Social Inequality in Israel

Like the US, Israel is a nation of immigrants. Israel additionally shares with the US vast economic, ethnic/racial and gender gaps, which are shaped and are being shaped by the demographic diversity characterizing its society. The course will provide a comparative framework for analyzing social inequality in Israel. We will start by reviewing essential concepts and theories in the study of social stratification. We will then review the main cleavages characterizing Israeli society, while comparing them to gaps in other advances societies and particularly the US. We will focus on class, gender and ethnicity as the main distinctions and will examine their implications for differences in life chances in several domains across the life course. We will conclude with a discussion of possible scenarios for change, which are relevant to both Israel and the US. Throughout the course, we will study critical thinking techniques and will use them for analyzing issues that are central for the analysis of social inequality in Israel and elsewhere.