Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

Haaretz just featured a profile of Mira Awad, an Israeli Arab Christian who appears in a new hit TV comedy called Arab Labor. Awad began as a professionally trained musician and recorded demos which no Israeli record company wanted to touch with a 10 foot pole because they are petrified of Arab music. Not necessarily petrified in an overtly racist way. Just petrified of its supposed ‘alienness’ from Israeli pop culture and of their inability to market it to the public:

In guitarist Amos Hadani’s small studio in downtown Tel Aviv she is completing the recording of her debut album, which will comprise songs whose lyrics and music she has written herself, mostly in Arabic.

The long road she has traveled until arriving at the final stages of the album began during her days as a student at the Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary Music in Ramat Hasharon. “Eight years ago I already had demos ready and I tried to interest several people in them. But it didn’t really work out, and at a certain stage I got tired of trying and abandoned music for a number of years,” she recalls. “Arabic is apparently a language that still arouses fear and reservations in Israel. The fact is that no one jumped into the cold water, no one took a risk with me. Most of the reactions about the album had nothing to with the music or the production, and this began to affect me. My career in theater began to gain momentum and I said to myself, ‘Thank God, at least there is another place where I can express my creativity.’”

But as sometimes happens, the mass market may be far more ready to embrace “the other” than the doyennes of pop taste recognize. Visit her MySpace site and listen to Bahlawan and tell me she’s not ready for Israeli prime time. Azini is a song with more rock-pop “chops” recorded with the enormously popular Idan Raichel Project. Awad also recorded a duet with Noa of the Beatles We Can Work It Out that’s making the rounds of YouTube. It’s cute and makes a political statement but doesn’t showcase either of them to best effect. Far more compelling musically are these videos of more “hard core” Arab pop performances featured at MySpace video. As far as I’m concerned Awad has all her bases covered and if an Israeli record company can’t take a risk on her then they can’t take a risk on anything.

One warning: this is a woman who speaks her mind. Hearing Hatikvah doesn’t make her heart beat pit-a-pat. It makes her sad as one might expect coming from an Israeli Arab:

Mira Anuar-Awad was born in an Arab village in the northern part of Israel and has a full Israeli citizenship. She will sing Zman (Time) in the Kdam-Eurovision, combining Hebrew and Arabic. “There will probably be some people thinking I am not eligible to represent Israel at the Eurovision Song Contest because I am not Jewish, and I do feel, to some extent, that this country does not represent my true being” says Anuar-Awad. “When the Israeli national anthem is played I am usually sad and embarrassed cause it doesn’t stand for anyone of my national symbols” Mira adds. These statements by the star of the musical My Fair Lady have caused quite a commotion in Israel, just 5 days before the contest.

In certain Israeli nationalist circles, they can’t understand why Israeli Arabs don’t just shut up and get down on their knees and thank Jews for putting up with their endless whining and carping about discrimination and inequality.

tags arab-labor-tv-show, idan-raichel-project, israeli-arab-pop-singer-actress, mira-awad

I was listening to KBCS a few days ago and the DJ played a song that knocked me out. Being Jewish, having a strong interest in Israel, and knowing Hebrew, whenever I hear Hebrew anywhere my ears perk up. But this song didn’t start out in Hebrew. It started out in an African language I didn’t recognize (which later turned out to be Amharic) with a performer calmly speaking lyrics. Only later did the song switch to Hebrew lyrics and the melody and lyrics took on tremendous urgency and passion.

I was listening to Bo’i (”Come”–hear it in AAC format) a huge Israeli hit by the Idan Raichel Project. And the Amharic comes by way of Israel’s large Ethiopian community which immigrated during Operation Moses in 1984. The Ethiopians have found it hard to integrate into Israel since it is a largely ethnically fragmented society. The power of music is that it can acknowledge these tensions and overcome them by integrating the sounds of diverse cultures into a single song.

What impresses me about Raichel’s music is that he is attempting in musical terms to create an amalgam of all of the cultural and ethnic strands that constitute Israeli culture. He is doing this much more boldly than most other Israeli performers who are content to perform in a conventional and largely derivative western idiom. Raichel is searching for something more. He recognizes that Israel is not in Europe or Brazil, but rather smack in the middle of the Middle East. To achieve a genuine Israeli sound that recognizes and embraces this fact is a great achievement. What is also remarkable is that Raichel is of Ashkenazi ethnic background. He does not come naturally by way of embracing Israel’s eastern roots. So in a sense his is a rebellion on many fronts against normative culture.

Here is what Raichel’s biography says at his website about his family background:

Idan Raichel, the architect of this unique recording project, is a 29-year old keyboardist, producer and composer from Kfar Saba. Idan was born in 1977 to a family with Eastern European roots, and although music was an important part of his upbringing, his parents did not place much emphasis on performing music from his particular cultural background. “I think the fact that I didn’t have strong family musical roots is what made me be very open to music from all over the world,” says Idan. Idan started playing the accordion when he was 9 years old, and even at this young age was attracted to the exotic sounds of Gypsy music and tango.

Here is some background of how he came to his interest in Ethiopian music:

After he was discharged [from the IDF] Idan starting working as a counselor at a boarding school for immigrants and troubled youth. Notably, the school was filled with young people from Ethiopia who were part of Israel’s growing community of Ethiopian Jews. It was here that Idan first started getting familiar with Ethiopian folk and pop music. While most of the young people in the school rejected their own cultural traditions in an effort to assimilate into mainstream Israeli society, a small core of Ethiopian teenagers remained fans of Ethiopian music. They passed around cassettes of songs from artists like Mahmoud Ahmed, Aster Aweke, Gigi and others, and the exotic, otherworldly melodies piqued Idan’s curiosity. “I started to hear lots of cassettes from Addis Ababa. Village music, like Ethiopian pop and reggae, or the native village songs,” says Raichel. “I noticed that immigrants from the Ethiopian community changed their names when they got to Israel. They try to assimilate into Western culture and don’t keep their roots.” He wanted these kids to “remember that they like hip-hop but they are not from Harlem, they like reggae but they are not Bob Marley. The Ethiopians have a great culture that should be cherished.”

Idan started going to Ethiopian bars and clubs in downtown Tel Aviv. It was like entering another world, a country within a country that remains a secret from most Israelis. As his connections to the community deepened, Idan began attending Ethiopian synagogues, weddings and other ceremonies, and he began to learn more about Ethiopian music and culture.

And this provides a pretty good summary of Raichel’s musical mission:

Idan was a unique talent that offered a new vision for how Israelis, their neighbors in this volatile region, and people all over the world, can cherish their own cultural traditions, celebrate their differences and through respectful collaboration create new and inspiring expressions.

While this may sound quite prosaic to a westerner steeped in multiculturalism, to know Israeli society is to understand how radical such an all-embracing view is. Israel is a country that devours cultural difference and subsumes it into an artificial “Israeliness.” Ethnicity is frowned upon. When you become an oleh chadash (new immigrant) you tend to flee your past adopting a Hebrew name and even a new Hebrew surname to eliminate your Diaspora past. So what Raichel is doing is quite radical and refreshing.

But hey, none of this cultural-social analysis would matter worth a damn if the music didn’t groove and it does.

The World’s Marco Werman interviewed Raichel for the radio program. It’s a short, breezy interview but worth a listen.

Thanks to Richard Isaac for providing me the mp3.

tags ethiopian-jews, idan-raichel-project, israeli-music, middle-eastern-music, song-boi