Book Talk: Israel's Black Panthers: The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation's Founding Myth
Book Talk: Israel's Black Panthers: The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation's Founding Myth
The book talk focuses on and tells the 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, Israel’s 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 award-winning investigative journalist working as a senior reporter for JTA News, a nonprofit newsroom covering the Jewish world. He is based in Los Angeles but has spent years working in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. As a Mizrahi Jew who grew up in the United States and Israel, Elia-Shalev is attuned to cultural nuances and offers a unique blend of insider and outsider perspectives in his writing on Israel's Black Panthers. He is the author of Israel's Black Panthers: The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation's Founding Myth (2024)