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The Israeli Music Scene: An Essay in Secular Culture

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. Incidentally, Arabic music enjoys the lowest level of artistic appreciation of all musical genres among Israeli Jews (Haas et al. 1992, p. 29). As the goal of Israeli society was to construct a local, native, authentic culture, a major conflict in this arena has to do with defining what are the legitimate foreign and non-Jewish cultural sources from which materials can and should be taken and whose presence in Israeli culture is therefore welcomed. Arab cultural products are generally excluded from Israeli public culture and it is a systematic exclusion, perhaps done at the subconscious level (Regev 1995).

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  1. Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Haifa, 31905, Haifa, Israel

    Stanley Waterman

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  1. Stanley Waterman
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Correspondence to Stanley Waterman.

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Waterman, S. The Israeli Music Scene: An Essay in Secular Culture. Cont Jewry 30, 105–118 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-010-9029-4

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