"Songs of the Land: Recording Trials and Tribulations in Arabophone Israel" with Cristopher Silver

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.