2 West Coasts: Music Networks between Israel and the San Francisco Bay Area

In Israeli songs and poetry in Hebrew, San Francisco and its Bay are often presented as a distant and pleasant place, which causes poets and songwriters to reflect on their land (or love) of origin. San Francisco seems to orient the perception of Israel in Hebrew lyrics.

The similarity of facing West (the Mediterranean Sea, and the Pacific Ocean, respectively), indeed seems to prompt some unexpected connections, which are also reflected in the Jewish musical history that unites Israel to the Bay Area.

There are all kinds of wine houses, taverns and dives
In San Francisco, San Malo and Marseille….
There are blondes and brunettes that will eat you alive!
All waiting for some “beau” to sweep them away…
But as for me, despite it all, I swear sincerely,
I am chained down to some dilapidated dame..
If my harmonica sings out a weepy blues,
And if I hate myself, it’s not the wine or booze,
It’s that female, damn it, she’s the one to blame!

What’s come over me? The devil knows!
I am feeling confused and dazed…
Is it the night? Or is it this song
That has left me bewitched and amazed?
A harmonica spreads its wings in flight!
Singing a song of laughter and woes
oh good lord, will you explain the night?
Or is it only the devil that knows?

(Edna Goren and Kobi Recht, Zemer mapuchit, or “The Song of the Harmonica,” 1968; lyrics by Nathan Alterman and music by Sasha Argov, 1956; Hebrew lyrics found here, and English translation, by Achinoam Nini/Noa, available here).

Sitting in San Francisco by the Water
Carried away by the blues and greens
It’s beautiful in San Francisco by the Water
Then why do I feel so removed

Watching the ducks, roaming amongst the boats
and the Golden Gate Bridge, beautiful like in a movie
It’s a shame you’re not here
With me to see it
You’d say you’d never leave

I watch Doctor J, tear down the nets
and Kareem Abdul Jabbar, touches the sky
It’s a shame you’re not here
With me to see it
It’s so beautiful in San Francisco by the Water

Suddenly I want to go back home
Return to the swamp
To sit in Kasit with Moshe and Chatske
Give me Mount Tibor
Give me the Kinneret
I love and keep falling in love with my little Israel Warm and Charming

(Arik Einstein, san fransisqo ‘al ha-mayim – San Francisco on the Water, from the album Hamush bemishkafaim – Armed With Glasses, 1980; lyrics found here).

This week, we explore a host of musical relations between Israel and the San Francisco Bay Area.

A Hebrew poem by Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000), Israel’s leading poet, dedicated verses to San Francisco and the Bay Area. (The English translation that appears below was done by Avshalom Guissin, and can be found here; a UC Press edition of translations of Amichai’s poems, by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell, is linked here; thank you to my friend Dorothy Richman for sharing this poem with me).

North of San Francisco*

Here the soft hills touch the sea,
like eternity touching on eternity.
And the cows that graze on them
ignore us, like angels.
Even the scent of ripe cantaloupe in the cellar
is a prophecy of calm.

The darkness does not fight the light
but passes it forward
to another light and the only pain
is the pain of not staying.

In my land called holy
eternity isn’t allowed to be eternity:
they divided it into small religions
and demarcated it in deified departments
and shattered it into shards of history
sharp and mortally wounding.
And they turned its calm reaches
into a closeness that twitches with present pain.

On Bolinas beach at the bottom of the wooden stairs
I saw bare buttocked girls
bowing down in the sand
intoxicated with the kingdom of everlasting kingdoms,
and their souls within like doors
closing and opening,
closing and opening,
to the rhythm of the breaking waves.

* From: Yehuda Amichai, Me-Adam Bata, Ve-El Adam Tashuv (Schocken Publishing, Tel Aviv, 1985), pp. 99–100.

The history of the musical relations between Israel and the Bay Area go back to the 1930’s, when San Francisco’s became the first Jewish community in the Diaspora to raise funds for the founding of the Palestine Orchestra (which, as we have learned in a previous week, was the ancestor of modern day’s Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra). 

The film, Orchestra of Exiles (2012), about the creation of the Palestine Orchestra by Polish violinist Bronislaw Huberman, was indeed included in our Syllabus this semester.

The fundraising for the Palestine Orchestra, and the later commissioning of music to Israeli composers such as Paul Ben-Haim (1897-1984) and Marc Lavry (1903-1967), was the work of Reuben R. Rinder (1887-1966), who between 1913 and 1962 served as the Cantor of Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco. 

The Western Jewish Americana archives of The Magnes, accessible at The Bancroft Library, include the Reuben Rinder’s papers, a selection of which is available in an online narrative format (created by your instructor…). You can check it out here.

