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A major sphere of action in which parents engage in the management of risk on behalf of their children—primarily through the gendered work of mothering—is that of education and schooling. This article explores the endeavors on the part of middle‐class Israeli mothers hailing from three social‐cultural groups—immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Palestinian Israelis, and Jewish Israelis—to manage the risks of schooling, as they perceive these to be. We ask: What do the women share, and how do they differ in their understandings of the failings of school and the risks attached? How do they choose to act in response to these perceived risks? In posing these questions, we seek to explore the ways in which the perception of risk, the experience of anxiety, and the navigation of schooling are shaped at the nexus of class, culture, and social positioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In its view of the contemporary world, social theory-and particularly its postmodern trends and proponents-attributes a dominant role to the realm of consumption and consumerism in shaping both individual lifeworlds and the system of social hierarchies as a whole. In this article, building on the case of middle-aged to late-middle-aged post-Soviet Jewish immigrants in contemporary Germany and illuminating a particular condition that I call 'condemned to consume,' I seek to reexamine this tendency to celebrate consumption and consumerism while downplaying and marginalizing realm of work and employment. I interconnect this examination with questions regarding the distribution of resources and the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Drawing on the 'condemned to consume' condition, I seek to claim that in affluent Western societies, which are able to provide relative material well-being or at least subsistence even to those at the margins, the main contours of inclusion and exclusion are not grounded primarily in one's ability to enter the realm of consumption but, rather, in one's ability to participate equally in the realm of work and employment. I underscore this idea by connecting lack of regular, meaningful employment with the concept of exclusive inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, I present the case of middle-age and late middle-age Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union to Germany, who are attempting to rebuild their employment biographies and construct identities of social worth and status in the new country but are constrained from entering formal salaried jobs and are thus pushed into alternative work schemes. I explore the everyday experiences of these subjects and analyze why the alternative work projects fail to provide an equal substitute for formal salaried employment. Highlighting work as a crucial resource for the construction of immigrants' self-perceptions, identities, and sense of belonging in a new country, I challenge claims about the diminishing meaning of work-in particular what is considered to be standard (long-term, salaried) employment-in the construction of identities and determination of social hierarchies in contemporary Western societies. [unemployment-underemployment, nonstandard work, immigrant experience, recognition, marginalization] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on a group of elderly immigrants from the former USSR living in Israel, this ethnographic study examines a matter that has received scant attention in the literature: immigration in old age and the complex relationship of older immigrants to the host country. Finding themselves in a situation of multiple marginality, these immigrants search for a means of belonging in their new country. In this particular group, a narrative of the past--that of their service in the Red Army during WWII--is the central symbolic resource mobilized in forging an identity of honor and esteem within the host society and in constructing their narrative of inclusion. By observing the present circumstances of the elderly immigrants' lives and exploring their pasts in light of sociopolitical factors and social memory frames of the former and host societies, the article demonstrates how a soldiering identity serves the veterans in restoring the rupture between past and present. The veterans' Victory Day parade held in Jerusalem, marking the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany, epitomizes their commemorative work and shows how their identity of belonging is constructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]