The following is a transcript of Episode 178 of the Identity/Crisis Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi, welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show about news and ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording on Monday, February 26th, 2024. 

So here’s an amateur history of the politics of Israeli music informed unapologetically by my own life experience through all of this. I’m going to divide it into three phases. In the first era, so let’s say from the 1950s through the 1970s, maybe even the early 1980s, Israeli popular music was hugely informed and influenced by the experience of near-constant war. The peak of that era, of course, was the Six-Day War. And its music included sweeping ballads, famously like Yerushalayim Shel Zahav, which is a song that both reflects pre-war anxiety about what was about to happen and also gets edited after the war to reflect the news of its victory. Six Day War also produced playful gloating songs like Nasser is waiting for Rabin. 

But the period in question, I would say, also includes the folk music prior to that war and extends all the way, I would say, until Naomi Shemer’s Al Kol Ele, a meditation on territorial compromise that resulted in giving the Sinai back to Egypt in 1982 and the evacuation of the settlement at Yamit. 

If you grew up with a diaspora Zionist education like I did, you would think that Naomi Shemer was the iconic premier balladeer of this period, but I would suggest, even if you did, go and read Yessi Klein Halevi’s Like Dreamers, and you’ll conclude, no, maybe that credit should go to Meir Ariel, or at least maybe they should share it. Meir Ariel was also a product of that time, a singer and songwriter, a writer, a singer and songwriter whose work is inseparable from the prevailing climate of war. 

By the way, Israel was not alone with this kind of military-informed music culture. Consider all the ways, at the exact same time, that the American rock and folk scene were shaped in the 60s and 70s by Korea and then Vietnam, and then Israel’s version of the same music trends, same styles, the same themes doesn’t seem that unusual or special. 

Those were a lot of the songs that I grew up with. We had a record at home with like a record player called Songs of the Six-Day War. I remember we sang a lot of the folk songs about hope and dreaming for peace that only makes sense if you know that they’re written in an atmosphere of wartime. I grew up with these songs in part because, like I said, I grew up in a Zionist household and an educational environment in the 1980s, but I also grew up with them because my parents were born around the time of the War of Independence and became adults around the time of the Six-Day War. 

I think it’s almost inevitable that the songs we fall in love with as we become adults, like my parents did, become the soundtrack in the cars that we drive with our children in the backseat. All of that is part of the epigenetic transfer of culture. All of us are products of when we happen to have been born. 

I think phase two was the 1990s and early 2000s, when the soundtrack shifts from becoming from when the soundtrack shifts from being war-informed to something a little different, the music both of the hope for peace and the trauma of terror. The peak of this musical moment was the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin and its aftermath. Rabin was shot right after coming down from singing a famous 1970s peace song at a rally. By the way, the blood-stained copy of that song with its lyrics found in his coat pocket after his death. 

That song got a revival in the months after the assassination. And then a short time later, the following week, Rabin was memorialized with a mega concert in Tel Aviv at which almost every Israeli star of the time performed and converted some of their biggest hits into memorial songs. 

I was living in Israel when this all went down. I was 18 years old that year. I’m not sure I have any bigger regrets than not going to that concert. The Rabin assassination was life-changing for me in a lot of ways. I spent many, many hours with the double album that emerged from that concert. The album, entitled Shalom Chaver, it’s still out there, was named after Bill Clinton’s eulogy of Rabin. 

Perhaps the most iconic song at the time was Aviv Geffen’s rendition of Livkot Licha, Crying for You, a song he had written about a friend killed in a car accident, but which became then more famously a tribute to a prime minister who had come to symbolize, for Aviv Geffen, for many other young Israelis, the person who would bridge between his war past and his dreams for peace.

Many of those songs, from Shalom Chaver, as well as others that joined the canon, then became part of a morbid, ritualized soundtrack that came to define the next decade of Israel. Every time there was a suicide bombing or terror attack, and there were so many of them, from that time on, from 1994 through the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, you almost didn’t have to listen to the news in Israel to know that a terror attack had taken place. You just had to turn on the radio. And if one of those melancholy songs was playing, you knew. 

