Frankel Institute Detroit Lecture Series on Jews and Empires

“Black Africa”, as both place and image, has played an important role in Zionist history, culture and literature. Numerous episodes—from the “Uganda Plan” to establish a Jewish state in East Africa (1903) to Ehud Barak’s claim that “Israel is a villa in the jungle” (1996)—testify to the ways in which images of “Africa” have figured in Zionist texts, visions, and projects.
The most remarkable of these projects is what Golda Meir called “our African ‘adventure’” – namely, young Israel’s offer of technical assistance to the emerging Black nations of Africa. Already envisioned in Theodor Herzl’s early Zionist writings, this massive involvement in and with “Black Africa” in the two decades following the establishment of Israel in 1948 allows us to see how the encounter with Africa was central to the self-fashioning of the New Jew in Eretz Israel, a space which becomes both the opposite of “Africa” and its double. More recent developments—such as the immigration of Ethiopian Jews to Israel and the growing visibility of African work migrants—suggest how the journey to and from Africa continues to shape Israeli culture today.