Efrat Yerday, Ethiopian Israeli writer, activist, Ph.D. candidate and teacher, delivered a lecture titled “Between the Local and the Global: Blackness, Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary Israel” in the Meyerhoff Library space on Wednesday, November 8th.
The lecture focused on a range of topics including the history of racism within Israel as well as issues and discussions specific to Israeli society. George Kintiba, a lecturer at the university, moderated the discussion.
Yerday grew up in Ashdod, a city located in Southern Israel. She described how the start of her activism began from a young age.
She said her formal school education told one narrative regarding Ethiopian Jewish history in Israel, while her parents relayed to her a very different story. Her father arrived in Israel from Ethiopia in 1970 and experienced many barriers including a deportation order from the state.
“I grew up between these two stories and I knew someone is lying” she said.
She described several factors that contributed to the unequal treatment of Ethiopian and Mizrahi Jews in both the early days of the state and in modern times.
One of the recent incidents she highlighted was the 2019 fatal shooting of 18-year-old Solomon Teka at the hands of an Israeli police officer. This led to mass protests across the country.
Another relevant factor that is specific to racism in Israel, is the struggle for Israel to exist as a state. She explained how the constant fight for Israel’s survival dominates the media and all other discourses fall to the side.
She said there’s a narrative that “we have bigger problems.”
“My motivation is also to change the Israeli discourse and what Ethiopian students know about their own history,” she said. Ethiopian Jewish history in Israel is often absent or censored from the history books.
“What I’m trying to do in my activism is shape discourse that is more relevant to Israeli society. There is a whole system of silencing conversation about racism,” she said.
She explained that in Israel, the Holocaust is often seen as the only acceptable discussion when talking about racism or anti-semitism.
A major theme of Yerday’s lecture included the conversation on how Jewishness has been linked with whiteness, including the concept that Israel’s definition of who is a Jew interacts with whiteness.
To illustrate this, one example she gave was how the Law of Return was expanded to accommodate Jews trying to flee the USSR in 1970. However, she points out that Ethiopian Jews who were present from the conception of the state were not eligible for citizenship under the Law of Return until 1973.
Yerday said this interaction of Jewishness and whiteness can be seen in various areas including Zionism. An example she gave was how when Israel was being established, non-white Jews who emigrated were sent to populate border areas that were often dangerous and underdeveloped.
Yerday described the negative impacts Zionism has had on Israelis, Palestinians and all those who live in the land. She said, “the Zionist movement is very Eurocentric and very political, it’s not religious.”
“Zionism is a movement that evolved in Europe; Judaism is not a national movement it is a religion,” Yerday said. She explained that Zionism uses ideas and symbols from Judaism that Jews are connected to which causes an overlap.
Over 30 participants attended the lecture, including Ethan Kirk, a government and politics major. Something that prompted him to attend the lecture was the idea of perspective, he said.
“Perspective is the best teacher,” said Kirk. The part of the lecture that stood out to him was the discussion on the “push and pull of different immigrants tracking back to the origins of Zionism.”
Toward the end of the lecture, Yerday was asked what she hoped people took away from it. Yerday said, “I hope people will have the ability to understand things out of their cultural context.”
