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  • The American Dream—For Men Only? Gender, Immigration, and the Assimilation of Israelis in the United States
  • Suzanne Vromen
The American Dream—For Men Only? Gender, Immigration, and the Assimilation of Israelis in the United States, by Lilach Lev Ari. El Paso: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2008. 184 pp. $62.00.

This book is part of a series entitled The New Americans, Recent Immigration and American Society, edited by Steven J. Gold and Rubén G. Rumbaut, whose aim is to explore recent immigration and the changes it brings in the United States.

This volume, written by a sociologist, focuses on three aspects of Israeli immigration: motives for emigration, assimilation understood as economic, social, and cultural integration into American society, and attitudes towards an eventual return to Israel. The novelty of the study is the author's interest in examining gender differences among Israelis as they immigrate to and assimilate in the U.S.A. Here is where Lev Ari makes a genuine scholarly contribution as she "proposes a new research approach, perceiving migration as a lengthy development of gender relations affected by social, economic and cultural factors" (p. 31).

The analysis is based on a survey designed by the author of a representative sample of Israeli couples in the United States. This sample is composed mainly of native-born Israeli citizens registered at Israeli consulates and living in the metropolitan areas of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Miami. One can question why New York with the largest population of Israelis was not included in the survey. The study was carried out in the years 1998 to 2000, [End Page 147] and included only couples who had immigrated at least three years earlier. It is a quantitative study, with a few open-ended questions.

Theoretically the study adopts a transnational perspective that emphasizes the processes by which migrants sustain multiple links between their society of origin and the host society. Their many involvements cross geographic, cultural and political borders as they migrate and afterwards. On the individual and familial level this dynamic approach highlights how resources can be combined, and on the macro-level it shows the interplay of the economic, social, and political structures affecting the migrants' lives.

What were the motives for migration and whose decision was it? Both men and women migrated for economic reasons, a desire for higher education, professional advancement, a higher standard of living. However, economic advancement was a less important motive for women with lower education than for those who were highly educated. Young women without children in Israel, with little education and from non-egalitarian families, reported that they agreed to emigrate for family reasons. Generally, but not always, the Israelis reported that the decision to migrate was shared. In non-egalitarian couples that decision was clearly made by men.

Economic, social, and cultural assimilation were interconnected. Economically successful immigrants were also socially integrated and very satisfied with their lives in the United States, and vice versa. However, while both men and women benefited from upward social mobility, men advanced economically significantly more. Socially and culturally there were no significant gender differences. The family status of women did not change and the former Israeli gender norms persisted. Only women of high economic status attained a more egalitarian role allocation.

Ethnic origin as related to gender mattered. Sephardi men and women migrated with less education and less occupational prestige than the Ashkenazi. In the United States the gap between Sephardi and Ashkenazi men increased, but it decreased for the women. The author did not explain cogently the reasons for this gender difference. She speculated that possibly the absorbing society perceives the migrants as a single Israeli group, ignores their ethnic origins, and minimizes this latter factor. However, then she needed to explain what accounts for the increasing gap between the men.

With respect to cultural assimilation, the level of Jewish identity felt by Israelis in the U.S. is the same for men and women. It grows stronger as the number of years in the U.S. increases. Fewer women than men describe themselves as American, and Sephardi women are mainly the ones maintaining a strong Israeli identity. The study also indicates...

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