ABSTRACT
Following the mass migration of Jews from European, Middle Eastern, and North African homelands after World War II, Israel became a site for new genres of music combining styles, instruments, and traditions from quite different cultures. Jews from Islamic lands found an already present European-dominated national music (and here I refer to Ha Shir Ha Eretz Yisraeli – The Song of the Land of Israel) that specifically excluded their music as too Arabic, too Turkish, or not European enough. 1 Although European-Israeli artists borrowed elements of Middle Eastern and North African musical styles, the music and musicians who originated the music were relegated to display occasions at official folkloric events or specific ghettos of radio broadcast time. Against a backdrop of cultural and political exclusion, Jews from Islamic lands formed a pan-ethnic community of communities called Mizraḥim (or Easterners) and developed their own musical genres and styles. One of the new genres, Mediterranean-Israeli music, emerged in working class Mizrahi neighborhoods as the first Israeli-born generation of Middle Eastern and North African Jewish children came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
