In 1999, while in Jerusalem, I stopped by the local Tav ha-Shmini record store near Ben Yehudah Street to search for new music. The clerk recommended Sarit Hadad's new album, K'mo Sinderella (Like Cinderella), with an informal money-back guarantee: “It will make your heart dance,” he said. I had followed the so-called Muzika Mizrahit phenomenon in the scholarly literature and Israeli pop charts and decided to take my chances. With the clerk's sentimental metaphor firmly in mind, I found that Hadad's music did indeed make my heart “dance.” My purchase also contributed to a major breakthrough in Hadad's rising career: K'mo Sinderella shot to the top of the Israeli sales charts, likely fueled by similar record-store guarantees. As Amy Horowitz might argue, however, Hadad's success resulted from decades of creative activity, politico-sonic reframing, and strategic local marketing by her predecessors. Their work had tied the “Mizrahi” soundscape to the political and ethnic movements of the 1970s and 1980s, and brought it into mainstream Israeli life.
Horowitz, one of the first researchers of Mizrahi music, has published Mediterranean Israeli Music in a field somewhat more populated than she found it. Not too surprisingly, her work has both influenced and been influenced by Edwin Seroussi, Motti Regev, and Galit Saada-Ophir's subsequent publications. As with the others, she recounts the culture of haflot (parties), wedding music, and cassette distribution that birthed an ever-changing style. Horowitz, however, takes a particular angle on this scene, attempting to construct through ethnography a community-based subaltern model of creativity where “innovative negotiation and change in both the musical and the political arenas become necessary for [musical and cultural] survival” (175). Emphasizing the conversations forged among the heterogeneous group that became known as Mizrahim, she highlights the immediacy, excitement, and messiness of emerging musical activity as it comes under constant negotiation and changing focus. Using this approach, which includes firsthand experience with key figures such as Avihu Medina, Haim Moshe, and Zehava Ben, Horowitz interprets this historical period as a way to “contribute to our understanding of how … aesthetic and political struggles arise in their own terms” (175).
The intermittent feeling of experiencing the scene provides the book's great strength. In Horowitz's descriptions, the shifting, marginalized ethnic communities involved in creating the music alternately pegged their work to dialogue with circumstance, history, politics, essentialized labels, and expectations from both insiders and cultural elites. By using Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the “rhizome” (a decentralized root system with multiple nodes), she attempts to build an argument of musical community as a fluid space where land, multiple ancestries, and identification with Israeli national identity require constant reinterpretation. Indeed, many of seemingly obvious genre designations underwent significant change over this period: in one thread of argument, the (European) Israeli imagination at first viewed Yemenite Jews and their music as holdovers from an ancient past; yet, when Israeli Mediterranean music first came onto the scene, it valued the contemporary “Yemenite” vocal sound; and ultimately this sound accompanied political movements that asserted Yemenite Jews as contemporary Israeli citizens. Through examples of this sort, Horowitz shows how populations used music to bring inequities into public view, while linking music to continually changing discussions of marginality, ethnic heritage, and national identity.
Horowitz's ethnographic eye is at its most acute when she takes the rather bold step of looking at the repertoire through a taxonomy described in 1992 by Avihu Medina, one of the scene's significant songwriters and producers. What first seems an idiosyncratic system ultimately yields the book's strongest chapter—taking the reader away from a scholarly imposition of terms and into the architecture of an industry insider's mind. Through Medina's working vision, Horowitz reveals a fascinating cognitive map of a dynamic industry that tries to mediate between ethnic tradition and innovation as it attempts to shake off “low culture” designations.
Inevitably, Horowitz turns to the “great” stars of the genre as case studies for this dynamic. Here, in describing the contrasting careers of Zohar Argov and Zehava Ben, her theoretical base falters a little. The Argov chapters in particular have a marked change in tone, in some ways resembling the “definitive” biographical narrative that Horowitz had successfully critiqued earlier. A subsequent discussion of Argov's posthumous fame, moreover, also strains to maintain a rhizomatic (anti-)narrative. Focusing mainly on one node of remembrance—Shmuel Hasfari's 1992 nonmusical play Ha-melekh—Horowitz probes deeply into Argov's further mediation as a tragic figure on the public stage; but in doing so, she also overly limits her portrayal of the complex memory game Argov came to represent. Admittedly the choice between depth and breadth is always difficult. Nonetheless, this particular work of avant-garde theater, while evocative in its construction, seems somewhat less central to the larger point Horowitz wishes to make.
A chapter on Zehava Ben extends Horowitz's arguments into the 1990s. With “Turkish” becoming the latest criterion for understanding Mizrahi musical styles, Ben's promotion of Arabic music, and especially the music of Egyptian superstar Umm Kulthum, made explicit an understated realm of discourse in Israeli–Arab relations. By singing in Arabic, Horowitz argues, Ben could “make audible” (150) both her own Moroccan background and the “political aesthetics” (150) of the time, adding a voice to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict that crossed physical and political borders while challenging the normative nature of Israeli identity. Horowitz's discussion of Ben's career seems at times hermetic: She does not, for example, address contemporaries such as Ofra Haza even for comparison. Nonetheless, her close look at Ben's career provides a rich example of the changing role of music in the Israeli political landscape and the dilemmas Jews from Arabic lands faced in fully representing themselves within Israel's borders.
Horowitz's choice to maintain a focus on symbolic figures and individual choices brings out a human side in a historical period largely described in sociological terms by Regev, Seroussi, and others. By taking this approach, however, Horowitz also reduces the visibility of state institutions, record companies, and production companies in the parlaying (and, to some extent, politicizing) of musical discourse. Hints at a larger structure abound in the book, from government sponsorship to the programming of a show for Mizrahi music on the Israeli Army radio station; yet without exploring these aspects further, some of the vibrancy of the period becomes muted.
Horowitz's study also limits itself to the 1970s through the 1990s, with a limited extension into the first years of the twenty-first century. While this time frame provides ample opportunity for Horowitz to lay out illuminating ideas about the “politics of the aesthetic,” it sacrifices a sense of currency. More recent performers such as Sarit Hadad and Eyal Golan lie outside the book's scope, even as they potentially offer additional layers of interpretation and development. The result provides musicologists and folklorists with a compelling narrative on the creation of a musical style, while perhaps seeming to provide premature conclusions to scholars of Israel and/or Jewish studies.
Supplementing the chapters, yet somewhat hidden in the back matter, are twenty pages of song translations plus liner notes for the CD bundled into the book's back cover. These materials, crucial for understanding Horowitz's argument, should have been referenced more effectively within the main body of the work. In their current placement, logocentric readers might make the mistake of walling these materials off, preventing a clear understanding of some of Horowitz's points, and circumventing a ready-made teaching unit for classroom use.
Mediterranean Israeli Music ultimately brings to fruition a rich and extended research project, introducing important ideas about the community dynamics that brought a new musical form into a nation's soundscape. It also provides a valuable blueprint for further study of this music's shifting place within Israeli identity and culture.
