Cornell professor[1] Deborah Starr uses the term to describe the fear of change to Israeli culture during the influx of Mizrahi Jews in the 1950s,[2] some of whom had arrived from Levantine countries.
Aravamudan says this viewpoint from which Montagu composed her letters "replaces the existing bias of a simple ethnocentricism in favor of the observer's culture with an eclectic relativism".
[7] For the Ashkenazi Jews in Israel the term Levantinization represented some cultural traits that were seen as threatening to the idea of Western modernity and by extension the core values of Israeli society.
[8] The Shinui party, founded by Yosef Lapid, who has been described as "Eurocentric, chauvinistic and anti-Mizrahi", viewed Levantinization as a threat to the existence of the state of Israel, along with the Haredim, Palestinians, and similar cultural influences of Russification and Orientalization.
In stereotypical terms, these immigrants were perceived as possessing a certain premodern biblical Jewish authenticity, although at the same time seen as aggressive, alcoholic, cunning, immoral, lazy, noisy, and unhygienic.Egyptian-Israeli novelist Jacqueline Kahanoff has described herself as a "typical Levantine in that I appreciate equally what I inherited from my Oriental origins and what is now mine of Western culture".