Ethiopian Jews Redefine Israeli Beauty
Social entrepreneur Yohannes Azanaw has opened the first Israeli agency for dark-skinned models, challenging misperceptions and racism.
Several years ago I talked with artists of Ethiopian origin about the cooperation between Israeli singer Idan Raichel and singers from the Ethiopian community. The Idan Raichel Project, regarded by many veteran Israelis as a generous gesture toward the Ethiopian community, was nonetheless received by some young people in the community with a mixture of gratitude and suspicion. Several months prior to our conversation, the media published interviews with singers who took part in the Raichel Project and spoke of feeling used.
“It’s OK,” a guy named Yohannes Azanaw told me at the time. “We can do the same thing. We’ll take a couple of Russian immigrants, turn them into a band and cash in.”
Azanaw’s Russian project did not materialize, but in 2009 he executed a different, more practical idea: “YAmodels,” the first agency in Israel for dark-skinned talent and models. Today his agency has the country’s largest pool of dark-skinned actors, models and movie extras. Their look, he says, represents that of the Israeli majority in 2013. Yet since its founding, YAmodels has not received a single significant order.
The idea of establishing a talent agency brewed in his mind for years. “The older I got, the more aware I became that dark-skinned people were not represented in the media,” says Azanaw. “This came up mainly in conversations with friends. We’d talk about movies and television series and sometimes someone would stop and say: ‘Do you realize there’s not a single Ethiopian there?’ We understood that Israeli-ness in the advertising world was a parallel universe from which we were absent. I knew dozens of beautiful and talented people of dark skin and I decided to pick up the gauntlet.”
