶⁰—is deeply divided. As often happens in such societies, the deepest division is both national and religious, because the national conflict is also framed as a religious one and is fueled by religious discourses.⁶¹ Thus we can speak of an ethno-religious divide between Israeli Jews, who constitute 75% of the population, and Israeli Palestinians, who comprise 21% of Israel’s inhabitants and adhere to various religions: 17.5% Muslims, 1.5% Druze, and 2% Christians. The remaining 4% of the population is classified as “Other,” signifying an absence of religious affiliation.⁶² Deep divides are also seen among the religious and ethnic subgroups that make up Israeli society.⁶³ Thus, it seems that to grasp the issue of “who intermarries with whom” in Israel one must take several considerations into account.

1. The ethno-religious divide explains the fact that in Israel, which is also defined as a Jewish and democratic state, family laws (governing marriage and divorce) are under the sole jurisdiction of religious tribunals for all citizens of Israel: Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Druze.⁶⁴ On the one hand, for most Jewish citizens of Israel, whether religiously observant or not, marriage conducted in accordance with Halakha (Jewish religious law) is an essential component of the integrity of the Jewish people and its historical continuity and survival, in Israel and the Diaspora. Similarly, religious family laws are viewed by Israeli Muslims and Druze as reinforcing the Arabs’ historical identity and as a bulwark against Westernization, which is increasingly perceived as a threat in the age of globalization. In addition, the (religious) laws serve as a bridge to the outside world—that is, to the Christian and Muslim worlds, with which the Palestinian communities have ramified connections, on both the personal and collective levels.⁶⁵ On the other hand, and perhaps most important, family laws act as key institutions in preventing mixed marriages between Jews and non-Jews, including labor migrants and asylum seekers⁶⁶ and between the different ethnoreligious groups among the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Israeli authorities do register as married, couples that have married abroad, regardless of the religion and gender of the spouses. Likewise, Israeli law has almost equalized the status of heterosexual and same-sex cohabitant partners to the status of married couples, whatever their religion. This leaves religious laws as a dividing line between the Jewish and Palestinian citizens and between the different religious groups among the Palestinians in Israel. This legal-religious situation actually expresses the will of most Israelis, so that there is no significant support for civil marriage or meaningful opposition to the existing legal-religious domination.⁶⁷ An illustration of this argument, which refers especially to interfaith marriage, may be found in the report published by the Pew Research Center:

[In 2015], among Jews, 97% say they would not be comfortable with their child someday marrying a Muslim, and 89% say this about their child ever marrying a Christian. Similarly, 82% of Muslims, 88% of Christians and 87% of Druze say they would be uncomfortable with the idea of their child marrying a Jew. Among Arabs, there is also uneasiness with marriage between religious groups. Three-quarters of Muslims say they are not too or not at all comfortable with the idea of intermarriage with a Christian. Similarly, most Christians (80%) say they would be uncomfortable with their child marrying a Muslim. Druze are about equally opposed to the idea of one of their children marrying a Jew (87% uncomfortable), a Muslim (85%) or a Christian (87%).⁶⁸

• (2) The ethno-religious divide in Israel also explains the fact that mixedness is perceived differently by different ethno-religious groups. Mixed couples are often assessed in terms of numerical losses and gains for one side or the other, that is, either as upsetting the demographic order and reducing the political advantage of the dominant group⁶⁹ or the other way around, as a factor that strengthens the culturally and demographically dominant group and reinforces it politically.⁷⁰ For instance, intermarriage between Ashkenazi Jews (of European origin) and Mizrahi Jews (of Oriental origin) is perceived as very different from intermarriage between a Jewish woman and an Arab man, which Yohai Hakak defines euphemistically as an “undesirable relationship.”⁷¹ The former is a Jewish interethnic marriage, which implements the Zionist ethos of the “melting pot”—once the official government doctrine of assimilating/Westernizing the Jewish immigrants of various cultures and heritages—and such marriages are generally more or less tolerated, whatever the class, gender, religious, or familial clashes these interethnic marriages encompass.⁷² The latter is an ethnoreligious intermarriage that is often constructed as a political act that endangers the integrity and survival of the Jewish people in its own country.⁷³ Thus, these important differences must be taken into account in the analysis of mixedness in Israel, so as to better apprehend the different ways mixedness is constructed and lived.