I actually met Aviv Geffen in the early 2000s when I helped students organize a concert of Aviv Geffen together with his father, the legendary songwriter, Yonatan Geffen, at Harvard. We hung out a bit backstage. I’ll never forget it. Aviv had aged a lot during that decade.

And then there’s the third phase, which I want to argue didn’t really have quite a plot until October 7th. Now Israel has always had political rock songs, but the last 20 years have been different than its first 50. There’s no obvious political narrative to respond to. Status quos, I would say, are morally awful in general, especially in the presence of injustice, but they’re also bad for art. 

In general, it seems now in retrospect that Israel between the Second Intifada and October 7th was in kind of a naive slumber. Donniel Hartman describes it by saying that Israelis had lulled themselves into a belief that they were living in Scandinavia, largely having subscribed to Bibi’s hubris of a non-strategy at the Gaza border and a simmering status quo in the West Bank. And let’s not talk about the North. 

So you still, yeah, of course, have political music throughout this stretch, perhaps most prominently, the protest rap catalog of Hadag Nahash. Fun fact, when I spoke at the Jerusalem democracy protest last summer, I was actually the opening act for them. And I got to meet Sha’anan Streett backstage. But until October 7th, no theme yet or organizing principle had emerged that would in turn help shape a catalog of Israeli music. It’s a whole metaphor for what Israel had become over time.

Immediately after October 7th, however, there emerged a first front-runner for a theme song. In those first few weeks, I remember being there the week of October 14th, you heard Ishay Ribo’s song, Halev Sheli, My Heart, everywhere. The song opens describing the singer’s heartbreak, his inability to stand up, his total brokenness, and then it crescendos like this.

The song roughly means only you can turn my mourning into celebration. The song proceeded October 7th. The song reflects that Ishay Ribo is religious. Only you means God. But I don’t think it’s an over-read to hear in this song what Israelis understood to be the tragic reversal of October 7th itself, when a Jewish holiday was transformed into a day of mass death. Ishay Ribo is wishing for the alternative. 

And so ubiquitous was this anthem in the first early days after October 7th that the song still lingers now as the background music on El Al in its somber home screen message when you get on a flight to Israel. It’s basically become Muzak since October 7th. 

But the story of Israeli music in the aftermath of this catastrophe and during this war is changing fast. I’m joined today by Lior Zaltzman, the deputy managing editor of Kveller. Lior is a journalist, a cartoonist, an illustrator, has been writing a lot about the evolving musical story in Israel since October 7th. Lior’s article, How Israeli Music Changed After October 7th, we’re going to link in the show notes. And Lior is here to help us listen to how Israeli musicians are narrating this unprecedented moment. 

Lior, thanks for coming on the show. And I guess I would first want to just ask you personally. Give us your Israeli music story. What draws you into listening and writing so much right now about this particular piece of how Israeli art and culture is responding to this moment?

Lior: Yeah, so just like you were saying, we’re all very informed by the kind of music that we grew up with. I grew up in the Israel of the Oslo Accords in the 90s. I grew up with a lot of songs about peace. And also, you know, that album that you were talking about, Shalom Chaver, was playing, was the one my parents played to me in the car when we were driving around for errands in Israel. I grew up in Ramat Gan in the center of Israel. I also grew up in the days of the second Intifada, where I was scared to take buses, but music was, so driving in the car with music in the car was kind of like how I grew up.

And yeah, I was a child. I went to, I was a big fan of the Festigal which is like the Hebrew. Every year there’s like a big song contest of all these Israeli child stars. And I remember it was ’94,’ 95, that the song that won was about peace. It was, you know, Shalom Zomila Shemoshit and all the ways that we use that word. So those songs about peace really like informed the way that I saw my country as this idyllic, this place where your eyes are always drawn towards that idyllic future.

Yehuda: Now why particularly pay attention to music now? I think you either wrote somewhere or spoke somewhere about how it was difficult for you to engage with much after October 7th, but that you were drawn back to the music. You want to share a little bit about that?

