Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History

GeoJournal, 2006

No culture, no society, remains static but changes imperceptibly day by day. The struggle waged by western art music in Israel for survival is eerily suggestive of how Israeli society in general has changed since the early Zionists set the course for the creation of a Jewish nation-state. Once regarded as the civilized face and civilizing influence of the Jewish national endeavour in Palestine/Israel, its advocates claim ever more desperately that western art music in Israel is in a state of rapid decline. Yet public opinion surveys reveal that the Israeli public backs state support for arts and culture whether or not people participate in cultural activities. Despite this, the internal ethnic struggle for domination of the arts and culture world and the rearguard action by culture administrators are both in danger of being overtaken by the country's exposure to global popular culture.

biu.ac.il

Jewish Quarterly Review, 2010

Music is widely recognized as a central component of Israeli national identity, yet the putative Jewishness of Israeli music remains a subject of enduring cultural controversy and ideological confusion. I argue in this article that the roots of Israeli music's distinctive national character can be traced to the pre-World War I activities of Abraham Tsvi Idelsohn, the pioneering Zionist scholar and ideological progenitor of a revolutionary new concept of Hebrew music. In his early writings, Idelsohn called repeatedly for a rejection of Diasporic Jewish music and the recovery of an authentic ancient Hebrew music for the reborn nation in its homeland. However, his two most influential early publishing projects, a songbook for Jewish schools and massive compendium of liturgical and folk melodies, reveal a more complicated cluster of attitudes towards European music, Diaspora Jewish culture, and the Arab Middle East. Analyzing Idelsohn's aesthetics, I discuss his different strategies for reconciling ideological purity alongside cultural cosmopolitanism in Hebrew national culture. I conclude that Idelsohn's aesthetic categories relied strongly on the semantic power of language to determine music's cultural meaning. This move allowed Idelsohn to link his model of a new Hebrew national music to the very European (and European Jewish) culture he ostensibly rejected. I close by discussing how Idelsohn's legacy exposes a deeper continuity in Israeli culture that cuts across the perceived ruptures of 1917 and 1948 to link the early Zionist idea of "Negation of the Exile" to contemporary concerns about Israeliness, music, and national identity.

Moods and Modes of Jewish Music, edited by Yuval Shaked, I-XI. Haifa, Israel: University of Haifa, 2014. Music constitutes a key medium through which political actors in Jerusalem embody, perform, and negotiate competing paradigms of nationhood and, more specifically, their visions of the future of Jerusalem. In this paper, I focus on the community espousing religious Zionism—the datiim leumiim—and their performance of neo-Hasidic pop and rock. In this paper, I analyse this genre of music as a form of political discourse within the public sphere of Jerusalem. Although the music was not originally intended to be political in nature, the contexts of performance of this repertoire have endowed the music with political meaning: the yearly Rikud’galim procession (celebrating Jerusalem Day), various public demonstrations, and displays of opposition to other Jerusalemites. I explore a number of issues that emerge out of this ethnographic research. First, this serves as an excellent demonstration of performance as a vehicle through which to claim and occupy public space. Tens of thousands of people singing, dancing, and processing through both West and East Jerusalem on Yom Yerushalayim enacts the unification of the city and claims both sides as Jewish space. Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization,” as well as Lefebvre’s “production of space,” are particularly salient here. Second, the musical choice of actors in this community functions as a form of political language—both as general expression of personal and communal political commitments and in dialogue with actors of opposing positions. Mainstream (non-religious) Zionist activists—both left- and right-leaning—exploit the repertoire of Shirei eretz yisrael as a manifestation of their commitments to both Jewish nationalism and secular liberalism. The radical left, maintaining a post-Zionist and universalist position, performs samba in an attempt to transcend religious, ethnic, and nationalist symbolism. In contradistinction to both of these communities and their chosen genres of music, the performance of neo-Hasidic pop by the datiim leumiim reinforces the liturgical and biblical underpinnings of religious Zionism and the yearning associated with life in the Diaspora. Yaron Ezrahi argues that the rhetoric of settlement is “pre-state” rhetoric; this musical discourse manifests parallel rhetorical strategies. Lastly, the ideologies inherent in the performance of neo-Hasidic pop and rock relate to the aesthetics and ideologies of the Hasidic niggun. Given that Hasidism was founded on Kabbalistic ideas in which music and dance were key vehicles to unification with the divine and were believed to have the power to affect the Godhead, and that Rav Kook was himself a kabbalist and incorporated theurgist elements into his Zionist teachings, I suggest the following parallel; whereas the Hasidim engage in singing and dancing as a personal redemptive process, the datiim leumiim transport this into the political realm and engage neo-Hasidic music and dance as a process of the redemption of the Land of Israel. Analyzing musical language as a manifestation of political interaction provides a portal into understanding the forces competing to define the public sphere of Jerusalem. Additionally, it highlights the ways in which Jewish music acquires various meanings through the act of performance and the appropriation by individual agents.

