MIZRAHI: THE HISTORY OF ITS STYLE

They all arrived and continue to arrive not empty-handed, at least metaphorical sense. In their baggage, each person carries a set of traditions and customs from their countries of origin, which immediately begin interacting with each other in new conditions. Hence the inherently hybrid, composite nature of Israeli culture, including its music. The country's territory, which is only 22,000 square kilometres, has remained a space of continuous cultural exchange throughout the 75 years of Israel's existence: friendly and violent, equal and abusive. In popular music, one of the most noticeable results of this exchange has been the Mizrahi style - a distinctly Israeli phenomenon with a history that remotely resembles the life path of American hip-hop: from the mud to the throne, from the ghetto to stadiums, from the periphery of show business to its very centre. Today, Mizrahi music is, in fact, the Israeli musical mainstream: any radio hit is either entirely in this style or at the very least uses some of its elements. And Mizrahi artist Eyal Golan has been recognised as the country's best singer for two decades in a row.

Paradoxes in the case of Mizrahi music begin quite literally at the threshold, starting with the name of this musical movement. "Mizrah" in Hebrew translates to "east," but here, the cardinal directions were interpreted as roughly as they were on Henry Bunting's trefoil map. In the 1950s, the term "Mizrahim" began to refer to Jews arriving in Israel who were not from Europe, in contrast to the Ashkenazi who were at the helm of the young state: immigrants from Russia, Poland, or Germany. Repatriates from places like Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, or Morocco were broadly categorized as Eastern Jews, even though, for example, Morocco is located much further west than Israel itself.

This superficial and geographically imprecise generalisation transparently hinted at less than warm feelings that the Ashkenazi elite of the country had towards the Mizrahim. Journalist Aryeh Gelblum of the newspaper "Haaretz" wrote in 1949: "These are very primitive people, their level of education borders on complete ignorance, they adapt poorly to life in Israel, are chronically lazy, and cannot stand to work." Here's another paradox: while proclaiming the new state as a homeland for all Jews, its creators still divided its inhabitants into strata: the privileged and not-so-privileged. When Eastern Jews arrived in Israel, they often ended up in transit camps, called "Ma’abarot" in Hebrew. After that, they most often went to live in so-called "development towns" - from Kiryat Shmona in the north to Sderot and Netivot in the south. At that time, they could only be called cities in a conditional sense; they were more like hastily constructed outposts on the periphery of the country serving as visible evidence of Israeli territorial control. Of the 170 such settlements that had arisen by the end of the 1950s, 120 were populated by immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa.

The ghettoization of Mizrahi Jews also extended to their culture: among the "Eastern" immigrants of the 1950s, there were musicians, some of them with glorious careers in their countries of origin. However, none of them truly managed to break into the Israeli market. Some, like the singer Zohra Al Fassiya, fell into obscurity. The superstar of North African music, who had performed at the court of the King of Morocco, couldn't integrate into the cultural reality of the new country and ended her days in poverty and loneliness. Similarly, the fate of the Kuwaiti brothers Daoud and Saleh Al Kuwaity played out: the authors and performers of hundreds of compositions that had long become musical standards in Iraq and Kuwait repatriated in 1951 and were forced to sell household goods in the market until their deaths. The disappointment of the Al Kuwaity brothers was so great that both forbade their descendants from pursuing music.

A couple of individuals were somewhat luckier: Egyptian Filfel El Masri and Moroccan Jo Amar. Both of them released several notable records in Israel, although they were primarily distributed among their communities. The key hits of each artist tell the story of the difficulties of adapting to the new reality. For instance, El Masri's song "Hakol Betashlumim" ("Everything Is Paid in Instalments," 1959) is dedicated to a practice unfamiliar to him but extremely popular in the country, the concept of buying on credit, where any payment, including groceries in a supermarket, can be divided into several periodic instalments. This easily leads to accumulating debt, which the wife of the song's lyrical character astutely exploits, causing him to tear his hair out in frustration.

Even more expressive is Jo Amar's work titled "Lishkat Avoda" ("Employment Office" 1959): in it, the author first describes his misadventures in the Ma’abarot transit camps and then shares his experience of trying to find work. The clerk at the labor exchange asks where he came from, and upon hearing the word "Morocco," promptly kicks him out. However, our hero, not being a fool, returns the next day, introduces himself as a Pole, and receives a polite, even obsequious "Please come in!"

