The African Hebrew Israelites are a small community with little political power, yet their story is important because it reveals some of the challenges faced by non-Jewish minority groups in the Jewish state.
Raised mostly in San Diego by a Russian American Jewish father and African American Jewish mother, Westside Gravy (né Noah Shufutinsky) takes pride in belonging to the Jewish and African diasporas.
In the late 1970s, Israel formed a Knesset committee to investigate the “Black Hebrews cult,” a community of non-Jewish African Americans who had been entering the country on tourist visas and settling illegally in the Negev Desert for almost a decade.
For many conservatives, the turbulence of 2020 — marked by what they consider draconian stay-at-home orders, violent social justice protests amid reckless calls to “defund the police” and another devastating wildfire season, on top of a growing homelessness crisis — reinforced their belief that California is beset by numerous systemic problems, and that its political leaders are either doing nothing to solve them or actively making them worse.
Tigist Yoseph Ron and Hirut Yoseph channel their trauma and creativity into drawings, paintings, photography, fashion design, and other media.