Black Israeli Woman Bombarded With ‘Crude’ Racist Slurs On Bus
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
By Sam Kestenbaum October 11, 2017
A black Israeli woman was bombarded by racial slurs while riding a public bus in the southern town of Be’er Sheva in a widely-shared video.
“This kind of racism I have never experienced,” Hasedia Bat Israel, a member of the Hebrew Israelite group, told Channel 2 News in Israel, according to the Times of Israel. “I was born in this land. This kind of racism I have never experienced. It was very crude and hurtful.”
In the original video clip, a fellow passenger can be heard insulting Bat Israel in Hebrew, calling her a “kushit,” a pejorative Hebrew term for a black woman, and saying she smells bad.
The passenger, Inbal Ben Baruch, posted the video on Facebook herself. In another video posted on Twitter, Baruch claimed she was not racist and didn’t intend to insult the woman. Baruch claims she has apologized since, but Israel said she has not received any apology.
In the Bible, Kush is the name of Ethiopia, but in contemporary Israeli speech the word “kushi” or “kushim” (in the plural) is widely seen as derogatory.
Some 3,000 Hebrew Israelites lives in the southern city of Dimona. Led by their charismatic Chicago-born leader Ben Ammi Ben Israel, the first members of the community migrated to Israel in the 1960s.
Email Sam Kestenbaum at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter at @skestenbaum
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