Part of the song "Lishkat Avoda" is performed in Arabic, and this is one of the reasons why the Israeli elite initially stigmatised Mizrahi culture as low and primitive. The State of Israel was declared amid the War of Independence (1948-1949) and was in a state of conflict with the surrounding Arab countries for most of its history. In this context, Arab and Middle Eastern culture was mainly seen as the culture of the enemy and was marked accordingly in public discourse (following a principle immortalized in a symmetric meme image that has been circulating on the internet for a long time: "our blessed homeland- their barbarous waste, our glorious leader- their wicked despot” and so on). There were exceptions to this rule: for instance, special consideration was given to the work of Yemenite Jews, which, although also distinctly oriental, held indisputable historical authority (in Israel, it was believed that this ethnic group, which had not left the Middle East region for many centuries, preserved the millennia-old traditions of the Jewish people in a form closest to the original). Thus, Yemenite musicians had more opportunities to showcase their talent in the country. The first to do so back in the 1930s was the singer Bracha Zefira, followed by others, such as Shoshana Damari, a true superstar of the official Israeli musical mainstream of the 20th century, who performed the composition "Kalaniyot" ("Anemones," 1948), which would certainly have found its place in The Great Israeli Songbook if such a corpus were to be compiled, akin to the American model.

Nonetheless, the songs of both Filfel El Masri and Jo Amar were composed by Ashkenazi composers in their familiar Europeanized style, with only occasional, light Oriental influences.

The music of Filfel El Masri and Jo Amar, in contrast, sounded fundamentally different. And it wasn't just the Arabic language, which was only episodically used in their songs. Even the Hebrew they used was distinct, with pronounced guttural sounds like "het" and "ayin," unlike the smoother speech of European Jews. The instrumentation was also different, featuring instruments like the oud, kanun, darbuka, and later the Greek bouzouki and Turkish baglama. The harmonic basis of their compositions often relied on Eastern makams, most commonly bayati or kurd; the music ventured beyond the confines of equal-tempered tuning and made extensive use of quarter tones. The singers' voices had a nasal quality. On long notes, they would often embark on fascinating melismatic journeys through the musical scale—in Israeli tradition, this technique became known as "silsulim" (curls, ornaments, or, in a narrow musical sense, trills).

From the perspective of the prevailing Westernized style, all of this sounded quite exotic and reinforced the idea of Mizrahi Jews as suspicious, overly "Arabized" foreigners. For the Mizrahim themselves, however, this was their tradition, absorbed literally with their mother's milk. For centuries, repatriates from Asia and

Africa had coexisted quite harmoniously with ethnic Arabs in their countries of origin. "The horror is that we risk being absorbed by them, rather than the other way around," as Aryeh Gelblum continued in the quoted article. To avoid this alarming scenario, Eastern Jews were subjected to "Israeliization" and "de-Arabization." In exchange for civil rights and the opportunity to live in the national Jewish state, effectively forming its proletariat, they were asked to discard their former "Eastern" identity.

This partially worked, as many representatives of the next generation of Mizrahi Jews, born in Israel, preferred to express themselves in different musical spaces, such as rock music. The Tel Aviv-based band “The Churchill’s”, authors of one of the first Israeli rock albums, composed music that hardly revealed the origins of its creators. Even the piquant mandolin solos (as in the song "Subsequent Finale") were closer to the orientalist experiments of psychedelic rockers from England and the United States than to authentic Eastern styles on which the musicians' ancestors were raised. The parents' music was often not well-regarded by the artists of this circle. As singer Yehudit Ravitz recalled, "As a child, I begged my mom not to play her Arabic music when my friends came over, so as not to give them a reason to mimic the whiny voice of the famous Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum. My mom liked her singing; it reminded her of her childhood in Egypt.

Folk music, which my father used to listen to, was always much closer to me. He came from Poland and knew all the old Zionist songs, even those that were composed in Europe. Growing up in Be'er Sheva in the south of Israel, Ravitz gained fame in 1977 by performing the richly orchestrated romance "Slichot" ("Forgiveness") at the official Israeli song festival, based on the poetry of the canonized poetess Lea Goldberg. This was followed by participation in the recording of a children's album called "Ha-Keves Ha-Shisha-Asar" ("The Sixteenth Lamb") with the Ashkenazi rock elite and a successful solo career in the Israeli mainstream.

