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De-coupling or remaining closely coupled to ‘home’: educational strategies around identity-making and advantage of Israeli global middle-class families in London
Author(s): Yemini, Miri; Maxwell, Claire
Date: 2018
Topics: Class, Globalisation, Jewish Identity, Jewish Women, Main Topic: Identity and Community, Motherhood, Interviews, Israeli Expatriates
Abstract: This article makes an empirical contribution to the study of the global middle class (GMC), and sheds light on the complex relationships that are constructed and sustained by these families with their ‘home nation’ through their educational strategies. Drawing on an inductive analysis of 20 in-depth interviews with Israeli migrant mothers in the United Kingdom who constitute a specific fraction of the GMC, this article examines families’ identity constructions and how these shape their educational practices. The participants constitute a growing phenomenon – highly educated, mobile middle-class families who live and move around the world, and position themselves using global frames of references. We emphasise how country of origin acts as a symbolic object in the cultivation of their children’s identity and how different types of attachment to ‘home nation’ are perceived as offering valuable capital for the GMC. The article therefore contributes much-needed empirical analyses on education strategies within the GMC, and challenges the suggestion that critical to the definition of the GMC is that they are ‘rootless’.
Krav maga and chicken soup: symbolic Jewish identities within and beyond the Jewish school
Author(s): Samson, Maxim G. M.
Date: 2019
Topics: Main Topic: Education, Jewish Schools, Jewish Identity, Religious Belief, Religious Observance and Practice, Schools: Seconday / High Schools
Abstract: Faith schools may play an important role in reproducing ethnoreligious identities, yet research into Jewish schools has tended to overlook students’ personalised conceptualisations of faith. Instead, it has regularly utilised restrictive ‘indicators’ of ethnoreligious practice in order to gauge these institutions’ effectiveness in ‘strengthening’ Jewish identity and thus mitigating assimilation. In response, this article explores the ways in which students at a pluralist Jewish school negotiated and (re)shaped their Jewishness, and thus lived their identities in personally meaningful ways. Students articulated ‘symbolic’ forms of Jewishness, rooted in inclusive and often stereotypical cultural symbols rather than regular religious practice, and personalised their identities through the school’s amenability to diverse manifestations of faith. Consequently, the research illustrates the value of including young people’s perspectives of faith and faith schooling, with implications for understandings of ethnoreligious identity and practice in spaces beyond traditional religious sites such as places of worship.