HEB 348: Israeli Society and Culture
Art and Theater
Information Center for Israeli Art: Edited and provided by the Israel Museum.
Subject Headings for Catalog Search
Music in Israel
The music scene in Israel is as diverse as the country's population. From traditional Jewish tunes sung in Ladino to Hebrew Hip-Hop to Israeli Arab music and from Mizrahi songs (Arabic / Mediterranean style) to original Israeli classical works to modern Hebrew poems set to music - you name it.
Israeli Music Channel on YouTube; MMC Channel on YouTube
Music in Israel (Wikipedia): Offers a good introduction to the history and current trends of music in Israel, including "Music and Politics".
Garland encyclopedia of world music (Vol. 6; The Middle East): Includes a number of articles about Israeli music.
Music Collection and Sound Archives (National Library of Israel): Several collections and playlists, including Hasidic niggunim, musical traditions of Yemenite Jews, Jewish holiday songs, and more.
Search Books in Catalog - Subject Headings
Music -- Israel -- History and criticism.
Hebrew Songs on the Web
Piyut: Old and new liturgical poems; the nonprofit site was recently re-launched at the National Library of Israel and now offers playlists arranged by different Jewish traditions and occasions (holidays, Shabbat, weekdays).
Zemereshet: An online database for early Hebrew songs. Volunteer-based project that includes thousands of recordings from the pre-state days to the 1950s. Informational and scholarly.
Sample Our Collections...
Popular Music and National Culture in Israel by ISBN: 0520236548Publication date: 2004A unique Israeli national culture--indeed, the very nature of "Israeliness"--remains a matter of debate, a struggle to blend vying memories and backgrounds, ideologies and wills. Identifying popular music as an important site in this wider cultural endeavor, this book focuses on the three major popular music cultures that are proving instrumental in attempts to invent Israeliness: the invented folk song repertoire known as Shirei Eretz Israel; the contemporary, global-cosmopolitan Israeli rock; and the ethnic-oriental musica mizrahit.
Mediterranean Israeli Music and the Politics of the Aesthetic by ISBN: 9780814334652Publication date: 2010The relocation of North African and Middle Eastern Jews to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s brought together communities from Egypt, Iraq, Kurdistan, Yemen, and many other Islamic countries, as well as their unique music styles. In the unstable, improvisatory spaces of transit camps, development towns, and poor neighborhoods, they created a new pan-ethnic Mizrahi identity and a homegrown hybrid music that inspired equal parts high-pitched enthusiasm and resistance along the fault lines of Israel's ethnic divide. In Mediterranean Israeli Music and the Politics of the Aesthetic, author Amy Horowitz investigates the emergence of a new pan-ethnic Mizrahi style of music between the 1970s and 1990s, as the community struggled to gain recognition on the overlapping stages of politics and music. This volume is both an ethnographic study based on Horowitz's immersion in the Mizrahi community and a multi-voiced account of community members, who describe their music and musicians who play it.
Israeli Cinema by ISBN: 9781845113124Publication date: 2010When the Hebrew edition of this groundbreaking book came out, it provoked a stormy public debate. This is a new edition of Israeli Cinema with a substantial new postscript that reflects on the book's initial reception and points to exciting new trends in the cinematic representation of Israel and Palestine. Ella Shohat explores the cinema as a productive site of national culture, dating back to the early Zionist films about turn-of-the-century Palestine.
