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Young Ethiopian Israelis Seek Identity Through Rap, Hip Hop

Young Ethiopian Israelis Seek Identity Through Rap, Hip Hop

From Haaretz. Story by Ben Shalev.

Musicians of Ethiopian origin are putting out hip hop, R&B, reggae and telling the story of their lives in Israel.

Israel’s Oasis Reggae Festival, held in June, was unusual. Reggae festivals always attract lots of young people from Ethiopian immigrant families, and at the Oasis festival the percentage of young people of Ethiopian origin was about half of those in attendance. At previous concerts and festivals the impression was that black and white Israelis kept to themselves. At Oasis, Ethiopians and non-Ethiopians seemed to mix.

It looked as if Israel’s millennials, or at least their representatives at the Oasis festival, reject the Israeli reality of separation and racism aimed at Ethiopian Jews and intend to change it. The Oasis festival was an oasis in that it does not reflect the mood of Israeli society. Still, anyone walking around the festival couldn’t help but leave with a glimmer of hope.

There were almost no performances by Ethiopian musicians at the festival, but there were hundreds of young people singing the songs of those groups, mainly of the group Café Shahor Hazak (“Strong Black Coffee” – Uri Alamo and Ilak Sahalu), one of the more dominant hip hop groups in Israel over the past two years. The young people, who knew all the words, sang “Yihiye B’seder” (“It’ll be all right”), the group’s big hit, but they also sang the single that the duo issued just before the festival, called “Hineh, Zeh Koreh,” (“Look, It’s Happening”).

Hip hop as a tool for musical expression is the tool of choice for Ethiopian young people. This choice reflects the deep identification young Ethiopians have with the hip hop and rap music culture, a feeling expressed repeatedly in “Hearing Black,” the fascinating book by published by David Ratner.

Ratner interviewed dozens of youths of Ethiopian origin about their lives and their musical preferences. “The central and formative experience for many of these teens is not necessarily the blatant racism some of them described, but the most basic and unsettling experience that all of them – all those I interviewed at least – experienced: Being constantly viewed and ‘marked’ as black,” Ratner said. That’s “race,” as opposed to racism, which the young people have also encountered.

“Black music serves as an inexhaustible source of texts and images that reflect their basic but most significant experience of being ‘marked’ as black,” Ratner writes.

If young black men tend to primarily choose hip hop, young women musicians of Ethiopian origin generally gravitate to soul or R&B. Sisters Ayala and Malka Ingedashet tried to break though at the end of the last decade, and in recent years there is Ester Rada, whose trajectory is one of the most impressive in Israeli music of this decade.

In addition to these voices, which operate in the black worlds of hip hop and R&B (even if they don’t remain there all the time), one is starting to hear in recent months additional voices of Ethiopian musicians who deviate from the traditional black areas and are working in a completely Israeli arena. These new young musicians are making pop music and even Mediterranean pop.

Tension with Mizrahim

When Ratner walked around neighborhoods where Ethiopians live and interviewed teens about the music they listened to, he discovered that most of them are hostile to Mizrahi music. (Mizrahim are Jews descended from North African and Middle East communities). By contrast, Ethiopian-Israeli youth were merely apathetic toward Israeli rock.

This hostility, writes Ratner, reflects attitudes on things beyond the quality of the music. “The attempts by this teen (and other teens) to portray Mizrahi music as ridiculous is a symbolic opposition to those whom they perceive as the strong and dominant group in their neighborhoods – the Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin),” he writes.

“The relationship of the young people I interviewed to Mizrahi culture is more complex than sweeping contempt,” says Ratner. “There are elements of strong attraction. Perhaps there’s identification of the rejected with the rejected, or maybe there’s an element of adaptation to those perceived as having the power.”

Read more at Haaretz.