The Churchills also achieved a certain level of success in cultural assimilation: they accompanied Arik Einstein, the leader of intelligent Ashkenazi popular songs, on his best albums, and guitarist Yitzhak Klepter became part of the golden lineup of the most popular Israeli rock band of the 1970s, Kaveret ("Hive"). However, a condition of this deal was the almost complete oblivion of their roots: not only on a stylistic level but also on a domestic level. In their efforts to become part of the refined Israeli mainstream, the Mizrahi musicians inevitably distanced themselves from the community that raised them. For a time, The Churchill’s' headquarters were not even in Tel Aviv, but in London, where they released two strong English-language albums under the titles “Jericho Jones” and “Jericho”. Years later, Yehudit Ravitz apologised to her mother for being ashamed of her background and favourite songs. In Hebrew, traditionally tolerant of new word formations, a special verb emerged, "lehishetaknez," meaning "to Ashkenazify" or "to become culturally Ashkenazi."

Meanwhile, the Mizrahi community continued to live its own life, and it had its own music that was more closely tied to Middle Eastern tradition. The attitude towards it from the cultural elite remained dismissive. In 1975, Nissim Serussi, a singer of Tunisian origin known for sentimental ballads like "Eyni Yakhol" ("I Can't") and "Ima" ("Mom"), was suddenly invited to Yaron London's television talk show, only to be humiliated on live television by the host. London called Mizrahi music tasteless and suggested that only in Israel could a person who looked and sang like Serussi hope to become a popular artist.

Parallelly, however, tectonic shifts were taking place in Israeli society, primarily linked to the heavy experience of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, during which Israel lost over 2500 soldiers (with approximately 8000 more sustaining various degrees of injuries). For a small country, these were staggering numbers. A significant percentage of the casualties were Mizrahi Jews, among whom questions began to arise after the conflict: why when it comes to sacrifice for Israel, it's for us (Mizrahi Jews), but when it comes to governing the country, we should stay quiet and not stand out?

Eastern Jews began to consider having proper political representation. In 1977, their votes undermined the hegemony of the left-wing forces that had been in control of the country since its establishment, leading to the rise of the right-wing Likud party. "Immediately after the elections, this was seen as an example of protest voting by the marginalized Mizrahi population against the dominant socialist establishment, composed almost entirely of Ashkenazi Jews," wrote Dov Waxman. "But the fact that the Mizrahi voted for 'Likud' in all subsequent elections indicates that the reason ran deeper. The way the party (especially its leader Menachem Begin) emphasised Jewishness and Jewish traditions appealed to Mizrahi Jews, as this idea allowed them to integrate into Israeli society on an equal basis. By voting for 'Likud,' they demonstrated their desire to be a full part of the Israeli nation."

Following the Yom Kippur War, Ahuva Ozeri, a singer hailing from a Yemeni Jewish family who played the Indian string-plucked instrument "bulbul tarang" as an accompaniment, composed a poignant song called "Hechan Hachayal?" ("Where is the soldier?"). It was a rare Mizrahi music performance on a relevant socio-political issue, dedicated to a young man who lost his life in battle, the son of her neighbour.

Nonetheless, an incident that appeared unrelated to warfare but held significant importance for the scene's evolution played a pivotal role.

In 1973, Asher Reuveni, who, together with his brothers, owned a small electronics store in the Htikva Quarter in Tel Aviv, predominantly populated by Yemeni immigrants, was preparing to get married. Unfortunately, the wedding celebration was marred by sad news: his bride's brother did not return from the war. After several months of mourning, the friends of the newlyweds finally decided to throw them a joyful party (referred to in the Mizrahi community in an Arabic style as "hafla") and invited musicians: Yosef Levy, better known as Daklon, and Moshe ben-Moshe, who would become members of an important ensemble for the Mizrahi movement, Tslilei Ha-Kerem ("Sounds of the Vineyard," with the vineyard referring to the Kerem Ha-Taymanim neighbourhood where the musicians grew up).