Several decades later, the musical ties between the Bay Area and Israel were renewed, when a San-Francisco-summer-of-love Jewish phenomenon, the music of the House of Love and Prayer (a Jewish center founded in San Francisco in 1967, also documented in the Western Jewish Americana archives of The Magnes at The Bancroft Library (link here), was transplanted to Israel along with its creator, Shlomo Carlebach (1925-1994).

Interestingly enough, Congregation Emanu-El and the House of Love and Prayer were located a few blocks from one another. See Google Maps directions for this 5-minute walk through San Francisco’s Jewish musical history.

Carlebach (who was born in Berlin), had studied in New York, and had moved to the Bay Area in 1966, as an emissary of the Habad movement, along with Zalman Schachter, as detailed in this week’s reading assignment, eventually moved to Israel, after one of his songs won the Hassidic Song Festival, one of the many song contests created in Israel after the festival hazemer hayisraeli that we discussed last week.

Here’s a clip from an Israeli television broadcast of Carlebach (1973).

A more recent, and less explored connection between our Bay and the Israeli musical scene, is in the open-source-inspired creation of the website, An Invitation to Piyyut (as we’ve learned, a piyyut is a Hebrew poem included in synagogue liturgy).

This extraordinary resource (which is connected to a real-life cultural initiative, Kehillot Sharot, or “singing communities” (active across Israel in transmitting traditional liturgical-musical lore to new generations, defying the boundaries between religion, art, culture, gender, and religious affiliations) charts century-old Hebrew poems in their musical versions across the Jewish Diaspora through texts and melodies. These resources are fully searchable, and also organized according to several principles, such as author, religious occasion (liturgical and para-liturgical events, life cycle ceremonies), and Jewish culture of origin. For example, if you follow this link, you will land on a page listing 21 different poems for the upcoming festival of Hanukkah, in countless musical versions spanning the entire Jewish Diaspora.

The website exists though the efforts of Israeli musician and music promoter (and Music in Israel “Zoom guest” this semester) Yair Harel (and the formidable support of the Avi Chai Foundation. You can see Yair in action while presenting his project in a very US-minded, Bay-Area-familiar, setting, here:

Musiqah Mizrachit: Is “Israeli Oriental Music” the *true* Music of Israel?

This week we get to focus on one of the “hot” topics in the study of music in Israel: the rise of musiqah mizrachit, Israeli Oriental music, from the old Tel Aviv bus station to the charts.

In overall terms, we’ve already encountered the issue of Jewish orientalism. It’s a loaded topic, which goes back almost two centuries (and to German Jewish culture), and that also finds its interpreters among unexpected popular culture icons. As a reminder, see for example how Danny Kaye and Harry Belafonte interpreted Hava nagilah back in 1966:

The theme of Jewish orientalism was also appropriated by non-European Jews, such as the Algerian-French musical legend, Enrico Macias:

…on the basis of a long tradition of Jewish musical practice–involving classical and popular music alike–in the lands of Islam.

Listen for example to Macias’ predecessor, Algerian legend, Lili Boniche:

What we are thus talking about here, in musical terms, is tuning in to music (any music), within the parameters of Arabic music. Here’s a handy example, from an instructor of the (online) Arabic Music Library, a YouTube channel that attempts to explain “Western music” to those growing up within the Arab musical world:

In Israeli terms, the issue of musical orientalism has to do as much with the development of local musical genres and of cultural “authenticity” as it has to do with politics. It is a musical culture that combines Jewish tradition with Arabic music and with pop and rock styles. As a culture expressed by Israeli Jews with roots in the lands of Islam, this music has given some of the most marginalized elements of Israeli society a voice (quite literally), and a way to be “heard” beyond music itself.

Musiqah mizrachit, or Israeli oriental music, has been also called musiqah shel tachanah merqazit (music of the Central [Bus] Station), or musiqah qasetot (cassette tape music), because it was first available outside of mainstream cultural outlets (like the official music market, radio broadcasting, TV, and national music festivals), and distributed instead on bootlegged cassette tapes, sold at bus stations. (Buses and collective taxis were the main mode of transportation in Israel until the advent private cars in the 1980s, and remain an essential mode of transportation until today. Israeli bus stations are therefore important hubs and places of great diversity and social exchange).

It’s hard to explain what the old Tel Aviv bus station, where musiqah mizrachit was initially sold in the ubiquitous cassette-tape format, was like. In this Israeli television clip from 1992 (one year before the bus station was dismantled) passers-by were interviewed about the music they had come to buy there.

