Israeli Hip Hop - Hip Hop For Ethiopian-Israeli Youth

Hip Hop For Ethiopian-Israeli Youth

Since the 1990s, Ethiopian-Israeli teenagers used the rising reggae and hip hop scenes as a means of forming a community and a sense of belonging. Tel Aviv nightclubs proved to be places of social gathering for Ethiopian-Israeli teenagers, giving them a space to gather and form a collective identity. Teenagers and young adults were able to identify with the black struggle of the music and felt reggae and rap reflected their own experiences. Through identification with historically black American musical styles, Anthropologist Malka Shabtay writes,

Young Ethiopians living in Israel have… transformed their collective and personal experiences of alienation, both real and imagined, into an ideology identifying themselves as the blacks in Israeli society and attributing the relatively poor achievements of Ethiopians and their sense of inferiority and failure to racism. Their language of disappointment, disillusionment and hostility is addressed to those they hold responsible for their situation. They believe Israelis to be prejudiced towards them and see in them the reason that their chances of achieving integration are low: ‘You feel betrayed and are called ‘n-gger’. You made it to Israel and it doesn’t work.’

Identification with the African-American struggle, mainly through music, formed a sense of community and identity among Ethiopian-Israeli teenagers. “Their search for a home is temporarily satisfied by reggae and rap… This encounter with black musical genres is a matter not only of musical taste, but of self-image and image in the eyes of others.” Ethiopian-Israeli reggae and rap, reflecting struggles and racism of daily life of these teenagers, provides a sense of community and identification among Ethiopian-Israeli youth. Ethiopian Israeli hip-hop groups, and artists like Cafe Shachor Hazak, Axum, Jeremy Cool Habash, and others have become very popular amongst all Israelis, and are growing in popularity as Ethiopian Jews integrate into mainstream Israeli society.