Few Israelis real­ly under­stand the his­to­ry, cul­ture, and strug­gles of the Ethiopi­an Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty. With the excep­tion of the hol­i­day of Sigd, very lit­tle about their cul­ture is taught in the pub­lic schools. This dearth is what inspired Roni Fan­tanesh Malkai to write her infor­ma­tive study of the place of Ethiopi­ans in Israeli soci­ety, We Are Black Jews. Over the course of four­teen chap­ters, Malkai takes Israel to task for fail­ures in polic­ing, edu­ca­tion, and health­care, mak­ing a strong call to action against racism in the Jew­ish homeland.

Malkai is a jour­nal­ist and social activist. She begins her book by dis­cussing the hypocrisy of the obnox­ious refrain, often uttered on the streets, that Ethiopi­an Israelis should ​“say thank you” for Israel tak­ing in their com­mu­ni­ty in the eight­ies and nineties. First, oth­er groups, like Russ­ian Jews are not made to feel guilty about mak­ing aliyah, a right nat­u­ral­ly avail­able to all Jews world­wide. Sec­ond, while there is a lot to appre­ci­ate about Israel, things have been unnat­u­ral­ly hard for Ethiopi­ans. ​“What should we be thank­ful for?” the author asks, cit­ing vio­lence against young peo­ple in the com­mu­ni­ty, dis­pos­al of their blood dona­tions, and the forced injec­tion of con­tra­cep­tive drugs against their will. 

The book is full of incred­i­bly damn­ing sta­tis­tics. Ethiopi­an chil­dren are put in fos­ter care at three times the rate of oth­er Israeli kids. They are arrest­ed at a rate four times that of oth­er eth­nic groups in Israel. Sui­cide rates among Ethiopi­an immi­grants are four times high­er than immi­grants from the for­mer Sovi­et Union and five times high­er than among non­im­mi­grant Jews. As if these sta­tis­tics are not hard enough to hear, Malkai is a mas­ter at the per­fect­ly placed anec­dote. In one instance she cites Mali, a new kinder­garten teacher who, on the first day of school, intro­duced her­self to one of her student’s moth­ers. The moth­er prompt­ly pulled her son from class so he wouldn’t learn from a teacher who looked like her. 

Per­haps the most pow­er­ful chap­ter in the book deals with the fact that as the Jew­ish world held their breath for the cap­tives in Gaza, anoth­er civil­ian cap­tive, Avera Mengis­tu — who was tak­en in 2014 — was all but for­got­ten, in part because he was Ethiopi­an. Where the world adopt­ed Gilad Shalit as one of their own, Mengis­tu remained ​“oth­er” and few knew his sto­ry. His Wikipedia entry is less than half the word count of Shalit’s. 

Mengis­tu is part of what some schol­ars iden­ti­fy as a ​“sec­ond Israel,” those who often feel like and are treat­ed like sec­ond-class cit­i­zens. Read­ers of We Are Black Jews will leave with a true appre­ci­a­tion for how much needs to hap­pen to close the gap between the first and sec­ond Israel. Thank­ful­ly, with activists like Malkai, who are unafraid to tell the truth, that goal may be with­in reach.