• (3) Exploring individual experience and agency allows us to discover how mixed couples succeed even in deeply divided societies to create their own trajectories and self-identities.⁷⁴ In that context, the reception and social acceptance by family, friends, colleagues, and the community have an important impact: They enable the couple to retain some autonomy and decide which elements to emphasize in their daily life, as explained by Hisham Moktal Abu-Rayya’s research on Christian-European wives of Arabs in Israel.⁷⁵ In other words, to understand the lived life of mixed couples in conflict-affected societies, the importance of agency and social acceptance cannot be overstated.⁷⁶

On the basis of these assumptions, the papers included in this special issue refer to the five topics outlined above. In the first section, Law and Demography, Assaf Shapira’s paper, “Israel’s Citizenship Policy towards Family Immigrants: Developments and Implications,” examines changes in Israel’s citizenship policy toward family immigrants since the early 1990s, when it became a country of (non -Jewish) immigration, and the implications of these changes for mixed families. In this paper, Shapira also argues that Ian S. Lustick’s explanation⁷⁷—that this policy works on the principle of the “non-Arab” character of the state and its majority population—has remained an effective tool for understanding Israel’s current citizenship policy. In the second paper, “EthnoReligious Intermarriage in Israel: An Exploration of the 2008 Census,” Sergio Della Pergolla points out that ethnoreligious intermarriage in Israel—with an emphasis on the Jewish–non-Jewish dyad—is still an infrequent phenomenon that has been largely imported from abroad through the immigration of couples that married in their countries of origin. Moreover, regarding the Jewish majority, he also notes that although the absolute level of heterogamous couples among Jews in Israel is not high compared to that among Jews in other locations worldwide, it is also not negligible—about 4% of Jewish husbands, 3% of Jewish wives, and 6% of all existing couples with at least one Jewish spouse in 2008—a level similar to that of the United States in the period immediately after World War II. The author also scrutinizes the statistical category of “Other,” – mostly Jews from the former Soviet Union whom Jewish law (Halakha) does not recognize as Jews – and he calls for unifying the Jewish religious allegiances of mixed couples before or after marriage by adopting a state policy of inclusion-strengthening. This call echoes some of the conclusions of Netanel Fisher in his work on conversion to Judaism in Israel.⁷⁸

The second section, Lived Mixedness among Different Ethnoreligious Groups, includes Dani Kranz’s paper, “German, Non-Jewish Spousal and Partner Migrants in Israel: The Normalization of Germanness and the Dominance of Jewishness,” and Maha Sabbah’s research, “Ethnoreligious Mixed Marriages among Palestinian Women and Jewish Men in Israel: Negotiating the Breaking of Barriers.” Both papers deal with topics that are not dealt with in the literature, at least from the perspective of the “non-Jewish spouse.” Kranz’s paper relates to German non-Jewish partner/spousal migrants who, notwithstanding the unique history of Israel and Germany, actually are part of Israel’s wider, if stratified, non-Jewish migrant population—that is, a group that is subject to restrictive policies and that potentially shares the experience of being non-Jewish incomers. According to her analysis, in that process, social acceptance and family reactions are pivotal. For Sabbah, as she explains in her paper, the social change that has taken place among Palestinian women in Israel in the last twenty years, especially in the field of higher education, has improved their socioeconomic status and their social independence. This in turn has increased various interactions with Jewish society and has sometimes also led to intermarriage between Christian or Muslim women and Jewish men. In this case, too, social acceptance, and especially the reactions of the couple’s families, were pivotal in facilitating these barrier-breaking marriages.