Note that they all converge on a few names, including that of Zehava Ben (check her out on Spotify), a Moroccan Israeli singer, born in 1968, who had grown up in an impoverished neighborhood of the southern city of Beersheba, and who had just come to prominence in the film Tipat Mazal (A Bit of Luck, 1992), for which she sang the title song:

On the wings of her initial success, Zehava Ben went all the way to emulate one of the greatest legends of Arabic music, the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum (1898 or 1904 -1975). She started in the 1990s, but one could still hear her live in Tel Aviv (2016) at the Pasáž (aka, “passage,” in French) club:

And here is the “original” model, aka Umm Kulthum, in a legendary live performance filmed fifty years previously, at the Olympia in Paris (November 1967):

Coming back to the Tel Aviv Centra Bus Station, the Israeli rock band Teapacks (or Tipex, depending on who’s reading their name) made an attempt at narrating it in a rather nostalgic way:

While the music of mizrachiyut (oriental Israeliness) indeed emerged out of Tel Aviv, its politics were defined by a mostly Jerusalem-based movement, the panterim ha-shechorim (yes, the [Israeli] “Black Panthers”), rebellious Moroccan-Israeli youth from the Jerusalemite neighborhood of Musrara (right on the green line), famously described by Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, as “not nice boys”:

Musiqah mizrachit has had a host of interpreters, from “purists” to pop stars.

My personal favorites:

Zohar Argov (Ha-perach be-gani, “The Flower in My Garden”)…

…and Sarit Haddad (Ani lo madonah, “I am not Madonna”):

These days, while the sound of musiqah mizrachit still defines music in Israel, the music market is moving beyond it. See it for yourself, for instance through the excellent work of Ester Rada, born in an Ethiopian-Israeli family in Kiryat ‘Arba, whose work addresses both the East African roots of her heritage:

as well as the sounds of the “Black Atlantic“:

In the last decade, Israeli explorations of the Judeo-Arabic musical past have ranged in scope.

Moroccan-Israeli singer Neta Elkayam, for example, has focused on the repertoire of Zohra Al Fassiya (1904-1994), an early-20th century Jewish star of Moroccan popular music, singing in Arabic:

Israeli singer-songwriter-guitarist Dudu Tassa (born 1977; here’s his Spotify channel) recorded music based on the repertoires of his grandfather Daoud and granduncle Saleh al-Kuwaiti – prominent musicians who immigrated from Iraq to Israel in 1951 but fell into obscurity in their new homeland. Here, he is performing live with his band, Dudu Tassa and the Kuwaitis, and with singer/actress Ninet Tayeb (of Tunisian-Moroccan Jewish origins):

Other musicians, like Riff Cohen, deploy the vocabulary of musiqah mizrachit beyond Israel itself, and beyond the Hebrew or Arabic languages:

And, of course, I could go on and on and on… This story is still very much developing.

A Song of the Land of Israel, a Song of War, and a Song of Otherness: Jerusalem of Gold as National Anthem

The iconic (and canonic) Israeli song, yerushalayim shel zahav (Jerusalem of Gold), a prime example of the SLI (Songs of the Land of Israel, or shire eretz yisrael) genre, was written by Israeli composer and singer-songwriter Naomi Shemer (1930-2004).

Shemer, an influential voice in the canon of Israeli mainstream and popular culture, rightfully deserves her own entry in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, authored by dr. Gila Flam, head of the Music Department of the National Library of Israel and “Music in Israel” Skype guest. (Note that links will only work with an account that allows access to certain electronic resources):

SHEMER, NAOMI (Saphir; 1930–2004), composer, song writer, and performer. Born at kevuẓat Kinneret, she studied at the Tel Aviv and Jerusalem Academies of Music. Among her teachers were Frank Peleg , Ilona Vinze-Kraus, Joseph Tal , and Abel Ehrlich . She returned to kevuẓat Kinneret as a music teacher and there she composed her first songs especially for children. In 1956 she moved to Tel Aviv. Her songs, to most of which she composed both lyrics and music, became very popular and are considered as part of the Israeli song canon. In 1967, after being commissioned by the Israel Broadcasting Authority to write a song for the annual song festival, she wrote Yerushalayim shel Zahav, which immediately became popular. It became the theme song of the Six-Day War and achieved international fame. In many Reform movement services and among both Ashkenazi and Sephardi congregations in Israel and the Diaspora, the song was introduced into the liturgy for special occasions, such as Friday evening, the last hakkafah on Simhat Torah , and the synagogue service on Israeli Independence Day. Considered to perfectly express the love of the nation for Jerusalem, the song was proposed in the Knesset as a new Israeli national anthem. By the mid-1980s there was not an Israeli singer or ensemble that had not performed one of Shemer’s songs. Nicknamed the “national songwriter,” she demonstrated a unique ability to express the national mood. Although her first works were published in the 1950s, her first book of songs, Kol ha-Shirim (“Complete Songs”), did not appear until 1967. Later publications included four additional song books (1975, 1982, 1995, 2003), as well as various collections for children. As a singer, she recorded a selection of her own songs. Her honors included the Israel Prize for Israeli song (1982), Jerusalem Prize (1983), and honorary doctorates from the universities of Jerusalem (1994) and Beersheba (1999). (Flam, Gila. “Shemer, Naomi.” Encyclopaedia Judaica. Ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik. 2nd ed. Vol. 18. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007. 457-458. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 13 Oct. 2013).

