“Ethiopian Jews between 1955-1975: The Story of State vs the Story of the People”
Speaker: Efrat Yerday
Efrat Yerday is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Tel Aviv University. Her research focuses on Ethiopian Jews and Blackness in Israel. Her dissertation, “Ethno-national Citizenship: Ethiopian Jews in Israel between 1955-1975 and the struggle for citizenship,” will be completed in June 2025.
Yerday’s publications include “To Be Black and Beautiful in Israel” (AME, 2019) and “Jewish Illegality: The Case of Ethiopian Jews between 1955-1975” (POMEPS, 2021). She co-edited “The Monk and the Lion: Contemporary Ethiopian Visual Art in Israel” and the epilogue for the Hebrew translation of Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
From 2023-2024, Yerday was a teaching fellow at UMD and American University, teaching “Blackness in Israeli Popular Culture and Contemporary Art.” And taught an “Israeli society” course at American University in the Fall semester of 2024.
Beyond academia, Yerday’s activism grew from her experiences as a first-generation daughter of politically active immigrants. She has been the Chair of the Association of Ethiopian Jews for the last five years and have founded several initiatives and writing projects, including “Ra’av” (Hunger) Publishing House; the “Ethiopolitics” reading group; the research group “Ethiopian Jews Rewriting Their Story” at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.
Yerday wrote the blog “Shchora M’Shachor” for HaMakom Hahi Kham Bagehinom, among other op-eds in Haaretz, Ynet, and Middle East Eye.