Musicology Department
Subject: “Everything is from above, so don't cry tonight”: Popular music in Israel and the dialectic of Mizarhiyut and Masortiyut in the imaginaries of Israeliness.
Supervisor: Dr. Oded Erez.
Abstract: My research deals with Mizarhiyut and masortiyut in contemporary popular music in Israel. I investigate expressions of Mizrahiyut and masortiyut in popular music, both as coupling and separately, and examine the dynamic interrelationship between Mizrahiyut/masortiyut to Jewishness and Israeli national identity. I seek to illustrate how Mizarhiyut and masortiyut are constructed as overlapping markers of Jewishness and Israeliness, and to demonstrate how national conceptions and ideas reshaped “from below” through popular everyday culture. Examining the formation of these sociological categories from historical and critical prisms, I explore long term socio-political processes which are reflected and reproduce in diverse mainstream music styles, and leads, among other things, to the construction of mainstream contemporary Israeliness as national-masorti.