Efrat Yerday

Efrat Yerday is an artist-researcher, poet, writer, activist, and cultural entrepreneur who leverages the capacity of art to forge dialogue and social change. Yerday has performed her poetry for public and television audiences and is a prolific editor and translator who has led and initiated poetry workshops for young writers and teachers. In 2012, she established the Ra’av (Hunger) publishing house in Beersheba, intending to add color to the Israeli bookshelf. She edited its first book of translated poetry, Kushila'imashelahem, a temporary anthology of black poetry.

In 2014 she established the reading group “Ethiopolitics” for students of Ethiopian descent who wanted to broaden their knowledge of Ethiopian history and to have a safe space to engage on blackness and racism in the university and elsewhere. Yerday wrote a regular column “Shchora M’Shachor” (blacker than black) for HaMakom HaHi Kham BaGehinom (the hottest place in hell), an independent journalistic online magazine, and has several academic publications including an article entitled “To Be Black and Beautiful in Israel” that was published in Anthropology of the Middle East (2019).

In 2018, she participated in an arts think-tank that led to the “Color Line” exhibition at Sapir Academic College and partnered with filmmaker Bazi Gete to lead the ATESIB! African Film Festival, which they continue to co-lead to this day. In 2020, she presented her research, Separate Fields of Art as Strategy of Visibility, at the Annual Israeli Sociological Society Conference. In addition to her leadership in the arts, Yerday is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Tel Aviv University, serves as chairwoman of the Association for Ethiopian Jews, and is a recipient of the “Guardian of Democracy” Gallanter Prize (2020) for her leadership and activism.