Sessions For: College of Literature, Science & Arts

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, in the aftermath of Israel’s establishment in 1948 and the Palestinian Nakba, hundreds of thousands of Jews from across the Middle East and North Africa restarted their lives in the Jewish state. Among this coalescing demographic, later known as Mizrahim (lit. Easterners) and soon to become the country’s majority, were some of the most celebrated musicians of the Arab world––and still others who were in the midst of launching their Arabic-language careers. Over a period of more than two decades, these veteran and up-and-coming artists released hundreds of commercial recordings, capturing a soundtrack of communal and individual triumphs and tragedies, quotidian difficulties, and disorienting new realities. In demonstrating the centrality of music to history, the deep connections between language and identity, and continuities before and after the ruptures of 1948, this talk challenges the notion that Arabophone Jews became muted upon their arrival in Israel and disconnected from their countries and cultures of origin. In listening for this particular past through a self-fashioned archive of vinyl records, it affords an opportunity to appraise the origins, meaning, and impact of a vast musical repertoire hitherto unstudied.

Sarah Imhoff (she/her) is the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Chair in Jewish Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University. She writes about religion and the body with a particular interest in gender, sexuality, disability, and American religion, as well as maintaining a research specialty in religion and law. She is author of Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism (Indiana University Press, 2017) and The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist (Duke University Press, 2022). She is the founding co-editor of the journal American Religion.