The song was presented at the Israel Song Festival of 1967, which

took place amid the growing tensions on Israel’s borders that led, three weeks later, to the Six-Day War in June of that year. The winning song was a sentimental love song, performed by Mike Burstyn, which was soon forgotten. The event, however, entered collective memory because of one of five new songs especially commissioned by the ma[y]or of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek. [including] “Yerushalayim shel zahav” […]. Performed (outside of the competition0 by Shuli Natan, who accompanied herself on acoustic guitar, the song “that changed the country forever” in Dan Almagor’s words, expressed almost prayerlike longing for the city, as though anticipating the eruption of national sentiment few weeks later, when the Old City of Jerusalem was brought under Israeli control. Interestingly enough, this was one of the first modern Israeli songs abut Jerusalem written from a national, rather than a traditional religious, perspective. (Regev and Seroussi. Popular Music and National Culture in Israel. UC Press, 2004: 117).

A YouTube user posted a recording of this original performance of the song by then 20-year-old Shuli Natan (born 1947):

The lyrics of yerushalayim shel zahav have been translated into English a number of times. They can be found on the website of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as searched on HebrewSongs.org, and even on a website solely devoted by this song (now defunct, but retrievable through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine) created by the American-Israeli scholar Yael Levine, whose translation appears below:

The mountain air is clear as wine
And the scent of pines
Is carried on the breeze of twilight
With the sound of bells.

And in the slumber of tree and stone
Captured in her dream
The city that sits solitary
And in its midst is a wall.

Jerusalem of gold, and of bronze, and of light
Behold I am a violin [Hebr. kinor] for all your songs.

How the cisterns have dried
The market-place is empty
And no one frequents the Temple Mount
In the Old City.

And in the caves in the mountain
Winds are howling
And no one descends to the Dead Sea
By way of Jericho.

Jerusalem of gold, and of bronze, and of light
Behold I am a violin for all your songs.

But as I come to sing to you today,
And to adorn crowns to you (i.e. to tell your praise)
I am the smallest of the youngest of your children (i.e.the least worthy of doing so)
And of the last poet.

For your name scorches the lips
Like the kiss of a seraph
If I forget thee, Jerusalem,
Which is all gold…

Jerusalem of gold, and of bronze, and of light
Behold I am a violin for all your songs.

The lyrics of yerushalayim shel zahav offer a Hebrewist re-actualization of the poetic tradition of the Book of Psalms, and are crowded with biblical imagery drawn from the Hebrew Bible itself, as well as from Hebrew poetry from late antiquity and early-modern times. In the song, the poet (embodied by two women: composer Naomi Shemer and performer Shuli Natan) speaks in the first person, singing the ancient glories and present demise of the city of Jerusalem, accompanying herself, like a modern-day female King David, on the biblical instrument, the kinor–a Hebrew word of biblical origin, which in modern Hebrew refers to the violin, as reflected in most English translations of the original lyrics.

The end of the Six Day War (the history of which can be studied through a wide variety of conflicting resources, among which two Twitter feeds, one in Hebrew, chronicling its events as if they happened in real tweet-time, and the official English Twitter account of the Israeli National Archives, became available only very recently) granted Israelis and Jews from the world over access to the Old City of Jerusalem (which had been denied during the Jordanian occupation (1948) and subsequent annexation (1950) of the city). Following Israel’s victory, Jews were once again allowed access to the Old City, and could pray at the Western Wall and restore the many synagogues and the Jewish Quarter.

In the aftermath of the war, Naomi Shemer added two new strophes to the song, reflecting Jewish return to the Old City:

We have returned to the cisterns
To the market and to the market-place
A ram’s horn (shofar) calls out on the Temple Mount In the Old City.

And in the caves in the mountain
Thousands of suns shine
We will once again descend to the Dead Sea
By way of Jericho!

This version of her song became truly iconic of the Israeli experience. Shuli Natan began performing it throughout the world, and, of course, in Israel. Below are video recordings of a 1968 performance in France…

…and of a 1986 appearance on Israeli television (note the background of the TV set, with, faintly visible in the background, footage of Keneset, the seat of the Israeli Parliament in Jerusalem):

In 1993, the song was included in the soundtrack of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List: 

The powerful symbology of the nexus that the inclusion of yerushalayim shel zahav in this Hollywood movie established between the Holocaust, the founding of the State of Israel, and the Six Day War, did not go unnoticed, along with its anachronism. In Israeli showings of the movie, the song was apparently replaced by Eli Eli (lyrics by Hannah Senesh, 1921-1944).

