PANTHERIM SHECHORIM

Francine Klagsbrun, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel (New York: Schocken, 2017) (Learned some history I did not know! "They called themselves the Black Panthers (Pantherim Shechorim), a name adopted from radical blacks in the American civil rights movement and chosen for its shock value. Most were young people who had come to Israel as children with their parents from Morocco, Algeria, Iran, and other Arab countries in North Africa and the Middle East, cast out of their homes and lands after the establishment of the state or during the Sinai campaign in 1956. They watched as the new Soviet immigrants received clean, relatively spacious garden apartments while they lived in cramped, deteriorating flats in slum neighborhoods, the same neighborhoods where their families had settled when they first arrived in a less prosperous Israel. They watched as the Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe and Western countries rose ever higher on the economic scale and continued to dominate every aspect of the nation's political, financial, and cultural life while they and their people, called Sephardim, and latter Mizrahim, held the most menial jobs. Few in their communities finished high school, and those who did might go on to vocational schools, rarely to a university. About 20 percent lived below the poverty level." Id. at 551-552. As we Americans continue to struggle--some seriously, others not so much--with and at the intersections of poverty and race/ethnicity America, a reminder that it is a global problem and condition. Social, political, and economic equality is the elusive butterfly.).