The relocation of North African and Middle Eastern Jews to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s brought together communities from Egypt, Iraq, Kurdistan, Yemen, and many other Islamic countries, as well as their unique music styles. In the unstable, improvisatory spaces of transit camps, development towns, and poor neighborhoods, they created a new pan-ethnic Mizrahi identity and a homegrown hybrid music that inspired equal parts high-pitched enthusiasm and resistance along the fault lines of Israel's ethnic divide. In Mediterranean Israeli Music and the Politics of the Aesthetic, author Amy Horowitz investigates the emergence of a new pan-ethnic Mizrahi style of music between the 1970s and 1990s, as the community struggled to gain recognition on the overlapping stages of politics and music.
This volume is both an ethnographic study based on Horowitz's immersion in the Mizrahi community and a multi-voiced account of community members, who describe their music and musicians who play it. Horowitz focuses primarily on the work of three artists―Avihu Medina, Zohar Argov, and Zehava Ben―who pioneered a recognizable Mizrahi style and moved this new musical formation from the Mizrahi neighborhoods to the national arena. She also contextualizes the music within the history of the community by detailing the mass migration of North African and Middle Eastern Jews to Israel, the emergence of these immigrants as a pan-ethnic political coalition in the 1970s, and the opening up of markets for disenfranchised music makers as a result of new recording technologies, including the cassette recorder and four-way duplicating machine.
Mediterranean Israeli Music and the Politics of the Aesthetic places folklore within the frameworks of nationalism, ethnicity, ethnomusicology, Jewish studies, Israel studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and politics. Anyone interested in these disciplines will appreciate this remarkable volume.
Amy Horowitz is a Grammy-award winning music producer interested in the unlikely coalitions and inevitable contradictions in music cultures and everyday lives. In 2010, her book Mediterranean Israeli Music and the Politics of the Aesthetic received notable mention from the Jordan Schnitzer Book Awards.
Dr. Horowitz has over four decades of experience in the academic world, the music industry, and grassroots social justice arts networks. Her main research interests are global indigenous studies, the study of music in disputed territory, contemporary Jerusalem, Arab Jewish popular music and protest music as responsible citizenship. She believes in coalition across differences, and has long fought against racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia and misogyny. Her work in cross-cultural and multiracial coalitions includes co-founding Roadwork and Sisterfire and serving as artist representative for Sweet Honey in the Rock 1977 - 1994. Her activist work complements her academic background that combines training in Jewish studies and ethnomusicology (MA, New York University, 1986) with folklore and Israeli studies (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1994).
Horowitz worked as curator at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and in 1997 she received a Grammy Award as co-producer for Anthology of American Folk Music while serving as acting director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. In 2003 she created and produced "Protest Music as Responsible Citizenship" featuring Pete Seeger, Harry Belafonte, Bernice Johnson Reagon and Holly Near. Currently she is a senior fellow in Israel Studies at Indiana University Center for the Study of the Middle East and co-director of GALACTIC (Global Arts Language Arts Culture Tradition Indigenous Communities) a collaboration of Indiana University and Navajo Technical University.