By 1998, yerushalayim shel zahav had become part of the national patrimony, and could be performed by Yemenite-Israeli pop star Ofra Haza in the course of the national celebration commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel, at the Hebrew University Stadium. (Note the “orientalist” vocal embellishments inserted by the singer at the end of the performance):

The process of canonization of yerushalayim shel zahav continued over the decades, since its original performance in 1967, and even took place in roundabout ways.

As Dalia Gavriely-Nury noted in 2007:

In May 1968, Knesset Member Uri Avnery proposed a law designating the song as Israel’s official national anthem and raised his proposal again 35 years later. (Dalia Gavriely-Nuri, “The Social Construction of “Jerusalem of Gold” as Israel’s Unofficial National Anthem,” Israel Studies 12/2, Summer 2007: 104-120; note: the online sources mentioned by the author are not available).

Avnery’s proposal was everything but nationalistic, and warrants some attention as it exemplifies the political uses (and appropriations) of popular culture.

Avnery, a former member of the Israeli parliament and a political activist, first attempted to use Yerushalayim shel zahav against Israel’s official national anthem, Ha-tikvah (The Hope) while at the Kenesset:

I thought that if I proposed Naomi Shemer’s song as a national anthem, I might be able to build a consensus for the idea of changing the existing one. I was not happy with several nationalist phrases added to the song, but I believed that we could change that along the way. (Uri Avnery, “Death of a Myth,” 14/05/05, http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1115987772/, accessed on 10/13/2013).

In 2005, shortly after her death, it became public knowledge that Naomi Shemer had “unwittingly” used a Basque lullaby as the source for the melodic line of her song. Israeli reporter and writer, Tom Segev, reported about this in Haaretz.

View this document on Scribd

Following additional reporting by Haaretz staff, it appears that the lullaby was performed by Spanish singer, Paco Ibáñez (b. 1934), in a concert that took place in Jerusalem in 1962:

Ibáñez said yesterday that he was saddened to hear of Shemer’s guilt feelings over basing the song on the Basque folk melody and not admitting it. “It is a shame. She had no reason to feel guilty,” he said yesterday. “True, I think she heard the song from me, but that’s life and that’s how I see it. It wasn’t even a secret. I spoke to friends about it and mentioned it in conversations with people. I didn’t speak to Naomi Shemer since then because I didn’t see her again, and it didn’t really matter to me. If I had seen her, I certainly would have mentioned it, but of course, without anger.” Ibáñez said his mother would sing the lullaby to him when he was little and sat in her lap. He recorded the song, which is based on a folk tune, in his volume Songs I Heard from My Mother. Ibáñez said he first heard Shemer’s song in the summer of 1967, shortly after it was written. He immediately recognized it as his song, “Joseph’s hair.” “I didn’t consider this plagiarism but rather felt a lot of empathy for Shemer. Was I angry? Not at all. On the contrary, I was glad it helped in some way.” (Idit Avrahami, Nurit Wurgaft, “Shemer had no reason to feel bad, says Basque singer of copied tune, Haaretz, May 6, 2005, http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/shemer-had-no-reason-to-feel-bad-says-basque-singer-of-copied-tune-1.157853, accessed 10/13/2013).

The singer continued to perform the song as part of his repertoire: 

Despite Ibáñez’s statements, Shemer’s posthumous admission has since given rise to a series of accusations, which at times have turned into veritable indictments against the “authenticity” (or lack of) of Israeli culture as a whole.

Avnery, for example, renewed his proposal to promote yerushalayim shel zahav to the role of Israel’s national anthem immediately after Shemer’s “appropriation” hit the news cycle, this time with the intent of attacking Israel’s own “myths,” including those connected with the Six Day War:

Israel is a country built on many symbols and myths. What could be more symbolic than the destruction of the myth of the Six-Day war, now followed by the collapse of the myth of “Jerusalem of Gold”, that war’s symbol in song? (Uri Avnery, “Death of a Myth,” 14/05/05, http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1115987772/, accessed on 10/13/2013).

This was almost ten years ago, and it’s not unlikely that the saga will continue, along with discussions about Israel’s national anthem, which often remind me of the lack of a shared melody for Hoggy Warty Hogwarts, the “anthem” described by J. K. Rawlings in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (chapter 7) as having no tune, tempo, or duration, and for which each student was invited by the Headmaster to “pick their favorite tune.”

Needless to say, the Hollywood filmic rendition of the scene (displaced in the narrative to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) does not reconstruct its sonic (and multicultural) echoes:

Ten Competing Notions of “Jewish Music”

Let’s scan through ten (at times competing) notions of “Jewish Music” that have emerged during the last, well, 500 years.

Background information for this is in the articles by Philip Bohlman and Edwin Seroussi listed in the Syllabus (they were last week’s assignments, so I’m absolutely positive that everyone has already read them carefully…). These studies are also reflected in this week’s reading, and especially the “Jewish Music” entry in Oxford Music Online, which opens with the following statements.

