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Ethiopian Jewish photographer and filmmaker Avishai Mekonen will speak on the subjects of Ethiopian Jewry, diversity, racism, anti-Semitism, and immigrant identity at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 21 in Kirby Hall of Civil Rights room 104. The lecture will be preceded by a free community dinner and short Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah) commemoration at 5:30 p.m. at Hillel House.
The talk is the first to be sponsored by the Sheila Goldberg Lecture Fund. Goldberg, who is the mother of Julia A. Goldberg, associate dean of the College, established the fund as a way to give back to the College and the community in which she lives. The annual series will bring speakers to Lafayette who would be of interest to members of Hillel.
Mekonen’s lecture, which will be accompanied by images and clips from his documentary photography and film work, is entitled “Searching for Identity Through Photography and Film.” For more information contact Rebecca Metzger, reference and instruction librarian and Hillel program assistant, at (610) 330-5154 or send an email.
In 1984, Mekonen was airlifted from Sudan to Israel as part of Operation Moses, a joint effort of Israel, the United States, and Sudan that removed 8,000 Ethiopian Jews from a severe famine and brought them to Israel. Today, Mekonen lives in New York City, where he is working on a film (tentatively titled Four Hundred Miles to Freedom) that documents his search to remember and reconcile what happened to him at age 10, when he was kidnapped by slave traffickers in Sudan.
Throughout his life-long journey from Ethiopia to Sudan, Israel, and finally America, his fundamental identity as an African American Jew has been challenged. His search for answers leads him to other African, Asian, and Latino Jews, and together they grapple with the double invisibility of being both religious and racial minorities. A section of the film was shown as part of The Jewish Identity Project: New American Photography at the Jewish Museum in New York, the Skirball Museum in Los Angeles, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.
Currently on view at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan is Mekonen’s Seven Generations, a photography and sound series that explores the Ethiopian Jewish oral tradition of counting a betrothed couple’s ancestors back seven generations to ensure that they are not related. Mekonen’s grandfather was well known in Ethiopia for counting, with a memory for the details of more than 10 generations. This series of portraits of Ethiopian Jews – shown together with sound recordings of their counting, praying and music – documents an endangered tradition while providing a critical glimpse into the contemporary state of Ethiopian Jewish assimilation in Israel.