Customer Reviews

The Hyena People: Ethiopian Jews in Christian Ethiopia (Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society)

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Excellent academic account of Ethiopian Jewish-Christian rivalry in native Ethiopia. The author has conducted "exit"-style interviews, anthro style, with Ethiopian Jewish emigrees to Israel, once settled in the Holy Land, about their experiences with Christian neighbors back in Ethiopia. The info gleaned is priceless, unsettling, and invited as many questions as answers. The profundity of the Ethiopian Jewish experience is something Global Jewry is only beginning to grasp (caught up earlier, unfortunately, in a "are you *really* Jewish game", perhaps a (unnecessary) defensive formation towards a potentially more legitimate (strictly Old Testament) African Jewish experience?). This book makes a credible and substantive contribution towards this new realization.
My only critique of the book is in the author's somewhat cliched "academic" response to the Beta Israel's spiritual beliefs. Like most Western textual analysis, the author downplays any claims to legitimacy in the Beta Israel's "animistic" or "superstitious" beliefs, choosing instead to explain them away with rational pseudo-psychological explanations. Sometimes these explanations are plausible; sometimes they seem more like a desperate attempt to "colonize" or "own" the Beta Israel's experience by virtue of being able to dissect and explain it. At these junctures in the book, I think it would have been more appropriate of the author to simply let the stories speak for themselves, and let the reader draw their own conclusions.

That said, it is still an excellent book and I'm glad the author did the no doubt difficult work of compiling these stories. Hopefully, we will see more work like this before the generation that was part of this Exodus passes.
Ethiopian-inspired Cooking, Vegetarian Specialties

This book was fascinating. Unfortuanetly, it is written in a highly academic style, making it a bit dry. I found the first couple of chapters slow, buit then it got more interesting, with great quotes, really getting into the subject of what it was like ot be a Jew in Ethiopia.

I really appreciate the author getting this information out of our modern history and plight. But I have the opinion the author should have exercised more caution not to manipulate the wording which can change the whole character and concept of the stories. Being a Beta-Israel or "Falasha" of direct Ethiopian heritage I found it annoying that the author uses the eurocentric term "Jew" to describe our people instead of "Hebrew" which are those Ethiopians who practice the ancestral rituals of the Semitic/Judaic faith. We were never "Jews" in Ethiopia, only Hebrews. or whatever the local people considered us to be based on their misunderstanding the strict doctrines of our faith. Though in some circles the word FaIasha connotes something negative, at least I know better of it's origin.