Ethnic Generations: Evolving Ethnic Perceptions among Dominant Groups

Abstract

This study suggests that generational affiliation is significant in explaining distinctive ethnic perceptions among dominant groups. In Israel, the Ashkenazim, Jews of European descent, constitute the political, social, and economic elite. In-depth interviews with two generations of Ashkenazim showed similarities in ethnic perceptions, but also revealed important differences among the two generations. For the older group, Ashkenaziness is both an ethnicity-free norm of Israeliness and a product of European culture performed by both the marking and unmarking of cultural boundaries. The younger group, on the other hand, self-identifies as Ashkenazi, but interprets Ashkenaziness as a thin ethnicity and primarily a position of social power. This evolution in ethnic perceptions is explained by the historical specific interface of three factors: dominant discursive orders of the era, state institutions and policies, and the encounter with the “other.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank the students from the seminar course, “Ashkenaziyut and the Sociology of Ethnicity in Israel,” who shared the interviews they conducted with me; Yuval Yonai, who allowed me to use interviews administered by his students; Yonit Lazerowitz and Ro'ee Parati, the research assistants who conducted most of the interviews for this study with intelligence and sensitivity. My thanks also to the members of the research group on “Identities in Israeli Society,” headed by the late Prof. S.N. Eisenstadt, and to Avi Shoshana, Edna Lomsky-Feder, and Ze'ev Shavit for their helpful comments. Finally, I want to thank the two editors of The Sociological Quarterly and three anonymous reviewers for their honest and constructive comments.

NOTES

Notes

¹ For a different approach to white identity in the Unites States, see Hartman, Gerteis, and Croll (2009).

² The translation of the Hebrew term “Ashkenaziyut” as Ashkenaziness is intended to preserve the meaning of an entire social category as opposed to individuals (much like the term “whiteness”). For other uses of the term, see, for example, Sasson-Levy (2013); Shohat (1997); Yadgar (2011).

³ The ultraorthodox Ashkenazi communities in contemporary Israel maintain, to a certain degree, the flavor of the Jewish religious communities of Central and Eastern Europe before World War II, but even in these communities Ashkenaziness has a new meaning in the context of the state of Israel.

⁴ Habitus, a term coined by Bourdieu (1977) refers to socialized norms or tendencies that guide behavior and thinking. Habitus is “the way society becomes deposited in persons in the form of lasting dispositions, or trained capacities and structured propensities to think, feel, and act in determinant ways, which then guide them” (Wacquant 2005:316). Thus, the particular contents of the habitus are the result of the objectification of social structure at the level of individual subjectivity.

⁵ According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, which categorizes ethnic groups based on the father's country of origin, Mizrahim constitute 50 percent of Jews born in Israel between 1983 and 1985, Ashkenazim constitute 30 percent; and mixed Mizrahi—Ashkenazi families 20 percent (Cohen 2006).

⁶ Sixteen of the interviews were conducted by students in a research seminar of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bar-Ilan University (2005 through 2007); and 17, by two research assistants during their graduate studies in sociology (2006 through 2007).

⁷ Edward Said argues in his book, Orientalism (1978), that Western European discourse constructed the orient through binary narratives, which represented the Orient using stereotypes such as week, primitive, lazy, or cunning. This discourse establishes “the East” as antithetical to “the West,” and serves to implicitly justify not only Western feelings of superiority, but also European and American colonial control over Eastern Asia and the Middle East.

⁸ Rosaldo introduced the concept “postcultural” to define cultural invisibility and codify how the denial of culture marks one's place on the high end of social hierarchy (Rosaldo 1989:198–9). See also Perry (2001).