The situation itself was not out of the ordinary; most Mizrahi artists earned their livelihood by performing at weddings and bar mitzvahs. The Churchills used to perform in prestigious academic halls with a symphonic orchestra conducted by the great conductor Zubin Mehta, following the aspirations of late 1960s progressive rockers. However, the favoured venues for other Eastern Jewish musicians at the time included private apartments, restaurants, or even local gas stations with hastily assembled stages. The "hafla" of the Reuveni couple continued until the early morning, with more than two hundred guests coming to congratulate the newlyweds. Some of their friends couldn't attend, as they were still in the army. So, the groom and his brothers decided to record the party on cassette, with a small, inexpensive tape recorder quietly running in the corner all night.

Later on, this cassette became mythologized in the history of Eastern Jewish music as a kind of seed from which the entire corresponding culture grew. While this may be an exaggeration, the Mizrahi music industry truly had its roots in the recording of Asher Reuveni's wedding. It quickly became apparent that the target audience wanted to listen to their favourite songs not only live but also in recordings, although the background noise of the guests often drowned out the music itself. People who didn't personally know the newlyweds began offering a hundred lira for the cassette (the Israeli new shekels were later introduced in Israel in 1980). The Reuveni brothers realized they could make a good profit from this, so they founded a record label and a production centre that would become a powerhouse of Mizrahi music in the following years.

Another stronghold of this music was the Tel Aviv bus station, a powerful transportation and trading hub. Amidst the stalls selling clothes, used goods, and various snacks, numerous cassette vendors quickly appeared, offering counterfeit products among others. "For ten lira, you could get three cassettes," recalled Kobi Oz, the frontman of the band Teapacks, which straddled the line between alternative rock and Mizrahi music in the mid-1990s. "I would go to the old station, and it was like entering another country for me: a country of suspended reality, whether it was raining or the sun was shining." Teapacks originated from Sderot, a southern "development town" on the border with the Gaza Strip. Young Oz, like many other Mizrahi Jews, regularly found himself at the Tel Aviv bus station, buying fresh cassettes along the way and taking them home. Thanks to this alternative grassroots cassette infrastructure, Mizrahi music's melodies and rhythms spread rapidly throughout the country. Mainstream media—radio, television and major record labels releasing vinyl records—continued to ignore what was happening right under their noses, but it no longer mattered.

Here's another paradox closely tied to this cultural phenomenon: in Europe and the USA, the audio cassette, a cheap and user-friendly medium, became a symbol of the musical underground, enabling artists who didn't rely on record deals to preserve their work for posterity. Israel, too, developed its own "cassette underground," but it featured a completely different sound: not like the avant-garde experiments of the West but democratic, entertaining, and friendly music meant for the widest possible audience. "My goal is to sing songs that touch people," said Zohar Argov, a key figure in Mizrahi music in the 1980s. "I noticed that the Israeli audience is quite sentimental. They love songs that reach the heart."

A descendant of Yemeni immigrants, with a memorable Middle Eastern appearance, strong stage charisma, and powerful vocal abilities, Argov became a star in the Mizrahi community after releasing his first single, "Elinor," in 1980. Two years later, he triumphed at the Israeli festival of Eastern music with the victory going to his composition "Haperakh Begani" ("The Flower in My Garden"). What was even more important was not just the prize but the fact that the 1982 festival was televised nationally for the first time. As a result, the track was heard not only by members of the artist's own community but also by those who hadn't had access to such music before—they heard it and loved it. "Haperakh Begani" became the first Mizrahi-style song in history to make it onto the Israeli radio broadcasters' year-end rating, immediately claiming the honourable fourth place. It undoubtedly found its way into many hearts.

Comparing classic recordings by Zohar Argov with early examples of Mizrahi music performed by artists like Jo Amar or Filfel El-Masri, we can unmistakably identify them as part of the same cultural continuum, but at the same time, we hear differences. Motti Regev and Edwin Seroussi in their book "Popular Music and National Culture in Israel" highlight seven distinct features (musical codes) of Mizrahi music during its heyday.