The Media and Civil Society are topics referred to in the third section. Indeed, mixed families are debated in the public discourse in Israel, that is in the media, the art and civil society organizations-much more so than in academic research. On Israeli television, for example, the very popular sitcom Sabri Maranan⁷⁹ celebrates Jewish interethnic (Mizrahi-Ashkenazi) families, while another quite popular one, Nebsu,⁸⁰ looks positively at a Jewish interracial couple (a Jewish man of Ethiopian origin married to an Ashkenazi woman) – both sitcoms being faithful to the melting pot ethos. However, when it comes to relations between a Jewish woman and a Palestinian man, as in the novel Gader Khaya (Borderlife), by Dorit Rabinyan,⁸¹ mixedness becomes a political issue that involves the Education Ministry, school principals, and teachers associations.⁸² This complex approach appears also in the case of NGOs and civil society: Some organizations are on the front line for the defense of mixed families;⁸³ others construct mixed families, that is, Jewish–non-Jewish dyads, especially when one partner in that dyad is an Arab, as an imminent danger, a deadly threat.⁸⁴ The papers presented in this section are intended to help in deciphering part of the public discourse as it appears in the media and in civil society. Thus, in her paper “Sleeping with the ‘Enemy’: Mixed Marriages in the Israeli Media,” Sylvie Fogiel-Bijaoui analyzes how the mainstream media in Israel, increasingly shaped by social media, construct a story about a mixed marriage between an Israeli woman, born Jewish and converted to Islam, and a Muslim-Arab man who is a citizen of Israel. According to her analysis, mixedness appears in some media with “the human rights approach” and in others with “the threat approach,” and in both approaches the impact of social media is apparent. Consequently, she also points to the need to focus on the reciprocal relations between social and traditional media, to better grasp the media discourse and the social climate they fuel. With the same purpose—deciphering the various aspects of the public discourse in Israel—Ari Engelberg’s paper, “Fighting Intermarriage in the Holy Land: Lehava and Israeli Ethno-Nationalism,” as an initial foray into this field, explores the Lehava organization and its discourse. Lehava, an extreme-right Israeli religious organization, is dedicated to fighting intermarriage and especially to preventing Arab men from courting Jewish women. According to Ari Engelberg’s analysis, local elements, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Israeli ethnic and class relations, play an important role in shaping Lehava’s strategy and discourse. He also adds that it could be appropriate to compare Lehava to similar cases occurring in the context of postcolonial national and religious struggles.

With some exceptions,⁸⁵ research on offspring of mixed families is not abundant in Israel. The fourth section, The New Second Generation: Identity Formation in Mixed Families, addresses this topic, focusing on the self-defined identities of children of mixed families and on the extent to which they challenge hegemonic constructions. Thus, in her paper, “On the Fault Line: Israelis of Mixed Ethnicity,” which deals with children of mixed Ashkenazi–Mizrahi couples, Talia Sagiv takes as her starting point Bhabha’s ideas about hybridity⁸⁶ in order to deconstruct assumptions about social dichotomies and categories. She argues that mixed families, and the “half-and-half” Israelis they produce, challenge the dichotomous dialogue concerning Mizrahiness and Ashkenaziness in Israel, and at the same time maintain and preserve it. She also concludes that this movement, between resistance and submission to labels, though a subversive act, frequently ends in surrender to society’s demand to choose and decide whether one is Mizrahi or Ashkenazi. In this sense, she notes, the Zionist dream of forging a new, hybrid (Jewish) Israeli identity has not been fulfilled. Submission and/or resistance to labels and bureaucratic categorizations are also themes that appear in Julia Lerner’s paper, “‘Mixed Jew—It’s Like Being Half Pregnant’: Russian-Jewish Mixedness in the Bureaucratic Encounter with the Jewish State.” Her article presents an ethnographic picture of the encounter between the state national bureaucracy and Russian immigrants of mixed Jewish origin, that is, immigrants from the former Soviet Union whose fathers or one of their grandparents is or was Jewish, so that they are Jewish according to the Law of Return but not according to Halakha.⁸⁷ To that end, she describes how “mixed Jews” cope with the secular Jewish state and its religious principles. She also discusses what can be learned from the story of Russian immigrants of mixed Jewish origin about the tracks of ethno-national belonging, presumed and promoted by the work of bureaucratic classification.

