Thank you all for coming. We're looking forward to a wonderful time try our visiting

professor, Dr. Uri Dorchin. He's going

to be introduced separately in a

moment. My name is Maura Resnick - I'm

executive director of the UCLA Y and S

Nazarian Center for Israel Studies and

we're right down the hall; we're an

academic center here on campus that

promotes the study of the modern State

of Israel and in all different aspect. So come and visit us look at our courses

that we offer and we're very happy that

you're here today

This talk is co-sponsored by the Center

for Near Eastern Studies, the Department

of Ethnomusicology, and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. So we thank our cosponsors for that. Now it's my pleasure to introduce Professor Mark Kligman.

He's the chair of the Department of Ethnomusicology and also serves on our Faculty Advisory Board and he will introduce our speaker. (applause) Good afternoon - it's so great to see all of you here for what will be a truly wonderful lecture.

in which I could do this introduction in

So there's different ways in which I can do this. There's a more formal way or a less formal way. And I am going to choose the less formal way.

you choose the less formal way because

Uri Dorchin ...Dr. Uri Dorchin and I had a very interesting encounter. I think it

was about two and a half years ago. (Uri overhead) Yes something like that. (back to speaker) I was visiting Israel ....and

was visiting Israel and.....we

had coffee together and I thought wow

his work is fascinating and it's wonderful. it's

gonna work so well at UCLA. So many

different units and activities

and things we do at UCLA. So from that

small cup of coffee has come now

I guess 18 months being here at UCLA. So

Dr. Dorchin is now doing his second year

here as an assistant visiting professor

as a part of the Nazarian Center for

Israel Studies. He's senior lecturer in

the Department of Behavioral Sciences at

the Academic College in Zefat Israel. Here at

UCLA he's teaching courses in the

Department of Musicology and Near

Eastern Language and Cultures

as well as Department of

Anthropology. Dr. Dorchin's expertise is

really looking at modern contemporary

Jewish life as an anthropologist through music.

And he really engages very deeply in how

rap music and African American culture

is used and appropriated and understood

in Israel. He he really provides a

wonderful and fascinating lens of ways

in which we can look at Israeli culture.

He has a long list of publications. I

just want to mention one in particular

and that's his book published in 2017

called Real Time: Hip-Hop in Israel/ Israeli Hip Hop

and that is his book published

in Tel Aviv and published in Hebrew. He does have some articles in English.

He does amazing work and it's been a pleasure

to get to know Uri and his work. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Uri Dorchin. (applause)

Thank you Mark for the warm introduction. I thought the informal

way would make me blush somewhat less - it didn't work.

So thanks and thank you all for coming here. The subject of

my talk today that you can see here

is something

that that presents a rather strange

bedfellows in the Israeli popular music -

hip-hop and Muzika Mizrahit. Muzika Mizrahit stands for Middle Eastern music or otherwise music that is

