How Israeli Music Celebrates Diversity
A high-pitched adhan, the Islamic call for prayer, overlies the calm voice of a woman teaching sacred Hebrew words to children who repeat her lines. A piano is carefully unloaded as we approach a clubhouse in Offra, one of the oldest settlements in the West Bank.
We are a group of 20 professors from different countries and academic fields selected by the Schusterman Summer Institute of Israeli Study. Brandeis University. Flying to Israel from Canada, Brazil, Delhi, Prague, Los Angeles and Chicago, we historians, anthropologists, specialists in art, film, political science, foreign affairs, and security convening for a recent intense 23-day program.
At Brandeis our group spent two weeks of seven to eight hours of lecture daily. Afterwards we travel to Israel continuing a round-the-clock program there. The goal for each of us is to devise classes on Israeli studies in our own fields. In my case, Israeli music.
Beyond analyzing melodies, chords, and complicated rhythms, an ethnomusicologist, I explore the politics of performance — a political speech as a production, a state parade a spectacle that
combines theater and politics.
In Jerusalem, along busy, exciting, never sleeping Ben Yehuda Street, I pass a Jewish Orthodox playing rock music; a classical violinist; singing Russian puppeteers; a Jewish Ethiopian drummer, and about a dozen other groups.
A few hundred yards away in the Old City, the air vibrates with prayer coming from mosques an Armenian church choir, the chants of Greek Orthodox, and the murmur of praying Orthodox Jews.
People look modern and ancient, some dressed in attire that rolls back a century or a millennium.
It is an ancient land and a young country born from the ashes of the Holocaust and a long history of European anti-Semitism. It is involved in the conflict with an Arabic Muslim minority within and an Arabic majority around (over 70 times the Jewish population of Israel.) A 67-year-young country which according to Yedidia Stern (the Israel Democracy Institute) acts as a teenager, assembled a striking racial, social, linguistic, religious patchwork of its Jewish population.
The birth of the state told through music might begin with early 20th century Zionist songs of Jews escaping from the Russian Pale of Settlement to settle in Palestine. Early kibbutz tunes echo enthusiastic marches of Soviet youth who likewise pioneered collective farms. In the first known classical concert in a kibbutz, Jascha Heifetz , the great American violinist http://www.museumeinharod.org.il/english/about/articles/the_historical_role.html born and raised in the Russian empire, played before his former compatriots who had migrated to Palestine decades before Israel was founded.
The starting point could be the birth of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra. In the 1930s, when Nazis began the extermination of European Jewry, violinist Bronislaw Huberman recruited “Jewish orchestral players” with their families, saving more than 1,000 people and founding the Palestine Symphony (renamed the Israeli Philharmonics after the establishment of Israeli in 1948).
The first concert was conducted by Arturo Toscanini — an outspoken anti-Fascist who left Europe vowing not to return until the Nazis fell. My next lecture would be on the Inbal Dance troupe and the ballet dedicated to the airlift that brought Yemenite Jews to one-year-old Israeli state.
To be sure, Israel’s most difficult problem is the tangled conflict between Muslims and Jews. The blast of frequent wars, conflicts and terroristic acts seem to doom peace deafening this region.
Khaled Abu Toameh, a Palestinian journalist who lectured to our group about on Palestinian politics, believes a peaceful solution unforeseeable for Palestinians because of their leadership, public education, and a common myth (http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6142/palestinians-peace-israel).
According to Toameh, no Palestinian leader has had a mandate from both its own population and Arabic Islamic states to complete negotiation with Israel. Also Palestinians raised with the notion of Israel as the mortal enemy would find any leader making peace with the evil a traitor. A majority of Palestinian Arabs believe eventually to outnumber Jews — a half-pie two-state solution unsatisfying.
We met with members of the Israeli Knesset, some ready and willing to compromise in the name of two states, others hardcore opponents.
The cacophony of public voices, political, ethnic, religious at times makes each sound indiscernible.
But the musical soundscape gives a different hope. It can invigorate conflict or create unlikely alliances. A beautiful female singing duo, Noa and Mira Avad, who are a Yemenite Jewish Israeli and Arab Israeli, perform their signature song, “There Must Be Another Way.”
A Yemenite Jewish transgendered pop singer, Dana International, also known as Saida Sultana , is a native speaker of both Hebrew and Arabic.
Before winning the Eurovision Song Contest with her openly pro-gay 1998 song “Diva,” Saida Sultana’s cassettes gained a large following in Egypt. This led Muhammad al-Ghayati to write that Israel corrupts, “penetrates . . . like a plague” innocent Arab youth.
Israeli musical mosaics reflect diversity: a Yemenite Jewish pop-singer has musical ties with an Arabic counterpart; a small Moroccan Jewish ensemble with Middle-Eastern improvised maqam tradition; Iberian Jewish ballads or the musical lingua of Central Asian (Bukharan) Jewry sound exotic to Jewish musicians trained in European conservatories. Persian Jewry sings in Farsi, Ethiopian in Amharic.
Also, Druze, Circassians, and Bedouins navigate their identities and their alliances in a multilingual state. Rafiq Halabi, Mayor of the Druz Center (Dalyiat el-Carmel), talks about fiery Druze dance, dabke, shared by Druze in Israeli, Syrian, and Lebanon.
It is Halabi’s way of telling that despite cultural unity, each Druze community remains loyal to its country.
And there are many more musical traditions and experiments. Idan Raichel is an Israeli born, well- trained keyboardist, composer, and a student of world music. Raichel assembles a multiethnic group of superb performers. His fusion of Ethiopian, North African, Latin American Jewish, and Arabic musics and languages can be seen as the work of a Jewish Orientalist — for one who does not walk the streets of Jaffa, Tel Aviv, Haifa.
Sound conquers the space, maps and reshapes it. Music celebrates people’s complicated coexistence.
My hope is that the complex musical microcosm densely woven with pluralism of ideas in Israel will reach our students and beyond, our empathy translating into their compassion and finding sensitive ears.
