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After World War II, Israel and Germany adopted curiously similar policies of ethnic immigration, accepting as immigrants only putative co-ethnics. The objective of this article is to account for the main variation between the two cases, the resilience of Jewish immigration in Israel, and the demise of ethnic-German immigration in Germany. The very fact of divergent outcomes casts doubt on conventional accounts of ethnic immigration, which see the latter as deriving from an ethnic (as against civic) definition of nationhood. We point instead to the possibility of ‘liberal’ and ‘restrictive’ contention surrounding ethnic immigration, and argue that for historical and geopolitical reasons the political space for such contention has been more constricted in Israel than in Germany.

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This article analyses the formulation and implementation of a relatively new statutory programme of care services for dependent elderly people in Israel, which has as a basic characteristic the supply of services by non-state agencies. The analysis serves as a basis for an exploration of the effects of privatisation and the emergence of quasi-markets upon the functioning of the welfare state both as a benefits provider and as a major employer. In contrast to the perspectives that consider privatisation as leading to the weakening of the state in the welfare domain, we argue that through the transfer of services supplied by non-state agencies the state protects itself from demands and pressures from clients, while maintaining its control and regulation capabilities. This process decreases the state's accountability towards its citizens, enhancing in turn its autonomy. Privatisation policies do not imply, therefore, the dissolution of the welfare state, but rather the emergence of a new mode of state intervention.

The individualization, privatization and marketization of risk management represent a fundamental dimension of the financialization of everyday life. As individuals are required to engage with financial products and services as the main way of protecting themselves from risks and uncertainties, their economic welfare and security are construed as depending largely on their own financial decisions. Within this setting, the concept of financial literacy and accompanying practices of financial education have emerged as a prominent institutional field handling the formulation and communication of the attributes and dispositions that arguably constitute the proper financial actor. This article analyzes financial education programmes currently conducted by state agencies in Israel, examining the notions and principles they articulate when defining and explaining proper financial conduct. The study indicates that moral themes and categories occupy a salient place in the formulation of the character traits that constitute the desired literate financial actor. Notions of individual responsibility, planning ahead and rational risk management are presented not merely as instrumental resources, but as moral imperatives. Through these notions, the programmes moralize a broad array of everyday practices of personal finance such as saving, investing, borrowing and budget management, thereby connecting the sphere of financial matters to the domain of moral virtues. Offering a representation of particular modes of financial conduct as constitutive components of morally virtuous personhood, these practices imbue the financial field as a whole, especially its current generalized logic of individualized and marketized risk management, with moral meanings, hence contributing to the normalization and depoliticization of the financialization of everyday life.