The last section, Marital Dissolution, deals with a topic that in the context of mixedness in Israel remains largely understudied, with only a few exceptions.⁸⁸ In this section, no internal and external challenges faced by mixed couples are analyzed; instead, patterns of divorce are explored, and light is shed on the socio-legal implications of the dissolution of mixed marriages. Thus, in the paper of Amit Kaplan and Anat Herbst-Debby, “Mixed-Ethnicity Marriages and Marital Dissolution in Israel,” the relation between mixed-ethnicity couples and marital dissolution is examined. Their findings indicate that, when defined broadly, mixed-ethnicity couples have higher divorce risks than endogamous couples. However, comparing mixed and non-mixed couples in terms of specific ethnic categories reveals a more complex picture. Only in a few cases do mixed-ethnicity couples have higher divorce risks than endogamous couples of the respective origin groups. Moreover, some endogamous couples are more prone to divorce than others. Following this rich exploration, Ido Shahar’s paper, “When ‘Mixed’ Marriages Fall Apart: A Socio-Legal Perspective,” analyzes two legal cases of marital dissolution, decided by the Israeli Sharia and civil courts, involving a marriage between a Muslim-Arab man and a Christian-Arab woman who converted to Islam. It shows how such dissolution transforms the coalitions that were formed when the marital union was established and illustrates how the ex-spouses’ families and communities are drawn into the custody struggles following the divorce. It also argues that ex-spouses who converted to their partners’ religion—more often women than men—might be disadvantaged by their conversion.

Final comments

Of course, only very few topics are discussed in this special issue and many more are not included, such as intermarriage among Ethiopian Jews.⁸⁹ Thus, more research is needed to contribute to our understanding of mixedness, mixed families and mixed children, in Israel as in the Global Village. In this theoretical process, it could be useful to have some input from deeply divided societies, for example, research that (re)integrates the impact of religious norms, beliefs, and expectations in the analysis of mixed families’ lives in the Western world; produces academic knowledge on the social construction of mixed families and mixed children by extreme-right/fundamentalist associations or movements; or scrutinizes the social media and their impact on the social climate and social acceptance of mixed families. It remains that at this stage, the question mark in our title may be deleted. Mixedness, in its various meanings, is definitely a (slow) rising tide in Israel as it is worldwide. But questions remain regarding how and to what extent the human rights of mixed families and mixed children—in the various senses of the term—will be respected, and regarding the role of academia in that process.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all the people who have helped in bringing this special issue to publication. Their support, encouragement and commitment have been more than precious in making this ambitious project come to fruition.

I would like to thank Prof. Meir Chazan and Prof Motti Golani, the former and the present heads of the Chaim Weizmann institute for the study of Zionism and Israel at Tel-Aviv University, for their immediate and warm support. A special thank goes to Prof. Orit Rozin, from the Department of Jewish History at Tel-Aviv University, who has always a gentle word to say, with a big smile upon her face. I am greatly indebted to Prof. Anita Shapira and Prof. Derek Penslar, the editors of The Journal of Israeli History, whose exceptionally cordial approach made things happen. Their continuing faith in this academic venture made our collaboration both pleasant and efficient.

Profound gratitude goes also to Naama Scheffer and to Nimrod Lin, the former and the present managing editors, for their excellent and patient work on editing the manuscripts, and to the anonymous reviewers of the articles. I am also most thankful to my colleagues and friends, who were part of a tumultuous and remarkable research group on mixedness in Israel at the Chaim Weizmann institute for the study of Zionism and Israel at Tel-Aviv University, where, during the years 2015–2016, the project has been based, thanks to Prof. Meir Chazan’s invaluable cooperation. My colleagues and friends, the authors, have come a long way with me, sparing neither time nor effort to bring this project to completion, while their commitment, their talent and their cutting edge scholarship made it possible. Finally, I wish to add a personal note: I wish to thank Prof. Beate Collet (Sorbonne) and Dr. Anne Unterreiner (Sciences Po), who organized in November 2015 an international conference on “New research challenges on intermarriage and mixedness in Europe and beyond” to which I participated. This outstanding conference ended on the same day terrorist attacks took place in Paris. The fact that the conference’s organizers, participants and we, here, in Israel, go on working on human rights, mixedness and families, is our answer to the despair we all felt at that time, and some seeds of hope for the future.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Collet and Unterreiner, “Introduction”; Osanami Törngren, Irastorza, and Song, “Conceptual Framework”; Rodriguez-Garcia, “Intermarriage and Integration.”