Among them were elements that were also present in the song "Lishkat Avoda": static harmony, a cyclical pattern in the rhythm section, vocal melismatics, reliance on Eastern maqamat (guitarist Yehuda Keisar, who collaborated extensively with Argov, even constructed a special guitar with quarter-tone frets in the 1970s). However, other features, primarily related to instruments or form, became characteristic of Eastern Jewish music only in its new, one might say, peak phase. Jo Amar didn't use electric rock instruments. For Argov and his contemporaries, they became an integral part of the arrangement, alongside the kanun and darbuka. Songs about employment bureaus or dues payment didn't divide into even segments of 8 or 16 beats and avoided a rigid verse-chorus structure, while "Haperakh Begani," on the contrary, was structured precisely this way. "With regard to its musical structure, Mizrahi popular music is undoubtedly western music," wrote Avi Picard. "The new style is based on studio technology and sound recording distribution. Its foundation is a written score that allows for the precise repetition of musical sections, rather than a unique, live performance."

Instead of elaborate improvisations and interconnected musical fragments, here, there is an individual song lasting about three minutes. None of this was characteristic of the musical tradition of Jews from Muslim countries.

Of course, partly, this evolution was driven by purely practical reasons: Jo Amar didn't have access to electric guitars, while Zohar Argov did. However, it seems that this is not the only explanation. The music of the Mizrahi people in the 1950s was a scattered collection of repatriate traditions, and the term "Mizrahim" then sounded like a derogatory generalization and a way for the elite to define the "other" and immediately distance themselves from it. On the contrary, in the 1980s, this word described a specific identity of the descendants of repatriates from Muslim countries in Asia and Africa: the Mizrahi generation born in Israel realized itself as a socio-cultural group. The songs of Zohar Argov, his contemporaries, and followers were no longer Moroccan, Iraqi, or Yemeni music simply transplanted to a different territory; they were, in the literal sense, Mizrahi music that expressed the aspirations of a specific segment of Israeli society.

Therefore, it inherently mixed everything that the Mizrahi people loved and listened to. One example is the Greek chanson in the style of the popular Israeli singer Aris San as Argov's song "Elinor" was a cover of a Greek composition, and Yehuda Keisar mastered a staccato guitar style, imitating the sound of the Greek bouzouki. Another inspiration was the Turkish Arabesque music: the famous hit "Tipat Mazal" by the Mizrahi singer Zehava Ben was based on one of the songs by the mustachioed heartthrob Orhan Gencebay (between Israel and Turkey, there was no copyright agreement in 1990, so melodies from Turkish chanson could be borrowed freely). There were also Arab vocalizations, like in the intro to "Haperakh Begani"; which used the technique of singing a single syllable in the Arab tradition called melisma.

Here, you can also find the passionate romance of Sanremo, the electrifying energy of rock and roll, brass arrangements of Balkan and other Eastern European origins (the arranger of "Haperakh Begani," Nancy Brandes, was originally from Romania), and sometimes even official Ashkenazi chanson. Haim Moshe, a popular Mizrahi singer in the 1980s, commissioned new compositions from Naomi Shemer, the composer of "Jerusalem of Gold," and dozens of other songs from the Great Israeli Songbook, an Ashkenazi-Mizrahi collaboration not considered inappropriate at that point in time. This clearly signifies a paradigm shift, as does the fact that poet-songwriter Meir Ariel, a veteran of the Six-Day War often informally referred to as the Israeli Bob Dylan, included a cover version of Zohar Argov's song "Kvar Avru Shanim" ("Years Have Passed") in his repertoire.

Mizrahi music still rarely played in prime time on TV, but at least it was no longer scorned there, as happened to the unfortunate Nissim Seroussi a decade earlier. On the contrary, Eastern Jewish singers reclaimed derogatory nicknames, which Ashkenazi Jews had labeled them with, such as "chachach" or "frecha” (“chick”)." "Shir Hafrecha" ("The Chick Song," 1979) became the first hit for Ofra Haza, an artist of Yemeni origin, although she only tangentially connected to the Mizrahi scene.

