ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to illustrate how processes of social change politicized these cleavages and thereby created ripe political opportunities for new political players, such as Shas and the National Outlook Movement (NOM). The sociocultural hierarchy between the Ashkenazim and Sephardim was politicized when the two groups came into closer contact following attempts at school integration in the 1970s. The politicization of the Ashkenazi-Sephardi cleavage in Israel and the center-periphery cleavage in Turkey created ripe political opportunities for religiopolitical actors, who successfully transformed those grievances to political capital through constructing appropriate frames. The purposes of state-religion arrangements, there were three significant institutionalized political trends in the Yishuv: Labor Zionism, Ultra-Orthodoxy and Religious Zionism. Understanding the historical evolution of state-religion arrangements and sociocultural cleavages in a country is key to any discussion of contemporary religiopolitical mobilization. The sociocultural cleavage between Ashkenazim and Sephardim had important repercussions for the education system.
