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A 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. The result is the first ever comprehensive study of popular music in Israel. Motti Regev, a sociologist, and Edwin Seroussi, an ethnomusicologist, approach their subject from alternative perspectives, producing a truly interdisciplinary, sociocultural account of music as a feature and a force in the shaping of Israeliness. A major ethnographic undertaking, describing and analyzing the particular history, characteristics, and practices of each music culture,Popular Music and National Culture in Israelmaps not only the complex field of Israeli popular music but also Israeli culture in general.

Thebook introduces the topics of Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment, and social demographyin Western art musics and shows their historical and sociologicalimportance, while exploring the concepts of \"existential irony\" and \"sanctification,\" whichhave not previously been the focus of any other studies.

Although some sociologists still connect cultural preferences with social class, others argue that postindustrial societies are no longer class-based societies and that contemporary cultural consumption patterns do not simply reflect class positions. This article addresses several theories that characterize the association between class and cultural consumption in contemporary society. It goes on to analyze the effect of class position on highbrow cultural consumption - using both leisure activities and cultural tastes - in Italy, Sweden, West Germany, Israel, and the U.S. It asks whether differences in cultural consumption, given other salient cleavages such as race/ethnicity, gender, and religious observance, are associated with class. Results show that class correlates with highbrow cultural consumption in different ways in the cases studied. The dividing line for consuming highbrow culture is located at the top of the class structure in Israel, the U.S., and Sweden; it is located at the bottom of the class structure in Italy and West Germany. Gender, race, and religious observance are important in conditioning culture consumption, but they do not fully mediate the association between class and cultural tastes.

Israel has been competing in the Eurovision song contest, Europe's biggest music festival, since 1973. The spectacle is a formidable arena for participating countries to shape their image and brand their nations. At the same time, its distinctively European character challenges Israelis, whose country is one of the few located outside the continent's geographical borders, to grapple with their social, cultural, and political affiliations with Europe and its institutions. Against this backdrop, the article traces the participation of the Jewish state in Eurovision and the debates this has generated in the Israeli public in order to investigate the shifts that have occurred in the country's self-representation and thereby, the messages Israel has sought to convey to Europeans.

Since the mid-1970s, the emigration of Jewish-Israelis to overseas destinations has become a recurring issue of acrimonious discussion and debate in the Israeli public sphere. This article traces historical anxieties about emigration, provides political frameworks for understanding related discussions and debates, and examines their popular cultural expressions. By analyzing three songs performed by Israeli singers Arik Einstein, Oshik Levi, and the indie group Shmemel, the historical, political, economic, and cultural elements of this debate are situated and explored. We argue that these songs reflect elements of the public debate about the angst of the Israeli, sabra, Ashkenazi middle-class émigré.

In the course of the past 120 years of Zionist culture in Palestine/Eretz Israel and later in the State of Israel, institutional, journalistic, and academic narratives have attempted to outline the stylistic traits of the Zionist sonic capital. These attempts were sometimes based on delineating what lay beyond the boundaries of that capital. Thus, diasporic voices comprising the repository of Jewish sonic memories were left outside the confines of the Israeli soundtrack. The incorporation of those forgotten voices into recent Israeli popular music is at the core of this study. Mixing old recordings of dead family members by some major Israeli rockers in their recent productions is a growing trend reflecting a shift in the contemporary Israeli attitude towards the voices of the Diaspora. This trend is critically examined through the prism of the concepts of soundscape, technologies of the intermundane, and nostalgia. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

The marginalization of popular culture in radical scholarship on Palestine & Israel is symptomatic of the conceptual limits that still define Middle East studies scholarship: namely, the prevailing logic of the nation-state on the one hand & the analytic tools of classical Marxist historiography & political economy on the other. This essay offers a polemic about the form that alternative scholarly projects might take through recourse to questions of popular culture. The authors argue that close attention to the ways that popular culture \"articulates\" with broader political, social, & economic processes can expand scholarly understandings of the terrain of power in Palestine & Israel, & hence the possible arenas & modalities of struggle. Adapted from the source document.

A view commonly held by students of Israeli society is that social classes are weakly structured in Israel because they are a relatively recent phenomenon and because other cleavages blur class distinctions. Another, more general, argument in the literature emphasizes the decline of class as a salient social category and the rising importance of other categories of stratification, such as ethnicity and religion. In this paper we test both arguments by studying the differentiation of cultural lifestyles in Israel. We measure lifestyle as participation in a variety of leisure activities, reading habits, and musical tastes. The analysis reveals that indicators in these three fields crystallize into three distinct lifestyle clusters: Highbrow, Popular, and Religious. We find significant class differences in highbrow lifestyle consumption. The service class, consisting of professionals, managers, administrators, higher-grade technicians and supervisors of non-manual workers exhibits a greater degree of involvement in highbrow lifestyle than the other classes. This finding is consistent with Bourdieu's arguments. At the same time, classes are not distinctive with regard to the other lifestyle dimensions. While maintaining distinctions in the realm of highbrow culture, classes show similar behaviour and tastes in the realms of popular and religious lifestyle.

The song \"Jerusalem of Gold\", one of contemporary Israel's inalienable culture's assets, represents a unique cultural phenomenon: Four decades have passed since it was written by Naomi Shemer-a leading producer of modern Israel's popular music-yet its status remains that of a national symbol or unofficial national anthem. This status is reflected in the fact that, among other things, it is frequently heard during public ceremonies relating to Israel locally and internationally. Even though \"Jerusalem of Gold\" represents an exceptional phenomenon in Israel's cultural space, it has generated marginal academic interest. In an attempt to understand the special status of the song, this article has explored events during the first significant phase in its social construction period, just before and immediately after the Six Day War. This study exposed the way in which the song's initial spontaneous success benefited from two growing forces: The song fitted wonderfully into the \"IDF's heroism festival\" and at the same time it suited the \"spiritual-religious festival\", both products of Israel's stirring victory in the Six Day War. This article sheds light on a song as a fascinating juncture of politics, national symbols, and popular culture. Following Regev and Seroussi who argue that popular music is the cultural form that most strongly signifies Israeliness [Israelliut], the article uses the multidimensional cultural construction of the song \"Jerusalem of Gold\" as a microcosm of Israeli society for the purpose of studying post-1967 \"Israeliness\".

This article surveys the history of songs about Palestine from 1948 to the present, examining how the changes in musical style and lyrics correspond to the changes in the exigencies of the Palestinian struggle itself. Tracing the primacy of revolutionary Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s, the central role of Fayruz and the Rahbani brothers in the wake of the 1967 war, and the emergence of Palestinian groups and singers as of the late 1960s, the article provides historical and political analyses of these songs as central features of how Arab popular culture has dealt, and continues to deal, with the Palestine tragedy.