Musika Yam Tikhonit Yisraelit (Israeli Mediterranean Music): Cultural boundaries and disputed territories.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Horowitz, Amy.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Music.

Folklore.

Middle East--History.

Middle East.

History.

0333.

0358.

0413.

Local Subjects:

0333.

0358.

0413.

Physical Description:

382 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 55-09A.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

Musika Yam Tikhonit Yisraelit (Israeli Mediterranean Music) gives voice to the cleavage between ethnic affinity and national identity that accompanied the massive immigration of Jewish communities to Israel from Islamic countries in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This hybrid popular genre subverted the policies of the new state aimed at forging a coherent national identity and sublimating diasopora ethnic traditions.

Musika Yam Tikhonit Yisraelit made its commercial cassette debut in 1974 among the vegetable and household appliance stalls in Tel Aviv's central bus station marketplace. Labeled inferior and too "Arabic," the music was rejected by many Ashkenazi radio editors, record companies, and listeners. Yet the cassettes proliferated in North African and Middle Eastern Jewish neighborhoods, infiltrating the national airwaves and ethos by the 1990's.

Ethnic, artistic, and socio-political interactions within the context of Musika Yam Tikhonit Yisraelit illustrate some of the complexities of cultural studies in the 1990s. An analysis of these complexities requires revision in the approach to the boundaries that are crossed within trans-ethnic environments. Theoretical questions draw from issues of trans-ethnic identity, popular music, tradition and innovation, technological invention, and community art as protest.

The study of Musika Yam Tikhonit Yisraelit and the people who create it, suggests that community identity is a network of interactive and context-sensitive forces. North African and Middle Eastern Jews comprise a pan-ethnic community while maintaining individual ethnic and shared national identities. Musika Yam Tikhonit Yisraelit mediates these strands of selfhood, revealing that trans-ethnicity transforms within a pluralistic and asymmetrical society. Overcoming exclusion and penetrating mainstream channels, the music encodes the ethnic tectonics of the Israeli cultural terrain.

Political and national boundaries are reshuffling with dramatic intensity. This study offers a contribution to our understanding of how these tumultuous shifts arise in cultural terms. It proposes an interface between art and politics at a time when national anthems confront counter-anthems in the thick air of disputed territory.

Notes:

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-09, Section: A, page: 2943.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1994.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.