Promises in the Promised Land: Mobility and Inequality in Israel (review)

Vol. 10, No.3 Spring 1992 149 factors have the cumulative effect of both irritating the reader and undermining the overall credibility of the study. Alexander Orbach Department of Religious Studies University of Pittsburgh Promises in the Promised Land: Mobility and Inequality in Israel, by Vered Kraus and Robert W. Hodge. Contributions in Sociology Series, Number 89. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990. 224 pp: $39.95. Since its establishment, the State of Israel has been characterized by major transformations in occupational achievement, educational attainment , and income levels among Jews and Arabs and the various ethnicreligious subpopulations within each community. Core issues associated with political ideologies, e~onomic policies, minority discrimination, immigration patterns, ethnic assimilation, and social inequality are linked in complex ways to the stratification of Israeli society. This monograph examines social mobility processes, ethnicity, and inequality in the State of Israel, using empirical data and applying models of stratification that have been used in other countries. The heart of the analysis is the statistical treatment of the 1974 Israel mobility survey. There are clear advantages to this data set, particularly the rich, detailed data obtained for a carefully designed national sample, even though much has happened to the economy and the politics of Israeli society since then. Social mobility and occupational attainment are treated in terms of their status and prestige dimensions, but the authors do not use the data to examine occupational networks, ethnic enclaves, labor market segmentation, or the household economy. The book begins with an overview of mobility research and a discussion of the bases of stratification. These are then placed in the context of changes in Israeli society and are followed by a discussion of the basic parameters of the stratification system in Israel. The core analysis begins in Chapter 4 with an examination of ethnic differentials in status attainment, followed by an investigation of the effects of immigration and socialization in Israel on social mobility and status attainment. Chapter 6 examines the role of economic opportunity, focusing on income levels of employees; the examination of culture and religion in the process of status 150 SHOFAR attainment is based on a comparison of Arabs and Jews in Israel. An important chapter on gender variation in occupational patterns concludes the analysis. There is a lack of coherence and integration in the monograph. Chapter 2 contains a review of regional differences in stratification, yet regional data on occupational opportunity are not presented nor are the links examined between educational opportunity and the ecological segregation of ethnic groups. Similarly, the literature on the importance of subjective factors in status attainment is reviewed but subsequently dropped in the analysis. The tabular materials are extensive but are not organized in a form that would be accessible to a diverse audience of social scientists. The treatment of ethnicity in Israel is disappointing. Ethnic variation is examined in the context of "cultural" or "primordial" factors, missing the importance of ethnic community, ethnic networks reinforced by marriage, and residential concentration. They show convincingly that ethnic origin per se (excluding other background characteristics) is of critical importance in shaping educational attainment and, in turn, in affecting occupational prestige. However, they do not deal with what it is about ethnic origins that enhances educational attainment. Is it the "values" associated with ethnic origin, the structure of ethnic community and access to educational opportunity, or the role of ethnic networks? What is the role of ethnic discrimination by those who control the school system, not only in terms of the structural discrimination indicated by occupational returns to education? Two broad Jewish ethnic groupsEuropean -Americans and Asian-Africans-are treated as if they were internally homogeneous and real communities. It would have been more convincing ifthe authors had demonstrated that the variation within ethnic groups was not greater than the differences between them. Their comparisons of Israeli ethnic groups to American immigrant groups are important, but may be distorted by their focus on European immigrants to the United States, missing the newer immigration to the United States, particularly Hispanics and Asians, which may have more relevance to the Israeli case. Surprisingly, there is no review of the extensive literature on the social mobility and assimilation of American...