Who Were Israel’s Black Panthers and How They Rebelled Against Israel’s Hierarchy
Asaf Elia-Shalev will tell the repressed story of the young and impoverished Moroccan Israeli Jews who challenged their country’s political status quo and rebelled against the ethnic hierarchy of Israeli life in the 1970s. Inspired by the American group of the same name, the Black Panthers mounted protests and a yearslong political campaign for the rights of Mizrahim, or Jews of Middle Eastern ancestry. They managed to rattle the country’s establishment and change the course of Israel’s history through the mass mobilization of a Jewish underclass.
Asaf Elia-Shalev is an Israeli American journalist based in Los Angeles. He is a staff writer for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, which distributes his work to dozens of media outlets in multiple languages.