Lior: Yeah, I mean, usually I write a lot about Israeli culture, but mostly about Israeli TV and Israeli movies and pop culture. I write a lot about the Eurovision, too, which is having also a very interesting moment. But yeah, I couldn’t read. I was very deep. I think we were all in very deep kind of visceral grief. And music is something that both, can uplift you, can heal you. 

I think one of the songs that we said we were gonna talk about, Latzet Medikaon, has this kind of lyric, oh, singers are the best doctors that science has found. 

And I did find outlet for tears and outlet for feelings and also thinking about Ofra Haza singing on Yisrael Chai on Eurovision stage again, that was like a moment that connected the past and the future, and music has a way to do that, to kind of illuminate the darkest moments.

Yehuda: Yeah, and I think also, you know, it’s worth noting that it’s the medium that lends itself to the fastest adaptation towards the news cycle, right? You want to produce a movie about October 7th, it’ll take 18 months. You know, the fastest TV that can turn around is I think there’s already been a Law and Order episode that makes reference to October 7th, but you’re not going to be able to do much around culture besides humor or music, right?

Lior: Yeah, and especially in these days of modern technology where you don’t need anything more than a YouTube page and a TikTok. Talking about the biggest hit, Harbo Darbo, it came from these young TikTok stars who know how to put out music in this kind of fast.

Yehuda: Yeah, yeah. So let’s jump in right there, because we’re gonna listen to a bunch of songs together, and for our listeners, we’re gonna compile all of these, every song that gets referenced in this episode, including the few that I mentioned in the opening, as well as everything we’re gonna analyze, we’re gonna put together in a playlist that’s gonna be linked in the show notes. We’re gonna listen to a few clips together. And again, using an order of three, we’re gonna listen to songs that reflect some of the rage or anger of this period, some songs that reflect a lot of the sadness of October 7th, and maybe a few songs that reflect some hope. Some of these are written for October 7th, some of them were quickly repurposed for October 7th after the fact. 

Let’s start with, in some ways, the most successful song or one of the most successful songs which you’ve made reference to already, this song Harbo Darbo. Let’s listen to a clip of it and then let’s do a little bit of analysis together. I should also say to our listeners some of these songs have explicit lyrics, especially Harbo Darbo. It’s a very hard song to listen to so brace yourself.

That’s the first part we’re gonna listen to, and then I want you to hear the brief ending of this song, and we’ll explain all of it as we go.

Okay, so some basics. You heard in the first part of the song a reference to Hamas as the sons of Amalek. It’s a song about enlistment of the whole army. There’s gonna be no forgiveness for all of you. And then this kind of, I don’t know, roll call of all of the army units, Golani, Nahlawi’s, Armored Corps, Givati, the Navy, the Air Force, ready to thrust war and pain on your head. And then at the end of the song, a list of people ranging from Nasrallah to the porn star Mia Khalifa, Dua Lipa, and others.

This song is a threat. Unpack the song for us a little bit. I think our listeners, Lior, even if they don’t know Hebrew, will hear what this song is about, but maybe you can unpack a little bit what you think the thematics of this song are.

Lior: Well, I think, you know, the song is by Ness & Stilla. They’re two very young rappers. They kind of saw it as a way to get out of that mourning music and to have a song that kind of gets everyone together and like has that, it’s a very strong revenge song. They don’t just call Hamas Bnei Amalek, they’re like spitting in their faces. They’re using this Arabic saying, which a lot of Israelis use as kind of like, one day you will get your due one day. I think some people take it as, especially with the international stars that they’re quoting, you know, Mia Khalifa, you will get, your day will come, you know? Like is it a threat or is it like kind of wishful like thinking? I don’t know, but it’s extremely militant.

The only songs that approach it was, you know, Subliminal and Hatzel also have this, and also recently released a very aggressive rap song. This kind of right-wing younger generation, not that my generation, a generation that grew up in the days of the status quo, as you were saying, but in the days where peace wasn’t really something that we talked about, where we kind of ignored that, where we were living, and who we were living with. And it’s a much more right-wing, much more militant, much more, like blindly patriotic, I would say, generation. And that’s all reflected in the lyrics of this song I feel. 