‘Jewish music’ as a concept emerged among Jewish scholars and musicians only in the mid-19th century with the rise of modern national consciousness among European Jews, and since then all attempts to define it have faced many difficulties. The term ‘Jewish music’ in its nation-oriented sense was first coined by German or German-trained Jewish scholars, among whom the most influential in this respect was A.Z. Idelsohn (1882–1938), whose book Jewish Music in its Historical Development (1929) was a landmark in its field that is still widely consulted today . Idelsohn was the first scholar to incorporate the Jewish ‘Orient’ into his research, and thus his work presents the first ecumenical, though still fragmentary, description of the variety of surviving Jewish musical cultures set within a single historical narrative. In his work Idelsohn pursued a particular ideological agenda: he adopted the idea of the underlying cultural unity of the Jewish people despite their millenary dispersion among the nations, and promoted the view that the music of the various Jewish communities in the present expresses aspects of that unity. Moreover, Idelsohn’s work implied a unilinear history of Jewish music dating back to the Temple in biblical Jerusalem. This approach was perpetuated in later attempts to write a comprehensive overview of Jewish music from a historical perspective (e.g. Avenary, 1971–2). Despite its problematic nature, the concept of ‘Jewish music’ in its Idelsohnian sense is a figure of speech widely employed today, being used in many different contexts of musical activity: recorded popular music, art music composition, printed anthologies, scholarly research and so on. The use of this term to refer both to the traditional music of all Jewish communities, past and present, and to new contemporary music created by Jews with ethnic or national agendas is thus convenient, as long as its historical background and ideological connotations are borne in mind.

Below, I’m scanning through some of the connections that “Jewish music” elicits. I’m not pretending to be exhaustive, and I’m also having some fun in choosing related visual and musical examples to make my points.

1. Jewish music as “Musica Haebreorum”: the notion of a “music of the Hebrews (the Jews)” really begins with Christian Humanists and their heirs.

An example I particularly like (also because it has been eminently understudied, so far), and that one can read online, is from Ercole Bottrigari, Il trimerone de’ fondamenti armonici, ouero lo essercitio musicale, giornata terza, 1599 (Source: Bologna, Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale, MS B44, 1-23): Bottrigari specifically addresses “il Canto degli Hebrej” (the song of the Jews) and the musical rendition of the “masoretic accents” that govern the singing of the Hebrew Bible in synagogue liturgy. (Image source).

2. Jewish (musical) antiquity. But whose antiquity really is it?
Venetian composer Benedetto Marcello, and many many more after him, searched for “Jewish musical antiquity.” (You can read more about this topic here).

See a contemporary incarnation of the belief in Jewish musical antiquity by Jordi Savall-Hespèrion XXI, Lavava y suspirava (romance) (Anónimo Sefardí):

3. The Wissenschaft des Judentums (19th cent.) and the invention of “Jewish Music” as a Jewish notion

An interesting byproduct of 19th-century Jewish scholarship was been the construction of the “Italian Jewish Renaissance” as a golden age of musical production, and of Jewish music as “art music.” Listen below to Salamone Rossi, ‘al naharot bavel (Psalm 137), by The Prophets of the Perfect Fifth (I profeti della quinta)

4. Jewish music as “Music of the Jewish People” (with the related notions of Nationalism & Identity), as found in the “St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music” and in related Zionist musical agendas.

Lazare Saminsky (Odessa 1882- NY 1959), composed Conte Hebräique (Hebrew Fairy Tale) in Palestine in 1919, en route from Russia to America (via the UK).

5. Jewish music as “Judaism in Music” (an expression made quite popular by Richard Wagner in an eponymous antisemitic pamphlet published in 1850 and periodically reassessed) brings with it a certain passion for singling out “the Jewish elements” in the music of eminent composers of Jewish descent.

This is a trademark of many 20th-century scholarly contribution to the field.

An excellent summary on the relationship between Wagner and modern Jewish sensibilities can be found in the form of a satire in Curb Your Enthusiasm, Season 2, Episode 3: Trick or Treat (October 7, 2001) (note when Larry David whistles “Springtime from Hitler” from the Producers).

6. Jewish music as “Degenerate Music/Art” and the passion of making lists of “Jewish” composers, compositions, etc., so that music can be purified from their influence. This takes the previous notion a step (or two, or 10,000) further.

And, well, this is what the Nazis tried to do…

Watch “Illinois Nazis” enjoying their right to free speech in John Landis, The Blues Brothers (USA 1980):

A book published in Nazi Germany, listing Jewish music professionals, is included in the music holdings of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, and will be accessible to interested students as soon as these holdings are transferred to our new facility.

7. Jewish music as lost (or suppressed) music: in the view of post-Holocaust cultural agendas, any sample of Jewish culture is worthy of attention, and the enormity of the historical legacy of the Holocaust trumps any aesthetic consideration.

