Sami Shalom Chetrit

Sami Shalom Chetrit was born in 1960 in Morocco

Chetrit was born in 1960 in Ksar es-Souk, now Errachidia, in southeastern Morocco. His mother was Pnina Chetrit-Edri and his father was the writer Nehorai Meir Chetrit. The family moved to Israel in 1963, and he grew up in Ashdod and attended the Nahalat Yehuda agricultural high school.

He earned a BA in Hebrew literature and an MA and PhD in political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also earned an MA at Columbia University in New York. His doctorate on the political history of Mizrahim in Israel became the book The Mizrahi Struggle in Israel.

In the 1990s he was active in Mizrahi social movements, including Kedma and the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition. He taught at the Rogozin school in Tel Aviv and was the founding principal of the Kedma high school in the Hatikva neighborhood. He later taught at Queens College in New York and now heads the School of Audio and Screen Arts at Sapir College.

His first poetry book appeared in 1988, and his Poems in Ashdodian became the basis of a musical show. He also wrote a novel and made documentary films. In 2016 he co-founded the Ashdodshira festival and serves as its artistic director.