2008

Musical Quarterly , 2014

Journal of Palestine Studies

This is an ethnographic study of the fraught and complex cultural politics of music making in Palestine-Israel in the context of the post-Oslo era. I examine the politics of sound and the ways in which music making and attached discourses reflect and constitute identities, and also, contextualize political action. Ethical and aesthetic positions that shape contemporary artistic production in Israel-Palestine are informed by profound imbalances of power between the State (Israel), the stateless (Palestinians of the occupied Palestinian territories), the complex positioning of Israel's Palestinian minority, and contingent exposure to ongoing political violence. Cultural production in this period is also profoundly informed by highly polarized sentiments and retreat from the expressive modes of relationality that accompanied the 1990s peace process, strategic shifts in the Palestinian struggle for liberation, which is increasingly taking place on the world stage through diplomatic and cultural work, and the conceptual life and currency Palestine has gained as an entity deserving of statehood around the world. The ethnography attends to how the conflict is lived and expressed, musically and discursively, in both Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) of the West Bank, encompassing different sites, institutions and individuals. I examine the ways in which music making and attached discourses reflect and constitute identities, with the understanding that musical culture is a sphere in which power and hegemony are asserted, negotiated and resisted through shifting relations between and within different groups. In all the different contexts presented, the dissertation is thematically and theoretically underpinned by the ways in which music is used to culturally assert or reterritorialize social and spatial boundaries in a situation of conflict. Beginning with cultural policy promoted by music institutions located in Israel and in the West Bank, the ethnography focuses on two opposing approaches to cultural interventions in the conflict: music as a site of resistance and nation building amongst Palestinian music conservatories located in the oPt, and music is a site of fostering coexistence and shared models of citizenship amongst Jewish and Arab citizens in mixed Palestinian-Jewish environments in Israel. This follows with the ways in which music making is used to rewrite the spatial and temporal boundaries imposed on individuals and communities by the repressive regime of the occupation. The ethnography also attends to the ways in which the cultural construction of place and nation is lived and sounded outside of institutional frameworks, in the blurry boundaries and 'boderzones' where fixed ethno-national divisions do not align with physical spaces and individual identities. This opens up spaces for alternative imaginings of national and post-national identities, of resistance and coexistence, of the universal and the particular, that musically highlight the daily struggles of individuals and communities negotiating multiplex modalities of difference.

Israeli music's evolution over the last or forty years should be approached, studied and accepted as a chaotic system rather than a well-defined, clearly integrated cultural and social phenomenon. Moreover, some will argue against the very validity of delimiting and defining such a cultural phenomenon in the framework and short span of existence of modern Israel. The forties and the fifties wishfully viewed the music in the land of Israel as the triumph of a nation-in-the-making integrative culture. Composers of European descent provided both the Western know-how in articulating the local idiom and the romantic view of folklore as the repository of the deepest and most authentic spiritual elements of ethnic groups. They shared the belief that artistic expression is a major link between land's mystic and people's sensibility and felt compelled to enroll in the historical task of forging such an expression and accelerating its embedding in the emerging cultural strata. Furthermore, unlike America, perceived by its pioneers as a no man's land, Palestine was for the Jewish pioneers of the 20th century an anciently promised, biblical land, enriched by the lure of the East. Socially and ethnically, young Israel strove to become a melting pot of more than a hundred Jewish communities and local Moslem and Christian ones. Politically, the State aimed at being the pole on which everything Jewish would be defined. The absorption and integration of local elements was, therefore, a desideratum, which helped making the Eastern Mediterranean style 1 in music the dominant idiom from mid-thirties to the end of the sixties. Without any doubt, the Eastern Mediterranean style enjoyed both the tacit and overt support of all those concerned with establishing and strengthening the new political entity. It had an ethos which people much loved to identify with as well as a number of clichés proudly exhibited by many a work. Undoubtedly, the general mood and ethos of young Israel were a favorable climate to idealization in which this musical trend fitted very well. Those composers who didn't adhere to the mainstream offered only a meager challenge, since avant-garde art was unacceptable at that juncture 2. * * * The sixties witnessed the coming into maturity and prominence of a group of composers who had previously been overpowered by the activism of the founding fathers of Israeli music. Most of them were born elsewhere, but young and receptive at the moment of their immigration, and therefore intensely exposed to the socio-cultural milieu around them. One counts as most distinctive Oedoen Partos, Mordecai Seter, Joseph Tal, Abel Ehrlich and Jacob Gilboa, all composers who embarked on musical activities drastically beyond what was fashionable to the Israel musical scene. These were years of Israeli composers' eagerly looking for encounters with the latest developments in Western music. Already established composers take the trip to 1 The term was coined by Max Brod 2 In the late thirties, Stephan Wolpe gave up fighting the local artistic establishment and left for America.

Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, 2016

Discussing mechanisms of representation in modern Jewish art music in general and post- Holocaust commemoration music in particular, the article examines the dilution of musical signs in Holocaust-related works penned by Israeli composers Noam Sheriff, Ruben Seroussi, and Tzvi Avni. Written within the span of thirteen years, between 1985 and 1998, these works include Sherrif’s (b. 1935) Mechaye Hametim (He Who Revives the Dead, 1985); Seroussi’s (b. 1959) A Victim from Terezin (1995; based on excerpts from Gonda Redlich’s Terezin diary); Avni’s (b. 1927) Se questo è un oumo (1998; a setting of poems by Primo Levi); and Avni’s From There and Then (1994–1998). The compositions under discussion unfold a continuum of aesthetic approaches ranging from postromantic trajectories that stitch musical signs on nationalist teleological constellations (Sheriff), through conscious non-redemptive formulations (Seroussi), to compositional emphases on the migration and translocation of Jewish musics rather than affixed signs of otherness (Avni). The dilution of Jewish musical markers not only attests to the composers’ abandoning of representational apparatuses, but also necessitates a broader look at the dialectical movement of Jewish musics before, during, and after the Holocaust, lest these sounds become objectified or otherwise overshadowed by nationalist constellations.