This article examines ethnic identification among minority middle class subjects in a novel way, centering on adolescents from Mizrahi (descendants of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries, North Africa, and the Balkans) families. Guided by liberal dispositions—that proper social order is achieved when individuals interact free from hierarchies—US literature on race and ethnicity has conceptualized ethnic identification by minorities either as a political strategy to resist subordination, or as an act of submission to structures that compel minorities to internalize a `stigmatized` identity, which then impairs integration into middle class culture. Similarly, Israeli literature examining middle-class Mizrahim tends to characterize Mizrahi ethnic identification as an act of submission that engenders an internal conflict between ethnic and middle-class status. This study, however, rather than employing a top-down approach to explain the causes of minority ethnic identification, focuses on the meaning adolescents themselves attribute to their ethnicity. Based on in-depth interviews with 33 middle class Mizrahi adolescents, we uncover a local world of meaning within the middle class in which Mizrahi identity is associated with positive characteristics such as hipness and authenticity, serving therefore to improve adolescents` self-confidence and social status among their peers. By revealing the existence of spaces that do not conform to the liberal logic, wherein a `stigmatized` ethnicity is not a burden but rather a valuable cultural resource granting privileges, this study contributes to the literature of ethnicity, showing that minority ethnic identification is not necessarily an act of resistance or submission.