Constructing a Classed Community in Kiryat Eilon (H-300) in Holon: A "Popular-Class" Community on Mizrahi "Building Blocks"

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines H-300 or Kiryat Eilon: a neighborhood in the city of Holon that exemplifies Mizrahi mobility into the new middle class. Following Cohen and Leon’s seminal insights on the Mizrahi middle class, the paper analyses life stories and other daily practices of H-300 residents in order to assess their (ethno-)class identities. The picture seems to be far more complex than the one described by Leon and Cohen. Mobile Mizrahi personal experience and collective memory are indeed dominant but what they construct is not a “Mizrahi” ethno-class space but a more open and integrated “popular middle class” community. Mizrahi collective and individual experience serve as a “quarry” from which cultural building blocks are produced. The findings suggest the emergence of an all-Israeli “popular middle class” subject, distinct from the upper-middle-class layers, leading the popular classes echelons.