Efrat Yerday Scholar-in-Residence History

Bio: Efrat Yerday is an activist, writer, poet, cultural entrapreneur, and current BAMAH Visiting Artist at the Meltzer Schwartzberg Center for Israel Studies. She is the chair of Association of Ethiopian Jews and a PhD candidate in Sociology at Tel Aviv University, researching “Ethno-national citizenship and Jewish illegality: Ethiopian Jews in Israel between 1955-1975 and the struggle for citizenship”. Yerday has founded a number of initiatives, including the Young Ethiopian Students blog, Ra’av (Hunger), African Film Festival ATESIB! the Color Line exhibition, and “Ethiopolitics” reading group for students of Ethiopian descent who wanted to broaden their knowledge of Ethiopian history and in order to have a safe haven for conversations on blackness and racism in the university and elsewhere; the course “Black Identity in a White Space: The Ethiopian Population in the Israeli Context” which she taught at ben Gurion University. Yerday received the NIF’s Gallanter Prize in 2020. Yerday wrote a column “Shchora M’Shachor” (blacker than black) for HaMakom HaHi Kham BaGehinom (the hottest place in hell) and has several academic publications, including “To Be Black and Beautiful in Israel” published in Anthropology of the Middle East (2019).

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