ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the human and fallible decision-makers and opinion-formers that influence the attitudes and actions of the government regarding Jewish ethnicity. It deals with the relations between the Israeli state and Jewish ethnicity, and with the transformation of Israeli attitudes and expectations regarding it. Ethnically specific social and cultural patterns are being maintained and developed in Israel, despite the original ideology, the policies, and the alarms of critics of the government and establishment. Social workers, psychologists, educators, sociologists, specialists of all kinds turned to the problems of absorption. The new mass immigration was divided almost equally into Jews coming from post-World War II Europe and those coming from North Africa and Asia, especially from Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and India. Zionism is the nationalist movement of the Jews that grew out of the experiences of European Jews in the nineteenth century.