2. Caballero, “Mixing Race”; Therrien, En voyage; Varro, “Les ‘couples mixtes.’”

3. Smooha and Hanf, “Diverse Modes.”

4. Mac Ginty, “Everyday Social Practices”; McDoom, Horizontal Inequality.

5. Donnan, “Mixed Marriage”; Hilker, “Rwanda’s ‘Hutsi’”; Mac Ginty, “Everyday Social Practices”; McDoom, Horizontal Inequality; Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation.

6. Smits, “Ethnic Intermarriage.”

7. Mac Ginty, “Everyday Social Practices.”

8. Al-Haj, “Multiculturalism”; Jabareen, “Constitution Building”; Lin, “Arithmetic of Rights”; Pew Research Center, Israel’s Religiously Divided Society, 2016. http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2016/03/Israel-Survey-Full-Report.pdf; Saban, “Minority Rights”; Smooha and Hanf, “Diverse Modes.”

9. For a pioneering work on this issue, see Merton, “Intermarriage and the Social Structure.”

10. Hacker, Legalized Families, 60.

11. de Hart, “Regulating Mixed Marriages”; Jacobson et al., “Inter-Racial Marriages”; Hill, “Loving Lessons”; Triger, “Gendered Racial Formation.”

12. Collet and Unterreiner, “Introduction”; Conrad, Thorn in the Eye; Hilker, “Rwanda’s ‘Hutsi’”; McDoom, Horizontal Inequality; Osanami Törngren, Irastorza, and Song, “Conceptual Framework”; Rodriguez-Garcia, “Intermarriage and Integration.”

13. Chakravarty, “Inter-Ethnic Marriages”; Triger, “Gendered Racial Formation.”

14. Collet, “European Immigration Policies”; de Hart, “Regulating Mixed Marriages; Odasso, “L’action des groupes militants”; Osanami Törngren, Irastorza, and Song, “Conceptual Framework.”

15. Collet, “European Immigration Policies.”

16. Caballero, “Mixing Race”; Osanami Törngren, Irastorza, and Song, “Conceptual Framework.”

17. Donnan, “Mixed Marriage.”

18. Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation.

19. de Hart, “Regulating Mixed Marriages”; van Walsum and Spijkerboer, Women and Immigration Law.

20. “Honor killing” as part of a shame-and-honor tribal culture is by no mean only a Muslim configuration. Its features can be found in many societies and countries, including India. See Chesler, A Family Conspiracy. See also Hussain and Qureshi, “Social Media”; Leeman, “Interfaith Marriage”; McDoom, Horizontal Inequality; Streiff-Fénart, “Sauver la face.”

21. Zabyelina, “Mail-Order Brides,” 87.

22. de Hart, “Regulating Mixed Marriages,” 182–183.

23. Therrien, “Trajectories of Mixed Couples”; Therrien, En voyage.

24. Kanafani-Zahar, “Pluralisme relationnel”; Mac Ginty, “Everyday Social Practices”; McDoom, Horizontal Inequality.

25. Song, “What Constitutes Intermarriage,” 95.

26. Al-Ali and Yuval-Davis, “Introduction”; Cowden and Saghal, “Why Fundamentalism?”; Engelberg, this volume.

27. Conrad, Thorn in the Eye; Kanafani-Zahar, “Pluralisme relationnel”; Mac Ginty, “Everyday Social Practices”; McDoom, Horizontal Inequality.

