Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History revolutionizes the study of modern Israeli art music by tracking the surprising itineraries of Jewish art music in the move from Europe to Mandatory Palestine and Israel. Leaving behind clichés about East and West, Arab and Jew, this book provocatively exposes the legacies of European antisemitism and religious Judaism in the making of Israeli art music. Studying the emergence of modern Jewish art music Shelleg introduces the reader to music written by and “about” Jews, music whose aesthetics ranges from auto-exoticism through the hues ... More

Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History revolutionizes the study of modern Israeli art music by tracking the surprising itineraries of Jewish art music in the move from Europe to Mandatory Palestine and Israel. Leaving behind clichés about East and West, Arab and Jew, this book provocatively exposes the legacies of European antisemitism and religious Judaism in the making of Israeli art music. Studying the emergence of modern Jewish art music Shelleg introduces the reader to music written by and “about” Jews, music whose aesthetics ranges from auto-exoticism through the hues of self-hatred to the disarticulation of Jewish musical markers. Moving on to consider part of this musics’ translocation to Mandatory Palestine, Shelleg studies the paradoxes embedded in a national Zionist culture whose rhetoric negated its pasts, only to mask process of hybridizations enchained by older legacies. Unearthing the mechanism of what “Zionist musical onomatopoeias,” Shelleg analyzes their entropy and dilution by non-western Arab Jewish oral musical traditions (the same traditions Hebrew culture sought to westernize and secularize). And what had begun with composers’ movement towards the musical properties of non-western Jewish musical traditions grew in the 60s and 70s to a dialectical return to exilic Jewish cultures. In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, which reaffirmed Zionism’s redemptive and expansionist messages, Israeli composers (re)embraced precisely the exilic Jewish music that emphasized Judaism’s syncretic qualities rather than its territorial characteristics. In the 70s, consequently, while religious Zionist circles translated theology into politics and territorial maximalism, Israeli composers deterritorialized the national discourse through a dialectical return to the spaces shared by Jews and non-Jews, devoid of Zionist appropriations.