An Israeli poster from 1971 that calls to “stop poverty”. © Personal archive Sami Shalom Chetrit

In 1970, Angela Davis made an unintentionally momentous visit to Jerusalem. Davis, then a young, charismatic, “Black is Beautiful” leader of the Communist Party USA and close friend to the Black Panthers, found her way to the impoverished neighborhood of Mursara, which marks the tempestuous border of Jerusalem’s East-West partition. There she met Saadia Marciano, a 20-year-old Jewish-Moroccan activist frustrated by the discrimination in Israel, ruled by the European Ashkenazim, against his people, the Mizrahim, who had been forced from their ancestral homes in the hundreds of thousands across the Middle East and North Africa following Israel’s birth. The two revolutionaries, both intent upon dismantling racial hegemony, “exchanged notes.” A year later, inspired by Davis’s recounting of Huey Newton and Bobby Seal’s great enterprise, Marciano, along with several friends also from Mursara, annexed the moniker of militant American Civil Rights and organized the Black Panthers of Israel.

Marciano’s group, like its transatlantic cousin, was criticized for its methods—distributing stolen milk from wealthy Ashkenazi neighborhoods throughout distinctly poorer and browner ones, for example. Or coordinating truculent, illegal demonstrations, the largest of which involved between five and seven thousand marchers and is remembered as the “Night of the Panthers,” a maelstrom of airborne expletives and stones and molotov cocktails ending in hospitalization and arrest. But, the Panthers of Israel, although successful in installing Mizrahi discrimination at the forefront of public consciousness, faded to insignificance in 1977 after a disappointing transition to electoral politics. Their childhood Mursara walls now read as a museum of protest: “clenched fist” tiles, Menachem Begin mini-portraits, and graffitied cats, snarling, preparing to pounce. What the Panthers stood for, however—abolishing ethnic discrimination, equal cultural and governmental representation, redistribution of educational funds to Mizrahi periphery towns—remains pertinent. Only now, 45 years later, the Mizrahi fight for social justice isn’t characterized by blocked streets and angry slogans chanted in unison, but by poetry.

Within the past half-decade, Ars Poetica, a decentralized generation of dissident Mizrahi poets challenging Ashkenazi monopolization of Israeli culture, has reinvigorated the spirit of protest against Arab-Jewish marginalization. Consequently, with its unapologetic nonconformity, Ars Poetica — simultaneously an ironic play on Horace’s rulebook, “The Art of Poetry,” and a reclaiming of the Arabic word “Ars,” a racial slur for Mizrahi men originally meaning “pimp”—has also liberated (or stolen, as some prefer) poetry from the ivory tower of high-brow critique and inaccessible language.

Rather than the small bookstore recitations offered by professorial characters to seated rows of unexcitable dress shirts, Ars Poetica operates in bars and clubs, where hundreds of anti-establishment 20-somethings release primordial woots and dance to the rhythm of poetry superimposed...