Unruly is an intersectional blog originally created by and for Jews of Color and Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews. Our focus is on racial justice issues in the United States, Palestine, Israel, and beyond. We feature news items, political analysis, essays, poetry, art, and video work that highlights the way oppressed people resist their dispossession.
We pay special attention the issues affecting Palestinians and Sephardi/ Mizrahi Jews and Jews of Color, because we see a direct link between these struggles. We seek to confront our role in US and Israeli settler-colonialism, as well as the way our histories have been buried and cut off from each other as a form of divide and conquer rule. We offer this platform as a space for building community and co-resistance.
The name Unruly is a play on the historical treatment of our communities as a “savage,” unpredictable, and unmanageable force in Israeli and white-dominated Jewish society. This was exemplified in Golda Meir’s notorious words after hearing the demands of the Israeli Black Panthers: “They’re not nice!”
This stigma is not unique to our struggle, and is an experience we share with many other oppressed people. Unruly is about rejecting the logics of control wielded against people of color around the world, and providing a space where we can connect our struggles. It also references the autonomy the Jews of Color and Sephardi/Mizrahi Caucus seeks to build within our own organizing, which is a vital part of both our liberation and our ability to support the liberation of others.