Hooray for Ethiopians!
For lunch Koleinu, BLSA, JLSA, and a few SIPA orgs sponsored Israel at Heart. It's a program where regular Israeli people go running around the world and act as ambassadors of Israel to give people a different perspective on "normal" Israeli life. We got a contingency of Ethiopian Jewish Lawyers. They didn't have the greatest English and got attacked by the Palestinian students of course, but I think they did pretty well. I have a special place in my heart personally for the Ethiopian Jewish population and it's such a rare pleasure to get to speak with them. I haven't seen any since my last trip to Israel when I visited an absorption center. I also actually got the special treat of seeing traditional Ethiopian Shoulder Dancing in Jerusalem at a leadership conference. Shoulder dancing is quite amazing to see by the way, I'd highly recommend it as a cultural experience. There are only about 100,000 (out of 6 million Jews in Israel) so black Jews are pretty hard to come by. But they are SO COOL! And have such pretty eyes. And such a beautiful language, Amharic. One of the visiting lawyers spoke for me in Amharic and it made my day. I'm just such a fan of diversity and it's wonderful to have black Jews to round out the middle eastern sephardic population and the european ashkenazi. It's a shame that most people only think of Jews as white/europeans based on the makeup of the American Jewish community. In Israel the population is split about 50/50 between sephardim and ashkenazim. Actually Los Angeles has a sizable Persian Jewish population and there are other pockets, but mostly American Jews are white. I wish there were more diversity here in the US, but at the same time I'm glad there is such a mix in Israel and I wouldn't want to take away from that to diversify America. Oh, also Eitan Schwartz, the winner of the ISraeli reality TV show "The Ambassador" was there. Got to shake his hand. Check another celebrity off the list ;-)
