From Exclusion to Leadership The Case of the Ethiopian Community in Israel

Main Article Content

Simcha Getahun
Irit Keynan

Abstract

Israel comprises diverse groups (mostly Jewish), between whom the differences are sometimes greater than the similarities. This frequently leads to social exclusion and discrimination that damages the very basic sense of human security. Scholars agree that cultural misrecognition or exclusion has a deeply negative impact on a person’s mental well-being and sense of security. In this paper, we show how the case of the Ethiopian community in Israel reinforces the understanding that a cultural group’s experiences of exclusion and non-belonging undermine its members’ sense of personal security and has detrimental effects on their well-being. Groups however can sometimes change the course of development. We show that 40 years after the first wave of immigration (Operation Moshe), the Ethiopian community in Israel has chosen a track of change, in which it slowly moves from exclusion to leadership. This idea calls for further study.

Article Details

Section
Articles (refereed)
Author Biographies

Simcha Getahun, The Kibbutzim College, Israel

Dr. Simcha Getahune holds a Ph.D. in Education from Bar Ilan University, Israel. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at The Kibbutzim College and also lectures at the Rishon Letzion College for Management. Dr. Getahune's research includes immigration and multi-culturalism, youth at risk, role perceptions among youth at risk, work with immigrant families, and community development. She coordinates and has been developing the focus on youth at risk in the educational counseling graduate program in the Rishon Letzion college of management. She is also the founder and director of the Center for the Heritage of Ethiopian Judaism. Dr. Getahune directed the area of multi-culturalism, and street work in Elem, a leading organization for youth at risk in Israel. 

Irit Keynan, The Kibbutzim College, Israel

Irit Keynan is the head of the Department for Informal Education at the Faculty of Education in the Kibbutzim College, Tel Aviv, Israel. In September 2021 she has finished her term as Dean of the School of Education at the College of Management, Rishon LeTzion, Israel. Her research interests, in which she has published extensively, are multiculturalism, collective memory and war trauma, democracy, and social justice. Prof. Keynan is the author of two award-winning books on the survivors of the Holocaust and on war trauma and is the co-editor of two essay collections on multiculturalism and on civil and cultural aspects of security. Her monograph Memories from a life I never lived, narrating the story of Jewish-Yugoslav Prisoners of War in Nazi German hard-labor Camps and the fate of Macedonian Jewry, was published in Hebrew in 2020 and in English in 2022. Irit is also active in social initiatives dealing with multiculturalism and reconciliation. Among other activities, she is the initiator and founder of KAV-MASHVE, a leading NGO, promoting equal employment for Arab Academics. Prof. Keynan holds a Ph.D. in history from Tel Aviv University.