28. Collet, “Intermarriage to Conjugal Mixedness”; Conrad, Thorn in the Eye; Donnan, “Mixed Marriage”; Jacobson et al., Inter-Racial Marriages”; Hilker, “Rwanda’s ‘Hutsi’”; Kanafani-Zahar, “Pluralisme relationnel”; Mac Ginty, “Everyday Social Practices”; Song, “What Constitutes Intermarriage”; Therrien, “Trajectories of Mixed Couples”; Unterreiner, “Enfants de couples mixtes.”

29. According to Peterson, “Living with Difference,” semi-public spaces impose stricter rules regarding behavior than do purely public spaces.

30. Mac Ginty, “Everyday Social Practices,” 5.

31. Therrien, “Trajectories of Mixed Couples,” 137.

32. Donnan, “Mixed Marriage”; Jacobson et al, “Inter-Racial Marriages”; Kanafani-Zahar, “Pluralisme relationnel.”

33. Caballero, Edwards, and Puthussery, Parenting “Mixed” Children; Collet, “From Intermarriage to Conjugal Mixedness”; Le Gall and Meintel, “Cultural and Identity Transmission”; Therrien, “Trajectories of Mixed Couples”; Therrien, En voyage.

34. Collet, “Intermarriage to Conjugal Mixedness,” 145.

35. Conrad, Thorn in the Eye; Donnan, “Mixed Marriage”; Jacobson et al. “Inter-Racial Marriages”; Hilker, “Rwanda’s ‘Hutsi’”; Kanafani-Zahar, “Pluralisme relationnel”; McDoom, Horizontal Inequality 2016.

36. Alba and Foner, “Mixed Unions,” 39. See also Barack Fishman, Double or Nothing?; Bensimon-Donath and Lautman, Un mariage; Kalmijn, “Children of Intermarriage”; Osanami Törngren, Irastorza, and Song, “Conceptual Framework”; Rodriguez-Garcia, “Intermarriage and Integration”; Smits, “Ethnic Intermarriage.”

37. Alba and Foner, “Mixed Unions”; Hilker, “Rwanda’s ‘Hutsi’”; Rodriguez-Garcia, “Intermarriage and Integration”; Smits, “Ethnic Intermarriage”; Song, “What Constitutes Intermarriage.”

38. Kalmijn, “Children of Intermarriage,” 247.

39. Smits, “Ethnic Intermarriage.”

40. Rodriguez-Garcia, “Intermarriage and Integration.”

41. Collet, “From Intermarriage to Conjugal Mixedness.”

42. Rodriguez-Garcia, “Intermarriage and Integration.”

43. Asava, Mixed Race Cinemas; Caballero and Aspinall, Mixed Race Britain.

44. Collet, “European Immigration Policies”; Odasso 2017.

45. Tania El Khoury, “Les cinémas libanais.”

46. Jacobson et al., “Inter-Racial Marriages.”

47. Conrad, Thorn in the Eye.

48. Hussain and Qureshi, “Social Media.”

49. Alba and Foner, “Mixed Unions”; Conrad, Thorn in the Eye; Hilker, “Rwanda’s ‘Hutsi’”; Kalmijn, “Children of Intermarriage”; Song, “What Constitutes Intermarriage”; Unterreiner, “Enfants de couples mixtes.”

50. Kalmijn, “Children of Intermarriage.”

51. Song, “What Constitutes Intermarriage”; Unterreiner, “Enfants de couples mixtes.”

52. Rodriguez-Garcia, “Intermarriage and Integration,” 16.

53. Alba and Foner, “Mixed Unions,” 50.

54. Song, “What Constitutes Intermarriage.”

55. Hilker, “Rwanda’s ‘Hutsi,’”, 230.

56. Conrad, Thorn in the Eye; Donnan, “Mixed Marriage”; Hilker, “Rwanda’s ‘Hutsi’”; McDoom, Horizontal Inequality, 2016.

57. Bratter and King, “’Will It Last?’”; Osanami Törngren, Irastorza, and Song, “Conceptual Framework”; Rodriguez-Garcia, “Intermarriage and Integration”; Wright, Rosato, and O’Reilly, “Influence of Heterogamy.”

