The response for many Americans is to crinkle in confusion when they hear that Amen, an Ethiopian dancer, is a black Jew.
Amen's dance troupe, Eskesta from the University of Haifa in Israel, visited the University last Wednesday to hold an open discussion session over kosher Chinese and Ethiopian food in the Greenfield Intercultural Center in order to relay their distinctive backgrounds and difficulties in assimilating into university life.
The discussion was sponsored by Penn Hillel and Alliance, a coalition of Black and Jewish students.
For over 2,000 years, a group of Ethiopian Jews had been living in Ethiopia amidst oppression and isolation. Within the last 10 years, some have been assisted by the Israeli government in making the trek back to the holy land.
A majority of these Ethiopian students had immigrated to Israel in the '80s and '90s in two separate operations aimed at airlifting thousands of Ethiopian Jews from their poverty stricken homelands in Ethiopia. Along the way, a number of students left behind family members, friends and siblings.
"I can't wait to hear from them," Alliance staff member Afi Roberson said minutes before the discussion session. "With all the controversy over whether they should even be considered Jewish, it will be interesting to hear about how they have adjusted."
The dancers expounded on the trauma of feeling as though they had two strikes against them. In their hometowns, they were often shunned because they were Jewish, and upon reaching Israel their skin colors often precluded them from being accepted by the same religion for which they had once been persecuted, members of the group said.
Eskesta Founder and Director Ruth Esher said that when she visited Ethiopia with the dancing troupe, she came across a man who asked the group what they were. Upon finding out that they were Jewish, he began to throw stones at them and scream "falasha," the term for Ethiopian Jews.
After years of researching Ethiopian dance, Esher convinced the Ethiopian students in her choreography class to form a dancing troupe.
The graceful movements that accompany rhythmic drum beats reflect the dancers' distinct background. The dance is characterized by rapid movements of the shoulders that come naturally to these tall, slim and elegant dancers.
"Their shoulder dance is a comfortable movement for them," Esher said. "They've been doing it since they were little kids in their own villages back home."
While the fusion of these movements combine Ethiopian and Israeli dance forms rather gracefully, the dancers found the cultural merge to be far more trying.
Ethiopia depends on its agricultural base, as opposed to the high-tech Israeli economy. One of the dancers explained that because of the agricultural backgrounds of many Ethiopian immigrants, the majority are faced with considerable difficulties assimilating to this new world.
Many of these proficient farmers found themselves strikingly unskilled within their new surroundings, in which agriculture is no longer the foundation of production.
As the previous bread winners of the family line up for welfare checks instead, the entire family hierarchy also becomes disrupted, Esher said.
The family becomes dependent on their children who are the quickest to grasp the new language. The children serve as the family's window to the outside world. Additionally, women, who find themselves on the same playing field as their male counterparts, become empowered.
As the discussion session continued, the tall beautiful female dancers silently watched as their fellow male dancers spoke for the entire group.
"In Ethiopia, the quieter a woman is, the better she is," Esher said.
Yet, once they settle in Israel, the women are not dependent on their often-abusive husbands, so they are quick to leave them. The single mother and children live off welfare checks, as they had before, but they are now better off having dropped the extra dependent.
Amen said that a common religion was of primary importance in finding a wife, while color was not even on the radar screen.
He said that their situation varied significantly in Ethiopia, where the diminutive gamut of options forced them to be careful with being too closely related to their prospective partners.
While the Jewish population abounds within this new environment, the dancers have certainly not left the heap of obstacles behind them. The dancers said that they have encountered a new batch of prejudices -- one being common Israeli reaction to the color of their skin.
"This is such a great opportunity for us to understand the difficulties and prejudices this group faced," Alliance Co-Chairman Kamaria Shauri said.
