Residential Segregation and Spatial Mobility in a New Immigrant Society: The Case of Israel

Noga Keidar, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Residential segregation and internal migration are studied as critical processes in understanding ethnic and race relations, but these processes are generally studied in relative isolation. In this article, we use the unique demographic context of Israel with its unparalleled levels of immigration, to examine how immigrant seniority and ethnicity shaped both patterns of residential segregation and spatial mobility. Our analysis focuses on the first cohort that was born around the establishment of Israel (1938-1958), and we use Theil's H to measure 'Eveness' in segregation across four rounds of the Israeli census from 1961 to 2008. Our findings illustrate how initially marked social-geographic boundaries were later erased. We suggest that the dynamics in Israel should be understood through the combined effects of seniority and ethnicity and we relate these findings and their implications to both classical and segment assimilation theory.