Multiculturalism or Assimilation?

“I am Israeli. I am from Russian culture. I love Israel. All of it is me and I want it to be together.” “The Yemenite culture is part of me.” “I’m black, I’m Ethiopian, I’m Jew, and I belong here.” With these words, The Ingathering, an episode of the Tkuma series, opens its tale of immigrant communities in Israel. An academic paper written six years later by the Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Haifa opens with “Israel belongs to a large category of societies built by European settlers and immigrants during the modern era.” Immediately, the two texts reveal the different lenses through which they look at the same issue. The Tkuma series focuses on people and individual stories; Sammy Smooha’s “Jewish Ethnicity in Israel: Symbolic or Real?” looks at the overall society, analyzing the state as a Western nation.
Though the two texts look through different lenses, they look at many of the same things. Below, I will address two themes central to both analyses: the melting pot and multiculturalism. First, though, I will look at a topic remarkably different between the two texts: ethnic violence.
The Ingathering opens with a scene from the Ethiopian blood riots. By showing the riots first, the episode speaks to how large a role ethnic violence seems to play in Israel. Smooha, contrarily, does not even mention the blood riots as an issue. This may be the result of his article’s later date. Smooha states that “the incessant Israeli-Arab conflict creates strong solidarity between all Jews in Israel” (51). His article came out just after the Second Intifada, when Palestinian violence was prominent. The Tkuma, on the other hand, came out in the late 90s, following a hopeful period in the peace process. I do not think it’s a coincidence that ethnic violence has seemed to be more prevalent when Israel faced less immediate external threats.
Regarding ethnic differences in Israel as a whole, the texts showcase two very distinct ideas about how various cultures and ethnicities should be integrated in a society: the idea of a melting pot, which both texts assert was the predominant ideal in Israel’s beginnings years, and multiculturalism, described by both texts as entering the society’s ideals later in the nation’s history. The two texts differ on how fully multiculturalism has come to replace the melting pot.
Tkuma uses the term “melting pot” to refer to the idea that immigrants should shed their old identities, forgetting their Diaspora life, including previous home and family values. Ben-Gurion thought immigrants should suppress where they came from, instead coming into the “Israeli reality.” Smooha uses the term “assimilation” to imply much the same thing: “For a long time successful absorption, adjustment, and integration of immigrants has been associated with assimilation. The newcomers are expected to discard their cultural heritage and ties with their country of origin and to completely assimilate into their new society” (47).
Multiculturalism, contrarily, refers to the idea that people are able to hold onto their previous identities while becoming loyal to a new group. The Ingathering speaks very proudly about the “cultural revolution” in 1977, when the Labor party fell to the Likud and the Oriental singers, Mizrahi artists, and immigrants writers that had been ignored for decades became prominent. Multiculturalism had “prevailed” and there was no longer a single model for what is “Israeli.” Smooha is much more cautious about asserting that multiculturalism won the day; rather, he believes that “immigrant groups cling to ethnic subcultures in addition to acquiring Israeli core culture” (57) due to discrimination and discomfort in their new society. Rather than true multiculturalism, Smooha insists that Israel has come to include three coexisting melting pots: one for Ashkenazi, one for Mizrahi, and one for mixed Jews. This is critically different than Tkuma’s claim that Israel has become a multicultural society.
Both texts end with a value placed on multiculturalism as opposed to assimilation, though The Ingathering does so much more tentatively. The episode closes with a diverse group of people singing about the beauty of the rainbow. But it voices a fear of this rainbow as well: “I think that we’ve established a state but we haven’t yet established a people.” “The last election proved we’re going back to the twelve tribes.” Reiterating his belief that multiculturalism has not become as prominent as The Ingathering suggests, Smooha asserts that Israel is currently “a tricultural society without multiculturalist ethos” (49), but perhaps it will one day be able to expand “ethnic ‘multi-sub-culturalism’…to a mild form of ethnic multiculturalism” (73).