Watch, for example, this news report on Francesco Lotoro’s KZ Musik project, conducted with the support of the European Union:

8. Jewish music as revival.

A step further from recovering a lost musical world is reviving it.

In her essay, Sounds of Sensibility (1998), Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett outlines several implications related to the (American) revival of “Klezmer” music. A haunting parallel drawn by BKG is that of the revivalist as necromancer, aka, someone who brings the dead back to life. But revivalism means, first and foremost, re-thinking “tradition.” However posited, such as stance is invariably close to cultural subversion.

In his fascinating eulogy of Adrienne Cooper (1946-2011), one of the protagonists of the American revival of Ashkenazi culture, Canadian writer, Michael Wex, thus articulated the special relationship that late 20th-century Jewish revivalists had with tradition:

[Adrienne Cooper] had a talent for subversion along with an innate sense of decorum that let her reverse a tradition, turn it inside out, before any of its guardians had actually noticed.

The New-York band, Klezmatics, turned the socialist Yiddish song, Ale brider into an anthem for Queer rights:

9. Jewish music as “soul” and “fusion” (or, how to market Jewish culture to the “masses”).

A way to translate the idea of “musics in contacts” that characterizes Jewish culture into the musical market is to present it as either soul or fusion.

An example by Argentinian-Israeli musician, Giora Feidman highlights a musical aesthetics based on soulfulness:

10. Jewish music as “world music” (or “ethnic music”) (or, how to market Jewish culture to the “elites”)

By categorizing “Jewish music” as “world music,” one can find a legitimized place for it within the music market. Until not too long ago, one could find Jewish music within the “world music” sections of stores like Tower Records. With the digital revolution, descriptive metadata (on platforms like iTunes, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, Soundcloud, etc.) is king.

An example by Moroccan-Israeli cantor and singer, Emil Zrihan, who made the “leap” from Israeli synagogue cantor and pop star to “ethnic voice” (check out the arrangement of the Arab-Andalusian melody set to the Hebrew religious poem Kochav Tzedeq below):

World(s) of Jewish Music (Part I)

My own personal version of paradise (a very musical one) is located in Jerusalem. It’s called National Sound Archives (NSA). These were founded in 1964 by Israel Adler (Berlin 1925-Jerusalem 2009), my beloved teacher and a veritable powerhouse. Israel Adler—who was also the founding director of The Jewish Music Research Center of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (currently directed by Edwin Seroussi, our guest last week)—was into synergies, and thought that scholars and archivists should work hand-in-hand.

The result is a fantabulous collection of hundreds of thousands of recordings, documenting music in Israel (including traditional music of many religious groups as well as the sound archives of the State of Israel), and Jewish music from around the world.

A peculiarity of the NSA is that many of the researchers who have conducted their work there have left their notes to accompany the field recordings they either made or studied. The result is that (if one knows how to ask), scholars working in this institutions not only have access to amazing musical treasures from around the world. They also have access to the scholarship of those who preceded them. Talk about collaborative projects. And talk about standing on the shoulders of giants…

The current director of the NSA is dr. Gila Flam. She has spearheaded a massive process of digitization, which accessible via the recently opened Music Center of the National Library of Israel (it used to be called The Jewish National and University Library, or JNUL, and was founded before the founding of the State of Israel itself).

In the video below, dr. Flam addresses the scope of her project (the style of the video is a bit too formal for my own taste, and not entirely in line with my own experience with the reality of this institution over the last several decades as a vibrant and somewhat unconventional place). We also get to see the Givat Ram (or Safra) Campus of The Hebrew University, its Library, and snippets of the amazing music performances organized under dr. Flam’s guidance. All good stuff.

This week, we will use a compilation of recordings from the NSA as a way to explore the diversity of traditional sounds found, collected and preserved in Israel by its leading sound archive. The compilation, Musical Traditions in Israel: Treasures of the National Sound Archives, has recently become available online, and you can listen to 24 different sound examples here. Unfortunately, most of the metadata for this playlist is in Hebrew, BUT you can find a copy of the booklet that accompanied the original CD release on bCourses.

In order to guide you in your listening work, and in preparing your first weekly written response, please refer to this week’s handout (and to the syllabus for my guidelines in completing this assignment):

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What does Hollywood Teach Us about Music in Israel?