58. Chakravarty, “Inter-Ethnic Marriages”; Conrad, Thorn in the Eye; Donnan, “Mixed Marriage”; Hilker, “Rwanda’s ‘Hutsi’”; Wright, Rosato, and O’Reilly, “Influence of Heterogamy.”

59. Chakravarty, “Inter-Ethnic Marriages”; Conrad, Thorn in the Eye; Hilker, “Rwanda’s ‘Hutsi.’”

60. Central Bureau of Statistics, 2016, table 2.2 for the year 2014.

61. Conrad, Thorn in the Eye; Donnan, “Mixed Marriage”; Kanafani-Zahar, “Pluralisme relationnel”; McDoom, Horizontal Inequality.

62. Central Bureau of Statistics, 2016, tables 2.1 and 2.2 for the year 2014.

63. Fogiel-Bijaoui, “Families in Israel”; Pew Research Center, Israel’s Religiously Divided Society, 2016. http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2016/03/Israel-Survey-Full-Report.pdf

64. Hacker, ““Inter-Religious Marriages”; Karayanni, “Two Concepts”; Triger, “Freedom from Religion”; Triger, “Jewish and Democratic.”.”

65. Abu-Rayya, “Acculturation”; Halabi, “Faith, Honor, Land”; Karayanni, “Two Concepts.”

66. Nathan, OECD Expert Group. Hacker, “From the Moabite Ruth to Norly the Filipino”.

67. Bystrov, “Religion, Demography and Attitudes”; Fisher, “Fragmentary Theory”; Fogiel-Bijaoui, “Families in Israel”; Fogiel-Bijaoui, “The Spousal Covenant”; Fogiel-Bijaoui, “Transmitting the Nation.”

68. Pew Research Center, Israel’s Religiously Divided Society, 30.

69. These arguments are now heard in the context of immigration from the Global South to the Global North (Hacker, Legalized Families).

70. See also Donnan, “Mixed Marriage”; Hilker, “Rwanda’s ‘Hutsi’”; McDoom, Horizontal Inequality.

71. Hakak, “’Undesirable Relationships.’”

72. Benjamin and Barash, “’He Thought I Would Be’”; Lomsky-Feder and Leibovitz, “Inter-Ethnic Encounters”; Okun, “Insight and Ethnic Flux”; Peres and Schrift, “Intermarriage and Interethnic Relations”; Yuchtman-Yaar, “Continuity and Change.”

73. Burton, “An Assimilating Majority?”; Hakak, “’Undesirable Relationships.’”

74. Conrad, Thorn in the Eye; Mac Ginty, “Everyday Social Practices.”

75. Abu-Rayya, “Ethnic Identity.”

76. Remennick, “Exploring Intercultural Relationships.”

77. Lustick, “Israel as Non-Arab.”

78. Fisher, Challenge of Conversion.

79. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabri_Maranan_(TV_series)

80. https://www.timesofisrael.com/groundbreaking-tv-comedy-introduces-israelis-to-their-ethiopian-neighbors/

81. Rabinyan, (Gader Khaya) Borderlife.

82. Kashti. “Bennett Backs School Ban on Novel About Jewish-Arab Love Affair.” Haaretz, December 31, 2015. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-bennett-backs-school-ban-on-novel-1.5384559

83. Kemp and Kfir, “Wanted Workers”; Irit Rosenblum. New Family. n.d. http://www.newfamily.org.il/en/

84. Burton, “An Assimilating Majority?”; Hakak, “’Undesirable Relationships.’”

85. Abu-Rayya, “Ethnic Identity”; Okun and Khait-Marelly, “Demographic Behaviour”; Sagiv, On the Fault Line; Stier and Shavit, “Two Decades”; Yogev and Jamshy, “Children of Interethnic Marriage.”

86. Bhabha, The Location of Culture.

87. Fogiel-Bijaoui, “The Spousal Covenant”; Prashizky and Remennick, “’Strangers.’”

88. Lavee and Krivosh, “Marital Stability.”

89. Benezer, “Israeli ‘Mixed Families.’”