ABSTRACT
The daughters of the Israeli-born generation, there are short-term alternatives to marriage. A critical difference between unmarried women and their mothers of the immigrant generation lies in formal education: in Yemen, Jewish women were illiterate and most of the immigrants in Israel received at most a few years of formal education; for daughters born in Israel education is compulsory up to the ninth grade. Yemeni girls of the Israeli-born generation thus have the chance to observe kibbutz parents and children interacting, usually in harmony. Yemeni daughters of the Israeli-born generation are like their Israeli peers, and indeed, parents readily blame the “self-interested” society in which children interact for producing selfish and ungrateful children. This brief discussion of the married Israeli-born generation suggests that they do not have an “immigrant experience”; in fact, like their unmarried peers, they are comfortably “Israeli.”