Another element was Sephardic synagogue chants, or piyyut, often based on melodies from secular Jewish or Arab music. Mizrahi Jews, on average, were more religious than European Zionists who stood at the roots of the state. Over time, the ultra-Orthodox party "Shas" became another political representation for them. Like many other representatives of Mizrahi music, Zohar Argov sang in the synagogue from a young age. The lyrics of his songs were often written in a lofty, old-fashioned language. For example, "You were the apple of my eye day and night; you were an angel of God in the darkness," as sung in "Haperakh Begani." The composition was "written in a language that resembles the 'Song of Songs' (King Solomon), more than Hebrew typical of Israeli pop music," noted Ben Shalev. This religiosity often went hand in hand with ideological conservatism. The parents of the Israeli superstar Sarit Hadad did not consider a musical career appropriate for their daughter, and she had to secretly run away from home to perform in a club, where she was eventually noticed by producers.

With the names of Hadad, Zehava Ben, Eyal Golan, and some other newcomers in the 1990s, Mizrahi music transitioned into a new quality, at least commercially. Unlike Zohar Argov, who didn't live to see the new decade, all three can be called crossover artists: they not only didn't shy away from cross-genre experiments but, on the contrary, bet on them. In 1992, Ben appeared at the microphone for the cover of "Kiturne Masala" ("When Luck Returns," with mixed languages) by the popular electropop group Ethnix; her melismas contrasted the more straightforward rock vocal of the group's leader, Zeev Nehama. In 1997, the same Ethnix initiated the first of several collaborations with Golan, and the previously mentioned Teapacks ensemble invited Sarit Hadad to record the song "Lama Alacht Mimenu" ("Why Have You Left Us"). Mizrahi music directly interacted with the mainstream, but remarkably, it avoided "Ashkenazification." In the "features" on these joint recordings, it was not so much Eyal Golan and Sarit Hadad personally as their style that was accepted into the mainstream while still maintaining their distinctive sound.

The musicians from Ethnix and Teapacks needed Mizrahi singers specifically in their professional capacity - as bearers of a characteristic vocal style. The same thing happened in the 2000s when Israeli rappers turned to them. Some - like the popular Jerusalem hip-hop collective Hadag Nahash ("The Fish-Snake") - demanded specific skills from Mizrahi instrumentalists. In their song "Shir Nehama" ("Comfort Song," 2010), the recognizable electric guitar in the Greek style of Yehuda Keisar is heard. According to Dr. Oded Erez, it's similar to a sample from an old record, which forms the foundation of a hip-hop track, with the only difference being that in Hadag Nahash's case, the sample was played live. As for the Mizrahi vocalists, they obviously played the role of R&B singers in Israeli hip-hop. In American hip-hop, their melodic singing serves as a counterpoint to the main characters' recitations. The most successful Israeli pop duo of the 2010s and 2020s, Static & Ben El Tavori, follows the same principle: the emcee (Static, also known as Liraz Russo) and the Mizrahi singer (Ben El Tavori).

The history of Mizrahi music from the late 1990s to the present is a chronicle of continuous extensive development on all levels at once: sound, media, politics, and meaning. "As a friend of mine, a Jerusalem sound man, put it: In 2015 it isn’t accurate to say that Mizrahi is a sub-genre of Israeli pop, or even a successful genre, or that it threatens the mainstream," wrote Matti Friedman in an article titled "Israel’s Happiness Revolution," named after a Mizrahi song by Lior Narkis and Omer Adam. " It is the mainstream. It is Israeli pop. If you put a stethoscope to the country’s chest right now, the rhythm you’d hear would be Mizrahi."

Following rock and hip-hop, Mizrahi music was able to seamlessly marry the oriental melodic profile and vocal ornaments to globalist club-electronic pop sound, from EDM to trap and reggaeton. "What appeals to Israelis is bass and silsulim!" proclaimed Static & Ben El Tavori in their breakthrough hit "Silsulim" (2016), and judging by the 59 million views on the YouTube video, they knew what they were talking about. Along with new media, under the pressure of Mizrahi music, the old media, such as radio and television, fell many years ago. This style has long dominated numerous Israeli vocal competitions, and Eyal Golan even had his own personal TV show searching for young talents. In 2008, Golan packed the Caesarea Amphitheater, the country's most prestigious concert venue previously associated with respectable Israeli pop and rock artists like Shlomo Artzi.