informed by our of traditions. And this

this this fusion intrigued me right from

the beginning when I started studying

Israeli hip-hop some 15 years ago. But

for some reason I I never came to focus

on that until recently. And recently I

was I was starting to rethink this

question of why young

Israelis being attracted by American

hip-hop find Mizrahi music or Muzika Mizrahit so appealing. So this is the

first time actually that I'm trying to

provide any reasonable answers to this

question. So you will be the first to

hear my thoughts about this issue and I

truly hope that you will find it

extremely impressive. But if not, please -

I've been more than more than happy and

I appreciate you to hear your opinions

that surely will allow me to to keep on

thinking and keep sharpening my my ideas

around this around this topic. So in

order to to just start scratching the

surface and get into the into the

subject and understand it, I think a

short background is is required. So as

some of you or maybe most of you know,

the Zionist movement - Zionism - was formed

to to provide an alternative framework

both ideological and practical for

Jewish life in Europe. Now regardless of

the seminal principle of negating Jewish

life in the Diaspora, and in spite of the

authentic enthusiasm with the idea of

bringing Jews back to their

fathers land, Zionist leaders have never

never actually yielded their sentiments

toward Europe and to the to the place

where where they socialized. Let's take

the example of the founding father

himself, Theodor Herzl, who said that

for Europe are present here in the

Middle East may constitute a defensive

shield against Asia. We may be the

spearhead of European culture against

barbarism . Along the same lines, Zionist leader -

another major thinker, Max Nordau, wrote

that amidst the wild and barbaric 'Asian

ISM,' Jews will expand the European moral

borders. So when we when we when we see

more contemporary leaders of Israel like

Ehud Barak, former Prime Minister of Israel,

saying that depicting Israel in terms of

'a villa in the jungle' - the jungle

referred to the Middle East of course -

and we can see how it echoes the similar

sentiments from 100 years ago. Against

this background we can now understand

the ambivalent attitude expressed by

Ashkenazi Zionist establishment toward Jews

originated in Arab countries in the

Middle East and North Africa whose mass

arrival in Israel dated only after the

establishment of the state in 1948.

Rooted in a modernist perception of

Western culture is superior to Oriental

(or otherwise non-Western cultures) and

within the context of a military

conflict with the Arab region, the

Israeli Ashkenazi establishment denied

Arab traditions of Jewish people the

status of legitimate representation of

Israeli culture. In accordance Mizrahi

Jews were

expected to erase their cultural

heritage and to adopt the European

oriented disposition of the

establishment that absorbed them. One

case study that exemplified this process

is the evolution of popular music in

Israel. As late as the the end of the

millennium, popular music in Israel was

still divided roughly between two

categories: the Muzika Mizrahit

on the one hand and the so-called

Israeli music. Okay or songs all of the

land of Israel. Now this categorization itself as you

can understand betrays the relegation of

Mizrahit expression into status that is

less than Israeli. And this is in spite

of course of the fact that what so-called

Israeli music is itself a combination of

non-israeli influences that were adopted

and appropriated in Israel in different

periods since the early 20th century.

Now rap broke into the Israeli

mainstream only at the beginning of the

2000s. Generally speaking, it was the

outcome of two concurrent circumstances.

First is the global popularization of

American rap. Before the 90s or before the

mid-90s rap was pretty much a

musical niche that was produced by and

consumed by African Americans after the

mid-90s and to greater extent in 2000s it

crossed over and became mainstream

global pop. So the other aspect is the

fast development of Israeli electronic

media at the very same time - again the

mid-90s. So when rap breaks into the

popular mainstream, it is consumed by

larger audiences around

the world including Israel. Now I've

mentioned that rap was not the first

non-Israeli style or international style

if you will that is adopted and

refashioned in the guise of Israeli

music. However, it is the first one that

deliberately adopted motives of Muzika Mizrahi - Mizrahi music -

right from the

first moment as a prominent musical

manifestation. So at that point let's

jump to a short example from 2003 or 4, I

think. It is because a duo called Chayaley Hanekana - Soldiers of Revenge.

They are part of the first group of

Israeli rappers and here their song

features a Mizrahi singer Rinat Bar ....(music sample plays)

All right. I think you got a good idea. So this song that we've just

heard with its combination between

Mizrahi melodic chorus and rap verses

is characteristic of the first wave of

Israeli rap. In fact, this combination

became so common that some rapper felt

as if rap was relegated into secondary

role within this combination. One of them

is the leading rapper Quami, who told me

in an interview that I conducted with

him at the time - saying the problem is

that we have almost lost distinction

between rap and Muzika Mizrahit. This

combination, which has become a

distinguished genre - hip-hop Mizrahit - is

ridiculous, to his opinion, because now

there is more Mizrahit than hip-hop. The

question in which to address here is how

are we to understand this situation. Why

do most American oriented genre in

Israeli music have become so entwined

with Mizrahi musical elements. Now before

proposing an answer to this, we must

understand that hip-hop or rap in Israel

is not performed or consumed

necessarily but people who come

from a Mizrahi background. Okay, the truth

is that hip-hop is produced and

performed by people representing all the

denominational segments of Israeli

society. And so the association between

rap and Muzika Mizrahit is more

complicated than then than that and

should be explained by certain symbolic

aspects attached in Israel to both

hip-hop and Mizrahi youth. Mizrahi-ness. So

the first layer of this symbolism is

the symbolism of blackness. For many

years the production and consumption of

Muzika Mizrahit maintained in Israel

on separated channels outside the

established record companies

and under the radar of the Israeli media.

As such, one may find similarities

between Muzika Mizrahit and black music

in the United States that was once

distributed as as late as the fifties

under the banner of race records and

even today is distributed through

segregated channels. Now comparison,

anyway, is always a tricky game that

should be handled carefully. Yet, we must

understand that blackness provided

powerful symbolic reference to Mizrahim Mizrahut long before hip-hop

was launched in Israel. And now we can

jump to the slide ...

In the 60s, a group of young people

from Mizrahi background from a run-down

neighborhood called Musrara in Jerusalem

for the the Israeli Black Panther

movement to protest against consistent

and systematic discrimination against

Mizrahi population in Israel. This was

the first time or the first moment in

which a Jewish group in Israel

explicitly identified itself with or as

black and so undermined the official

Zionist narrative promising independence

to all Jews in the State of Israel. At

the very same time that the Black

Panthers took their demonstrations to

the street, thousands of Israelis rushed

to the theaters to see the most popular

musical at the time called

Al Tikra Li Shachor (Don't call me black). Now this

this musical was written by a prominent

song writer and playwright in Israel called Dan Almagor. He spent the second half

of the 60s working on his PhD right here

in UCLA and he was inspired by what was

going on in the streets back in the

days the Watts Riots and the rally is

organized by the Black Power movement

and so forth. So when he came back to

Israel he sat to write this musical that

represented the the American situation

at the relationship between blacks and

white in America as he experienced it.

Yet many critics in Israel read or heard

these songs as a kind of allegory to the

Israeli situation and the fraught

relationship between Ashkenazim

and Mizrahim. In the wake of the new

millennium, it was rather clear that the

formative ethos of a melting melting

pot eroded

and gave rise to multicultural politics

of separate identities in Israel. Within

that atmosphere and given the accepted

identification of Mizrahim,

or as black, it is of no surprise that

rappers highlighted the perceived

affinity between their music, which they

often refer to as black music, and Muzika Mizrahit.

To take one example, Fishi Hagadol

(Big Fishi) - one of the early

pioneers ...one of the early pioneers of

Israeli hip hop...explained to me the

thing when I was talking with him...the

following words: I was the first who

collaborated with Mazrahi singers and

the first two brought Mizrahi protests

into the music. My presumption, he said,

was that it is like the Rasta people in

the ghettos of Jamaica who utilized reggae

music to protest. And since the rhythms

is astonishingly similar to Mizrahi rhythms

To take another example, Sha'anan Streett,

the songwriter and lead rapper of rap

group Hadag Nahash - another prominent

representative of the first wave of

Israeli rap ..the rap in their debut album a song whose lyrics go like this:

“People tell me ‘what you got to do with music of black people, drug addicts, nervous and armed, hating whites?

‘You racists!', I tell them what's your problem?

It's true that B.I.G, and Dre, and Snoop are the father But rap by now crossed all borders…”

Referred to of course as the

Notorious B.iI.Gg, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg

three of the most popular rockers of the

90s.Then at the following song, he added,

these two lines: "I take my inspiration

from the street from Zohar Argov

not Mati Kaspi or Gidi Gov."

Now, Mati Kaspi and Gidi Gov on the one hand

and Zohar Argov on the other hand

represent these two sections that I

referred to in the Israeli popular music.

Mati Kaspi and Gido Gov are successful,

very popular singers. Mati Kaspi also a

composer since the 70s who shaved pretty

much the they Israeli mainstream. Zohar Argov,

on the other hand, was once the king

of Muzika Mizrahit.

Who even by their height of his success

was ignored by the Israeli media. He then

fell to drugs and eventually finally

took his life in a prison cell.

The Ashkenazi rapper does deliberately put

the Mizrahi Zohar Argov in proximity with

the African American rapper as his

source of inspiration while renounce

connection with the Israeli Ashkenazi

performer Mati Kaspi and Gidi Gov.

Now you might have noticed that both

rappers - Fishi Hagadol and Hadag Nahash -

hinted to a special aspect that

apparently embedded in their music. The

first by referring to the ghettos of

Jamaica. The other one by taking his

inspiration from the street. These remarks

brings us to the second symbolic aspect

...aspect connecting

hip hop and Muzika Mizrahit. Much of the

discourse surrounding rap music

gravitates one way or another around the

notion of representing just a contingent sample. In that regard, rappers

not simply try to represent themselves

but rather rather to say something about

the place or their social background

where they come from. About the place

where they grew up and who their homies are - the homies are close circle of

best friends that grew up with them. The

American notion of 'hood' - the neighborhood

or as a cut short, the 'hood' in the urban

dictionary - reverberates to the Israeli

term schuna. However, unlike the case

of African Americans whose position in

inner cities neighborhoods occurred in

the context of industrialization and the

migration of people from former

plantation and farm workers to the urban

environment, the Israeli shchunot

constituted in a very different context.

Towns, cities and neighborhoods in Israel

were built to provide residential

solution for Jewish immigrants that

arrived in big waves soon after the

establishment of the state. In accordance

with the ethos of a melting pot, the

neighborhood was seen as a seminal

experience of social mixture. A crucial

stage in the reproduction of diverse

immigrants into a unified body of

Israeli subjects now we're redeemed,

so to speak, from their ethnic pasts of

the Diaspora. The schuna experience, thus,

was presented as a practical realization

of the Zionist ideal of Kibbutz Galuyot in

gathering of the Jewish exiles. One

example can be seen in a very famous

Israeli song of the time, Shir Ha-Schuna

(The Neighborhood Song)

performed by an ensemble called

Ha-Tarnegolim (the Roosters). Comprised of performers that were recently exempted

from their service in the military

entertainment troupe and guided by the

military troops former director Naomi Polani. These young men and women

performed songs and skits presenting

everyday life in the Israeli shchunot of

the time of the 50s and 60s.

Now although by that time many people

living in the shchunot suffered poverty

and some other complexes typical to to

immigrants community, the song featured

this song - the shchunot song - featured romantic

portrayal of ideal relationships in the

local shchunot that is as far as possible

from the alienation characterizing

big-city life. Even those examples when

aspects of poverty and crime was alluded

in Israeli popular popular songs. For

example, in a very successful musical

called Kazablan from 66, the Mizrahi ...

protagonist was presented in the

guise of a noble savage whose overall

orientation was integrationist and not

separatist. So usually the Ashkenazi and

Mizrahi find ways to live together and

sometimes even to marry one another and

live happily ever after. During the 70s, however, and to greater

extent in the decade of the 80s, this

romantic representation of the shchunot

made way for more sincere confrontation

with its actual and often unpleasant

realities. The Likud party arose to

power - the right-wing Likud party rose

to power in 1977 due to massive support

from the Mizrahi population. Carried by

the belated effects of the Black Panther

protests a few years earlier, Menachem

Begin - leader of the Likud - embarked on an ambitious plan called Proyect shikum shchunot

(project of neighborhood renewal). From that time, inner cities neighborhoods

became gradually associated with Mizrahit

... instead of a melting pot and

integration, the shchunot became site for

alternative solidarity rooted in ethnic

and and class affiliation. It is against

this background that the rappers quoted

earlier learn to think of Muzika Mizrahit

as the most authentic sound or

soundtrack of the Israeli hood - the

Israeli shchunot. Let's take another

example here. So this is..this example is

taken from a contemporary Israeli hip

hop. The rapper called Peled is one of

the biggest rappers in Israel these days

and the song is called Tipat Mazal (“a bit of luck”) and I would like you to pay

attention to the video and also to the

music and tell me if you can sense or

hear the the Mizrahi element in it. (Music)...

All right - yeah, it's hard to just cut it

off ...right... But look for this. Oh okay - good one (laughs).

So building on that and whatever we've

seen before, I think that it's easy to

say that this video is going to the

follow the footsteps of of many

videos that all of us have seen in in

American hip-hop. Trying to give visual

realization of the of the neighborhood

with its poverty and and and all these

all these things. So in that respect

Peled made his his homework. The thing

is that here there is a...This video is

peppered with many examples or hints and

say for the Mizrahi character of the

supposed residents of this shchunot. To

take one example, I mean the Israeli view... I guess could could

detect it. But for those who did not...So

to take one example, when this kid is

getting up from bed and puts on his

t-shirt ....So anyone who knows Israeli

sports can I can identify this t-shirt as

belonging to the soccer club ...

Tel Aviv ...Now unlike the two major major

clubs of Tel Aviv, which is .....

and Maccabi Tel Aviv which represents

the the general or the the major

population of Tel Aviv including the

wealthier neighborhoods, many of the Tel

Aviv represent a small shchunot...located in the poor southern

part of the city and whose residents of

course are coming from an Israeli

background. So when he puts this t-shirt

of ...there is at the same time we

can we can see

from behind on the wall, rapper Tupac

Shakur staring at us and there were

several close-up shots of him just to

make sure that none of us miss miss this

and hence make this just a juxtaposition

between the Mizrahi aspect and the

African-American. But how about the music?

Does this sound very Mizrahi to you?

Everybody who heard the

Arab or Mizrahi put your hands in

the air. I play like a rapper now. Yeah

... not many. Yeah it was it

was less explicit. But the fact is that

Israeli people do not actually have to

hear the song to detect the the Mizrahi

aspect in it. It is enough to read the

name of the song.....Tipat Mazal is

of the biggest hits of Mizrahi music.

Performed originally by singer Zehava Ben

in the late 80s. Actually

this was her breakthrough to the Israeli

public awareness. Zehava Ben

took the Mizrahi music closer to its

Arab tradition. Mizrahi music of the

70's and 80's was very much Western

oriented so it has this Arabic texture.

But when Zehava Ben and others took

it more towards Turkey to Turkish music,

it became like more heavy Arab music. And

Tipat Mazal again was her big hit. So

let's play just the introduction part of

of this song. You will hear that that the

intro is taken for Peled. It was not

taken as is. It was not just simple

but Peled made a variation of this

intro (Music)

Listen to this is this line (background music plays) again....(music) Listen to the melodic line that goes in. (music)

here

Did you hear this melody in

Peled song we heard before? Not so

much. You had to actually listen good for

that. Oh by the way, just pay attention

that before she started to sing there

was like two minutes of an intro. This

for itself explains that Mizrahi

music at the time was totally not

oriented toward the radio. There is no

radio music that allows itself to

have like two minutes of an intro before

the the singer...So the Mizrahi music was

totally made with a different

orientation or objective in mind - and

because the radio was not an option.

So now we'll jump back for a second to

to Peled and once again listen to the

intro. And you hear the variation he

is making on the intro ...and then when he

breaks up with his rap at the very very

same second that he gets in with his rap,

pay attention to this melodic line that

we've heard is always get in and once it

get in it runs throughout the song over

and over again in loop (music)

yeah (music)

(music fades) Okay, you try to be good; you try to do good; but they don't leave you any choice.

They make a crew make a criminal out of

you and so forth. All these kind of

narratives that you all know from

American rap and it repeats itself in

perhaps in any language that rap is

being made this day. So as you may have

heard, the integration of Muzika Mizrahit

hitting contemporary rap is somewhat

less explicit than it used to be. This,

however, doesn't mean that it is less

significant; in fact, my claim is that the

opposite is true.

Mizrahit musical elements are not teased

out in a Carnivale ish manner like it

used to be, at the first song that we've

heard. But integrated more subtly into

the very infrastructure of the song and

thus produced cultural fusion that is

more organic, Now let's jump to another

another example. Once again, listen to the

intro and listen how this Arabic element

runs at the background when the rap when

the rap verses getting (Music)

This is a collaboration of rappers that

work separately. Here when they come

together they call themselves "The C.A.B.I.N.E.T." Here again Mizrahi elements

is not stitched blatantly as an external

complement that supplements rap but is

genuinely integrated as part of the

overall composition. In this second

example I cannot point to the origin

from which this sample was taken - the Arab music.

I don't know where where they

took it from. This doesn't really matter.

The wide appeal of rap and their

significance of the cultural fusion it

offers have nothing to do with one's

ability or inability to detect the

origins or the sources of its various

components. Even if I wouldn't draw your

attention to the this melodic line that

was excerpted from Zehava Ben music,

your ears would would still sense its

present. You would hear, maybe absent

mindedly, its unique musical scale, the

tonality, the the the instrumental sound,

and so forth. It's there. All right. All

these components that we indeed hear

even without contemplative listening,

gives Peled's tune it's unique

musical tune. It is this sensitive work

with aspects of sound that enable us to

comprehend how and why Israeli rappers

managed to make their music sound local;

or in other words, how they affiliate

themselves with American rap... American

hip-hop while distinguishing themselves

from it at the very same time. This point

brings me to the third and last symbolic

meaning of Mizrahi rap. Early theorists

of globalisation associated this term

with the homogenization of cultures

across the globe, and thus with a gradual

devaluation of local cultures.

Counter theories, on the other hand, show

that global trends acts as an incentive for

people in groups around the world to

preserve and sometimes to reinvent their

local tradition against what they

perceived as an external threat. The

study of popular music enables us to

critically assess this mutually

exclusive approaches. Instead of the

either/or attitude suggested by this

approaches, one can see how Mizrahi rap

is a way for Israeli people to take part

in the global hip-hop scene - sometimes

called the hip-hop nation...

while doing so by highlighting their

local culture. Israeli sociologist of

music, Motti Regev, suggested that we can

look at cultural cosmopolitanism a sort

of a World Bank of aesthetic complements or products from which each people can

withdraw wherever they want, and do with

it whatever they want. So Israelis take

American hip-hop and appropriate it and

incorporate different things to it and

make it their own in a way - make it local -

and then they 'deposit' it, to go with a

metaphor of a World Bank...They make a

deposit back to the World Bank, and then

other people can take it and do whatever

they want with it and deposit it back.

And so this is how music and other

cultural products circulate and travel

around the world - and this is

exactly what we call cosmopolitanism.

This approach not only complicates the

binary perception of global versus local,

but also explains how people in groups

located in the global peripheries like

Israel can play greater part in global

trends. Instead of trying to be like

those in the cultural centers, people in

the peripheries can refresh standout

forms by appropriating it and send their

original expression back to the world

cultural centers. Now Israeli rappers,

believe me, understand this even though

they have not read my

articles or any sociological theory. Okay,

they understand that... to realize... I mean....

They realize that to become

legitimate and appreciated performers in

the larger field of hip-hop they should

not try to be what they are not, or who

they are not. In that respect,

infiltrating Mizrahi sound into

their music is not just a way to claim

local authenticity at home in Israel, but

also to offer this authenticity as a

valuable currency in the global economy

of aesthetic cosmopolitanism. Okay, it is

thus an ironic turn in the plot of

history the the rejected son of Israeli

music - I'm speaking of course about

Mizrahi music - it became a valuable asset

for those willing to be part of the

global map of contemporary music. For

many years, Muzika Mizrahit was

excluded from radio, television and

record companies in Israel. This very

exclusion, however, attributed Muzika Mizrahit

a sense of local authenticity

exactly at the time in history when when

authenticity is regarded the most

precious quality in the context of an

ever growing cultural border-crossing.

Right...So many times we are searching for

authenticity - as consumers, I mean, as

tourists when we go places we like to

see the authentic side of these places.

We can ask people to take us where

the locals are going, right, because we

want to see the the real life. In

culinary, we are looking for the

authentic foods of certain cultures and

so also with music. We like to hear the

musical form that we imagine as in its

purest form before it became

popular, before it was a sellout

or commercialized.

All right, so yeah authenticity sells.

Black cultural expression in the United

States, like Mizrahi was in Israel, often

imagined as if it sprang from semi-isolated

social enclaves. As an inner

code shared by members of these

communities of those who live in these

ghettos. The Israeli rappers are not the

first to highlight the similarities

between blackness and Mizrahit - Mizrahi-ness.

However, reframing Muzika Mizrahit in

the context of rap associated with

blackness which is today at the

forefront of the global pop culture.

Mizrahi rap, then, demonstrates significant

change in the status of Mizrahi culture

in Israel. It enables us to think of

Mizrahit for the first time not as

a source of shame but rather as a

cultural asset and a bridge to the Western

world to which Israel and the Israelis

have always aspired to belong. Thank you.