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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter One. Introduction -- Chapter Two. Some Historical Background -- Chapter Three. Theoretical and Analytical Approaches to Ethnic Formation -- Chapter Four. Was Dichotomization Inevitable? -- Chapter Five. The Iraqi Paradox -- Chapter Six. How the Polish Peddler Became a German Intellectual -- Chapter Seven. Cultural Capital -- Chapter Eight. Residential Segregation and Economic Isolation: The Moroccan Paradox -- Chapter Nine. Into the Next Generation -- Chapter Ten. Perspectives on Ethnic Formation -- Appendices -- Endnotes -- Bibliography -- Index

AbstractIn Israel, Middle Eastern women are read as more "traditional" than European women. Yet life-story interviews conducted for this article reveal that elderly Polish Jewish women self-present as traditionally feminine—emphasizing home-centeredness, passivity, modesty, self-sacrifice, and delicateness—in ways a matched group of Iraqis do not. The article shows that these presentations are a by-product of how Poles assert Western identity. They claim Westernness by emphasizing continuity between their current behaviors and ideals and those they were taught in upper-class 1930s Europe, including feminine ideals. They see these behaviors as European and are inattentive to potential links with traditionalism. The discussion focuses on this finding in light of arguments that for women classified as Western, being on the "liberated" side of Orientalist contrasts can render gender invisible, enabling reproduction of gender inequality.

This paper explores the role that orientalism has played in shaping ethnic inequality among Jews in Israel. Earlier works usually explain ethnic exclusion as a function of Jewish life on Israeli territory. Here, however, exclusion is located within an earlier history of a Jewish encounter with orientalism and Western European colonialism. It is argued that prior to their immigration to Israel, Jews the world-over had been stigmatized as Oriental. Through a complex process, they accepted this stigma, and they arrived in Israel deeply invested in developing the new country as "western " and uncomfortable with anything identified as "eastern." It is the imperatives of this westernization "identity project" that account for the initial impetus to exclude Middle Eastern Jews, as well as non-Jewish Arabs, from emerging Israeli society. Viewing history from this perspective, ethnic cleavages in the Jewish world appear to have a historical stability and consistency that is at odds with the current focus on contingency and historical indeterminacy.