Of course, this situation does not suit everyone. In 1992, Jonathan Geffen, a prominent representative of the "old" Ashkenazi cultural elite, wrote a column in the "Maariv" newspaper, "The Turks Have Taken Over Tel Aviv!" The reason was the Turkish melodies of Zehava Ben's song "Tipat Mazal" and some other songs. "I thought we had conquered Tulkarm (a Palestinian city on the West Bank), not that Tulkarm had conquered us," said politician Jair Lapid ten years later after hearing one of the songs by Mizrahi artist Amir Benayoun on the radio. For Geffen and Lapid, Mizrahi music obviously remained a marker of a foreign, and even hostile culture. In reality, it works more like soft power and builds bridges where other actors in Israeli political and cultural life prefer to burn them. Cassette recordings of Zeheva Ben could be found in industrial quantities in the 1990s not only at the Tel Aviv bus station or the Machane Yehuda Market in Jerusalem but also at street markets in neighboring Arab countries and even in the Palestinian Authority. She successfully performed in Egypt, Jordan, Jericho, and Nablus as long as it was possible.

Contemporary Mizrahi mainstream often seeks to smooth out contradictions in other areas. Thus, this music remains deeply religious. An obligatory element of the concerts of the hitmaker Omer Adam, who is a practicing Jew and consistently refuses to perform on the Sabbath, is the ballad "Modeh Ani" ("I Give Thanks," 2015), based on the text of the morning prayer. At the same time, another equally obligatory element of his performances is the carefree gay anthem "Tel Aviv" (2013), full of specific jargon. Instead of viewing these career moves by Adam as contradictory, it's worth understanding that he seeks to broadly outline the contours of modern Israeli middle class, dominated by Mizrahi Jews and encompassing what may appear to be very diverse trends: Eastern queerness, religious traditionalism, and hedonistic hyper-masculinity, according to Dr. Oded Erez.

It's interesting to note that Omer Adam, strictly speaking, is not Mizrahi or at least not entirely Mizrahi: his mother is Ashkenazi, and his father is a Mountain (Caucasian) Jew. He was born and raised in the United States. In its current mainstream form, Mizrahi music is no longer the exclusive domain of specific sub-ethnic groups; it has evolved into a cosmopolitan sound with a certain (and fairly broad) set of distinctive characteristics. For example, the song "Silsulim" by the duo Static & Ben El Tavori clearly exhibits the characteristics of the style but also blends seamlessly with a lineup of global summer beach dance-pop hits from around the world, such as "Despacito."

In recent years, an alternative stratum is taking shape within the community, represented by individuals who seek to return Mizrahi style to its roots, both literally and figuratively. Jerusalem singer Neta Elkayam is reintroducing the world to the music of Zohra Al Fassiya, a Moroccan star from the mid-20th century whose illustrious career effectively came to an end with her repatriation to Israel. The Haim sisters, who grew up in the southern desert of Israel (unrelated to the American band HAIM, also, by a strange coincidence, consisting of three sisters), delve into their family history. As part of the A-WA project, they revive the oral musical tradition of Yemenite Jews, or more precisely, Jewesses. "While men went to the synagogue and sang religious songs there, women stayed at home and had closer interactions with the Arab community," explains one of the sisters who holds a bachelor's degree in ethnomusicology. Unsurprisingly, the songs of A-WA are performed not in Hebrew but in the Yemeni dialect of the Arabic language.

Dudu Tassa, the grandson of Daoud All Kuwaiti, one of the Iraqi Jewish brothers who created a body of musical standards in their country of origin mentioned earlier, ignored his grandfather's prohibition and became a musician. Among his many genre-spanning projects, the standout is the "cross-cultural Jewish-Arab project" Dudu Tassa & the Kuwaitis. In this ensemble, the artist, along with instrumentalists from Israel and Iraq, offers modernized versions of the music of his ancestors. The group performed in the USA at the Coachella Festival and embarked on a full tour as the opening act for Radiohead in 2017. Their latest album, "Jarak Qaribak" (2023), is also dedicated to the Middle Eastern musical tradition, but this time, a non-Jewish one. Tassa recorded the album in the company of Jonny Greenwood.

The history of Mizrahi music, woven with paradoxes and as intricate as the melodies of Zohar Argov's songs, continues to develop intensely and unpredictably even today. Its core remains in the same place, where the three different colored petals converged on Heinrich Bünting's geographical map.