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:

View this document on Scribd

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: