"No one likes that judgmental look like you are a terrorist." Sensorial encounters with the Muslim Other in Amsterdam

Often framed in the public discourse as Europe's ultimate Other, Muslims have been heftily debated and vastly problematised by politicians, pundits, and public intellectuals as unwanted immigrants, part of a bad diversity, problematic, violent, refusals of modernity, secularism, and freedom. Thinking through the body as a phenomenal lived body, we explore Othering as a set of visual, auditory, olfactory, and haptic encounters. Employing an urban ethnography on everyday lived experiences of young Muslims in Amsterdam, the paper investigates multiple modes through which Othering is sensed, lived, and felt through the body

Pride and prejudice: using ethnic-sounding names and inter-ethnic marriages to identify labor market discrimination

labour markets discriminate against workers with particular ethnic-sounding names? We use non-random sorting into interethnic marriage and salient differences between Sephardic and Ashkenazi surnames to evaluate the causal impact of Sephardic affiliation on wages. Using the 1995 Israeli Census, we estimate the effect of a Sephardic sounding surname on wages. We first compare the wages of Israeli Jewish males born to Sephardic fathers and Ashkenazi mothers (SA), who are more likely to carry a Sephardic surname, with the wages of Israeli Jewish males born to Ashkenazi fathers and Sephardic mothers (AS). We find that Israeli labor markets discriminate based on perceived ethnicity: SA workers earn significantly less than their AS counterparts. We then exploit the custom of women to adopt their husbands’ surnames to disentangle actual ethnicity from the ethnicity perceived by the market. Consistent with ethnic discrimination based on surnames, we find that it is father-in-law’s ethnicity – rather than father’s ethnicity – that shapes female wage rates. Finally, we find that labor markets discriminate based on surname only when those names provide additional information about ethnicity. When ethnicity can be discerned from skin tone, surnames do not provide additional explanatory power with respect to wages

Arab Youth Involvement in Delinquent Behaviors: Exploring Hirschi’s Social Bond Theory from a Qualitative Perspective

Peer reviewed: TrueThe current study is based on Travis Hirschi’s social bond theory, arguing that the debut of delinquent behavior is a result of the weakening of the ties that bind people to society. According to Hirschi’s social bond theory, all youth have the potential to commit delinquent behaviors, but they are kept under control by their relationships with friends, parents, neighbors, teachers, and employers. These factors could serve as protective factors from involvement in crimes. Most studies of social bond theory have been conducted in Western countries among male adolescents using quantitative methods, including cross-cultural approaches. However, the ability of social bond theory to explain youth involvement in delinquency in non-Western cultures, especially conservative and authoritarian cultures such as the Arab one, has not been widely examined. This study aims to fill this gap by exploring youth involvement in delinquency using qualitative research on Palestinian-Arab youth in Israel. Addressing youth delinquency within the unique sociocultural, economic, and political situation of the Arab minority in Israel will help us examine the theory’s applicability to the explanation of deviant behavior in a variety of contexts.</jats:p

Israeli Child Policy and Outcomes

This report presents an overview of child policy in Israel. It covers a wide range of services and policies that are intended to further the wellbeing of children in Israel or that have an impact upon the wellbeing of children, including the fields of education, health, cash transfers, taxation and personal social services. In addition, the labour market and policies linked to work and family reconciliation are discussed. The report also offers a brief overview of the context in which these policies and services developed, and their consequences, with a special emphasis on child poverty. This is due to the unusually high level of poverty among children in Israel. The report concludes with a discussion of the factors that have an impact upon the degree of effectiveness of child policies in Israel or, in the case of child poverty, upon their limited effectiveness. This discussion is followed by a number of policy recommendations intended to help policies and services to improve children’s wellbeing in Israeli society. Ce rapport présente un aperçu des politiques de l’enfant en Israël. Il couvre une large gamme de services et de politiques qui sont destinées à augmenter ou à influencer le bien-être des enfants en Israël, aussi bien dans les domaines éducatifs, de la santé, des transferts d’argent, des impôts et des services sociaux destinés aux personnes. Le rapport discute en outre les politiques visant à réconcilier le travail et la vie de famille. Il offre aussi un bref aperçu du contexte dans lequel ces politiques et services se sont développés et leurs conséquences, en mettant en particulier l’accent sur la pauvreté des enfants qui atteint un niveau exceptionnel dans le pays. Le rapport se termine par une discussion des facteurs qui influent sur l’efficacité des politiques destinés aux enfants en Israël ou, dans le cas de la pauvreté des enfants, sur leur efficacité limitée. Un certain nombre de recommandations suivent sur les politiques et les services destinés à améliorer le bien-être des enfants dans la société israélienne.education, health work and labour reconciliation, social policy, Israel, child policy