This week, we began to assess our topic by looking at how Hollywood has portrayed Israel, and its music, by taking a good look at Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960):

In its own “Hollywood+1950ish”-sort-of-way, the film (written by blacklisted Dalton Trumbo — and here’s your chance to use UC Berkeley’s Kanopy subscription to watch an excellent documentary…) also tried to give an account of how displaced Jewish refugees arrived to Palestine at the end of WW2. For non fictional account on this topic, you can read a 1948 report from the New York Times, which in turn reviews the documentary The Illegals (Meyer Levin, 1948):

And here’s a political cartoon by Arthur Szyk from the same year, found in the holdings of UC Berkeley’s Magnes Collection, and titled “The Jewish Plot to Survive”:

Going back to the movie, Exodus, we examined its main (often involuntarily hilarious, but always revealing) musical traits/moments:

Somehow (but then, who’s surprised?), the movie obliterated one of the most musical scenes in the original novel, by Leon Uris (1958), since it also involves sex, and gives a rather different view of the “Jewish musical soul” of the early citizens of Israel.

For everyone’s convenience, here are Uris’ pages:

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These pages, and the juicy “cultural confusion” that they inevitably generate, are a good introduction to our (VERY QUICK) overview of the ca. 2000 years of Jewish Diaspora that preceded modern Zionism and the establishment of the State of Israel.

The Jewish Diaspora: Migrations and Expulsions (source LDS)

Jewish Expulsions, 1000-1500 (source, Encyclopaedia Judaica)

As we have seen, this is not a simple narrative to “map.” A painter, Ward Shelley, tried with a mindmap:

Music in Israel: Introduction

We begin our exploration of “music in Israel” by considering the diversity in which such music could sound. Here are a few examples to wet our appetite.

At first sight, a veeeeery WaltDisney-esque Song of the Grape Pickers, 1955. The analogy with Snow White’s Hi-Ho holds only insofar as one begins taking into account the real agricultural achievements of the State of Israel, and, even more importantly from our perspective, the role of the early pioneers (chalutzim) and their lives in the Jewish agricultural communes (kibbutzim) in shaping national culture in Israel. Music, and song, and dance, played a central role in all this. We’ll have a week to discuss it. And a whole semester to look at the way in which music relates to, describes, and challenges, the evolving notions of “Land of Israel” (eretz yisrael).

The mother of all Israeli songs (SLI, or “Songs of the Land of Israel), with hauntingly beautiful lyrics (by Naomi Shemer) and an interesting story, to be explored in detail later (the melody is apparently not original; the song itself came to define the Six Day War of 1967, among other things). A very important aspect of this song is that it does embody, in its own 1960’s folk-music way, the multi-millenary Jewish longing for Zion (Jerusalem). In this course, we are devoting a week to this topic, as expressed through poetry and song throughout the Jewish Diaspora for centuries.

The Nachal army ensemble, 1967: a deconstructionist’s dream. Also, a nod at the role of the army in shaping national and musical culture. (A lot) More on this to come.

Idan Raichel, the star of many Jewish organization-sponsored events in North America and beyond; and a true game-changer in the “world music” circuit. This song, im telekh, pays homage to the Ethiopian immigration to Israel and the racist backlash it continues to encounter, a topic Raichel (who will soon be performing in San Francisco) is particularly sensitive to, to the point that his music has helped launch a true Ethiopian musical renaissance in Israel. A recent example of this is Esther Rada, who performs here in one of the hottest clubs in the Tel Aviv scene:

But let’s move on. To more established territories.

The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO), conducted by Zubin Mehta, performs Israel’s National Anthem (Hatikvah, “The hope”) on top of Masada, the site of a famous and tragic battle between the Jews and the Roman army in ancient Palestine, in a concert held in 1988. The IPO is but one examples of the building of musical institutions (orchestras, academies, broadcasting stations, festivals, competitions, etc.) since before the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, and of their role in shaping national culture. It also has an interesting connection to the San Francisco Bay Area, since the first fundraising event to establish the IPO (then called the Palestine Orchestra) was held in San Francisco in the 1930’s. (BTW, we are devoting one week of class to the many, and interesting, musical connections between Israel and the Bay Area). I chose this video excerpt for a few notable (and slightly wicked) reasons. Note how the audience sings along, and how everyone stands, including the orchestra – except for those who cannot. The violin (solo played by Ori Kam), is in itself a fundamental Jewish musical icon. However, the distortions to the sound caused by the digital transfer from a VHS tape give this recording an involuntary Jimi Hendrix quality that I could not resist to point out.

Fiddler on the Roof, in Hebrew, staged by the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv. From Yiddish, to English, to Hebrew… What are “Jewish languages,” and what is their relationship with music (and sound)?

Essential. Palestinian and/or Arab-Israeli (bring on the hyphens…) rap band, DAM, singing in Hebrew and Arabic about their relationship to the Land (of Israel?).

During the class, we are going to explore the role of sounds and music in defining and opposing ethnic, cultural, political, and military conflicts.

Shas spiritual leader calls Israeli national anthem ‘stupid’ – National – Israel News | Haaretz

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Shas Spiritual Leader Calls Israel National Anthem ‘Stupid’ (Haaretz)

Where do we go from here? | Mira Awad – Opinion Israel News | Haaretz

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