The Politicization of Neo-Hasidic Popular Music: The Musical Discourse of Religious Zionism and its Role in the Struggle to Claim the Public Sphere of Jerusalem (original) (raw)

Moods and Modes of Jewish Music, edited by Yuval Shaked, I-XI. Haifa, Israel: University of Haifa, 2014. Music constitutes a key medium through which political actors in Jerusalem embody, perform, and negotiate competing paradigms of nationhood and, more specifically, their visions of the future of Jerusalem. In this paper, I focus on the community espousing religious Zionism—the datiim leumiim—and their performance of neo-Hasidic pop and rock. In this paper, I analyse this genre of music as a form of political discourse within the public sphere of Jerusalem. Although the music was not originally intended to be political in nature, the contexts of performance of this repertoire have endowed the music with political meaning: the yearly Rikud’galim procession (celebrating Jerusalem Day), various public demonstrations, and displays of opposition to other Jerusalemites. I explore a number of issues that emerge out of this ethnographic research. First, this serves as an excellent demonstration of performance as a vehicle through which to claim and occupy public space. Tens of thousands of people singing, dancing, and processing through both West and East Jerusalem on Yom Yerushalayim enacts the unification of the city and claims both sides as Jewish space. Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization,” as well as Lefebvre’s “production of space,” are particularly salient here. Second, the musical choice of actors in this community functions as a form of political language—both as general expression of personal and communal political commitments and in dialogue with actors of opposing positions. Mainstream (non-religious) Zionist activists—both left- and right-leaning—exploit the repertoire of Shirei eretz yisrael as a manifestation of their commitments to both Jewish nationalism and secular liberalism. The radical left, maintaining a post-Zionist and universalist position, performs samba in an attempt to transcend religious, ethnic, and nationalist symbolism. In contradistinction to both of these communities and their chosen genres of music, the performance of neo-Hasidic pop by the datiim leumiim reinforces the liturgical and biblical underpinnings of religious Zionism and the yearning associated with life in the Diaspora. Yaron Ezrahi argues that the rhetoric of settlement is “pre-state” rhetoric; this musical discourse manifests parallel rhetorical strategies. Lastly, the ideologies inherent in the performance of neo-Hasidic pop and rock relate to the aesthetics and ideologies of the Hasidic niggun. Given that Hasidism was founded on Kabbalistic ideas in which music and dance were key vehicles to unification with the divine and were believed to have the power to affect the Godhead, and that Rav Kook was himself a kabbalist and incorporated theurgist elements into his Zionist teachings, I suggest the following parallel; whereas the Hasidim engage in singing and dancing as a personal redemptive process, the datiim leumiim transport this into the political realm and engage neo-Hasidic music and dance as a process of the redemption of the Land of Israel. Analyzing musical language as a manifestation of political interaction provides a portal into understanding the forces competing to define the public sphere of Jerusalem. Additionally, it highlights the ways in which Jewish music acquires various meanings through the act of performance and the appropriation by individual agents.