Musica mizrakhit: ethnicity and class culture in Israel

Israel Studies, 2005

This essay deals with some issues relating to music in Israel. Many regard music as a universal language bridging barriers thrown up by spoken tongues , but there is more to music than meets the ear, for music divides by ethnicity, social class and age. Since the middle 1960s when classic Israeliness began to be challenged, Israeli culture has become much more contentious. Canonical highbrow culture was important in creating Israel's social structure, especially differences between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim. Thus classical ''art'' music is jostled for supremacy by such genres as Israel rock, musica mizrahit, Mediterranean music, and exposure to global pop cultures. Israeli culture has developed an open market in which everyone competes for devotees.

2007

This paper discusses the significance of status versus class in explaining the distribution of musical tastes among Jews in Israel. We analyze 15 music genres and four clusters that represent different musical realms: highbrow, western popular, mixed popular and eastern-religious popular. We embed the status versus class question in the particular features of Israeli society by focusing on two issues. First, the extent to which cultural stratification is affected by parental social position.

Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2007

Ari Katorza & Oded Heilbronner: Youth, Identity, and Re-Fashioning Popular Music in Israel 1950s–1980s, 2024

The book Youth, Identity, and Re-Fashioning Popular Music in Israel. 1950s–1980s aims to refresh the understanding of the relationship between social power relations, youth culture, and popular music in Israel. The authors discuss various perspectives regarding the axis of youth, popular culture, and music and present additional options for the discourse on these topics in Israel. Among its many new findings, the study discusses new insights relating to the increasing openness of Israeli culture to globalization, the decline of the collective culture of the Sabra, the rise of individual culture, liberalism and neoliberalism, the decay of Israeli consensus, and the melting pot idea and practices. In addition, the authors examine various perspectives on how Israeli culture and music have changed over the years and reacted to historical alterations. It reviews the tensions between modernism and postmodernism, localism and globalism, teenagers and their parents’ culture, ethnicity and class, hegemonic negotiations, and marginal subcultures. This book uses historical methodology combined with the assistance of cultural theories, historical surveys, and first-hand documents. Author / Editor information Oded Heilbronner, Shenkar College For Industry and Design, Ramat Gan, Israel; Ari Katorza, Reichman University, Herzliya, and Rimon School of Music, Israel.

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.

AbstractThis article examines the production of ‘high culture’ and how it shapes social mobility. I observe how the second generation of immigrants from North Africa have succeeded in rising up the Israeli social hierarchy by appropriating established modes of cultural expression. The founders of the Israel Andalusian Orchestra became aware that the road to full integration was closed to them by the politics of difference, that the way to total segregation from wider Israeli society was closed by economic and ontological dependence on the national state, and the option of multi-culturalism condemned them to a permanently marginal status. They realized that they needed a new political approach and that cultural appropriation was the way by which they could reclaim their ethnic identity yet still establish themselves among the élite of Israel.

The Rouledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage, 2018

One of the most distinctive characteristics of Palestinian popular music is that its production is exclusively based on improvisation (on-the-spot invention), mostly by performers who operate as poets and composers at the same time. This has been going on throughout Palestinian history, accumulating a tremendous repertoire of music and lyrics of various Palestinian popular music genres such as ‘ataba, dal’ona and zajal. After providing a precise definition of Palestinian popular music and enumerating the features that distinguish it from other popular music traditions in the Arab Middle East and the rest of the world, evidence will be provided for demonstrating the fact that all researchers of Palestinian popular music agree that productivity in Palestinian popular music has been brought to its demise in the last three decades, thus turning Palestinian popular music from a living and ever-growing tradition in people’s everyday life into a frozen heritage to be reserved and taken good care of. This has been taken for granted not only by researchers, but also by artists, performers, local audiences, and all those who are now in charge of Palestinian popular music, including the Palestinian National Authority in Ramallah (the PNA). This is what I call ‘heritagising Palestinian popular music’, and consider it the most decisive (and detrimental) feature in the current Palestinian cultural landscape. I will then show that, in spite of this sharp awareness of the phenomenon of ‘heritagising Palestinian popular music’, almost none of the involved researchers has addressed this issue, nor tried to problematise it or investigate the reasons behind it. Due to this severe gap in the literature, this chapter will end with a detailed account of the sociocultural and political process and conditions that have moved Palestinian popular music from the roads and yards of Palestinian peasantry to the archives and studios of Palestinian urban centres. In a way of summary, this chapter will end up with an analytical description of the state of Palestinian popular music at the time of writing.

A musical scene emerged in Israel in the 1990s, around unprecedented interaction between Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Druze musicians in Israel and the West Bank. 2