'The boys': work, identity and the constructing of class experience among immigrant boys from Asian and African Countries in Young Israel

The article seeks to recreate the inner world, and especially the work experience of Israeli boys who attended workshops in vocational schools, youth centers and boarding schools in the 1960s, most of them immigrants from Asian and African countries in an attempt to answer the following question: Did vocational work contribute to an initial formation of some kind of a working experience which could later constitute a basis for the construction of a working-class awareness? We shall try to answer this question with the help of original sources written by the boys themselves, in which they describe their experiences. An examination of these sources (problematic though they may be, and I will touch upon this question in the article) does not reveal traces of feelings of discrimination or deprivation, nor does it show an awareness of discriminatory tracking, at least from the boys' perspective. On the contrary, one can distinguish in these sources a process of building a professional, and perhaps class-related identity, not founded upon a sense of ethnic discrimination but rather upon the experience of learning and working in the workshops combined with other cultural experiences outside them.