The Construction of Ethnic Subjects among the Israeli Middle Class

This dissertation deals with the construction of ethnic subjectivities of middle class adolescents who live in the social center of Israel. It examines the way public discourses and practices delineate and construct cultural differences between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi adolescents. The main argument of this work is that although middle class status serves as a social platform for solidarity and equality between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews, hegemonic cultural processes preserve and reproduce the ethnic hierarchical social order within this class in Israel. The analysis of depth interviews that were conducted with fifty-two middle class adolescents points to ways that ethnic boundaries are produced and stabilized. Public discourses and practices classify food, colors and spaces to Mizrahi and Ashkenazi sides, and create hierarchical relations between them. These acts shape adolescents' subjectivities as social boundaries that prevent these adolescents from revealing other potential characteristics, but also cause them to experience themselves as subordinated or superior when they encounter kinds of foods, colors, and spaces in their daily lives.;The analysis points also to the limits of the ethnic structure. Alternate experiences enable adolescents to choose to be Mizrahi or Ashkenazi according to their changing circumstances, to pass from one side of the ethnic boundary to the other, and to be both Mizrahi and Ashkenazi, and by this to undermine the essential, separated and dichotomous nature of ethnic categories.Still, this work finds the challenge of these phenomena to the ethnic social order to be limited. These acts that are experienced daily by almost every adolescent are actually reinforcing the ethnic boundaries themselves. This is because when adolescents are moving between their different characteristics, behaviors, and feelings, they experience this movement as a movement back and forth between discrete ethnicities, or between the two separate sides of the ethnic boundary. By this they confirm and reproduce the solidity of this boundary, or discrete ethnicity itself.;This structure, which limits the ways adolescents can transgress the ethnic boundary, reflects the centrality of ethnicity for national boundaries. Through the construction of Mizrahi Jewish identity as split between Jewish and Arab parts, the Mizrahi Jew is used as a buffer—literal and symbolic—between the Ashkenazi and "western" side, and the Palestinian and "eastern" side. Being a hybrid category and buffer zone that continues to create literal and cultural differences between east and west, Mizrahiness maintains the Israeli state legitimacy, and thus, the oppression of the Palestinians. Challenging ethnic boundaries is thus permitted as long as it follows the separation of the Mizrahi, backward side, and the Ashkenazi, modern side. This logic becomes even more explicit in the mechanisms of hybridization and purification that seek to stabilize the ethnic boundary. These mechanisms signify the intersection of Ashkenazi and Mizrahi sides as hybrid, and "send" them to their appropriate side of the ethnic boundary. Through this process, the "modern" Ashkenazi side and the "traditional" Mizrahi side are kept separated, and this, cultural separation of Ashkenazi and Mizrahi maintains the separation of the Jewish and the Palestinian sides at the level of the nation.;This analysis suggests that the rise of the Mizrahi Middle class and its geographic integration within the Ashkenazi Middle class transgress the ethnic social order that legitimizes and naturalizes the national social order. In order to maintain the state legitimacy and the domination of Ashkenazi Jews of Mizrahi Jews and mainly of Palestinians, public discourses and practices operate in order to produce, on the one hand the social ethnic boundaries, and on the other hand, to purify these continually blurred boundaries. These practices and discourses will continue in their operation as long as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will persist.