And the rage, the great rage.

Yehuda: Yeah, this piece of rage is so much more of a piece of the story that’s going on in Israel than could even be approximated from afar. If you’re Israeli, I’m sure you can access it, both through listening to the music but also talking to people. I felt that this past week in Israel that the story of anger was very profound and, by the way, a lot of that anger is directed towards the government. This song, it’s not really directed towards the government, it’s directed towards Hamas and essentially its international supporters. 

Lior: No, there’s this very strong feeling, right, it’s us against the world, kind of, and who are the, they’re young rappers singing to a younger generation, most a lot of whom have been, are either in active duty or in reserves duty, so it’s kind of like this activating, like singing towards those people.

Yehuda: Yeah, I had a hard time listening to the song. It reflects a version of Israel that I tend to not wanna see. It’s also worth naming that both this song and a bunch of others, some of which we’re gonna reference today, have actually been brought as part of the evidence by the South Africans against Israel in international courts around the intent to commit genocide. I think that’s legally questionable, right? It’s art, right? Art is allowed to do what it’s supposed to do, but the critics and enemies of Israel are trying to argue this is what Israelis are basically about. 

And I guess the only defense you can offer, even if I don’t like seeing this side of Israel, is people are entitled to anger. It’s a legitimate emotion that we’re allowed to have without being criminalized for all of the reasons why Israelis are legitimately holding on to a tremendous amount of rage and anger in a moment like this.

Lior: Yeah, I mean, what happened on October 7th changed the country so completely. What is your first response to a feeling of helplessness? Rage? A desire for revenge. It is like a very like basic human desire of seeing your enemies fall, you know?

But there’s always been this tension, right, in songs about during at times of war, like we want to be united. We want to strengthen the front. We want to, there’s also that a little bit, in Harbo Darbo too. Like when they do the roll call of all the army units, like go, go, go, like we’re behind you. It’s really like that. It’s a new, it’s new in its violence and it’s like aggression, but it’s a familiar sense of like, we’re all together, we’re all fighting. We’re all gonna, you know, yeah.

Yehuda: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think it channels this weird thing that really happened in Israel overnight between October 6th and October 8th, where you have a deeply divided country. And then overnight, it becomes a weirdly unified country. As oftentimes happens when you get an external enemy, it helps a country that is rife with all of these internal divisions to actually set those aside. 

As we know, 150% of those who were called up to duty responded, you had hundreds of thousands of people go out to the army, and you didn’t have to really be right-wing or even that anti-Palestinian, as this song is, to feel a sense of being enlisted.

Lior: Yeah. And I mean, there was a feeling we were talking about the government. They weren’t really there wasn’t really that. So the music is, kind of the culture makers are on the front lines way faster than any ministers or any leaders. They’re there, both in the minds in these songs and both, like physically at the front lines singing to soldiers singing to evacuees, right away, you know, like from October 8th and on.

Yehuda: Yeah, I’m not sure if it’s in this song or elsewhere where we get a reference to the fact that nobody from the government is coming to talk to them. But that is one of the themes also. The musicians were out front, the military was out front, the government disappeared. 

Let’s go to a second song that doesn’t have quite the same rage, but it certainly captures some of the frenzy. And I think it’s worth naming as we listen to this song. This is going to be an excerpt from Tirkod L’Netzach, Dance Forever, by an unlikely duet, Infected Mushroom, you’ll tell us more about that, and Omer Adam. It’s just worth naming as we go into this that it’s not only about the music, about the Nova Festival itself, and you’ll see a nod to the style of the music there, but it’s effectively a reference to the fact that the violence of October 7 takes place at a music festival. There’s a particular significance therefore to the response by musicians in a moment like this. This is Tirkod L’Netzach.

Alright, Lior, tell us what we’re listening to.

Lior: Israel’s biggest Mizrahi star, really biggest, Omer Adam is a sensation, right? Like we, everyone knows him, everyone knows his vocals, everyone knows his kind of ability to market himself as kind of the premiere Mizrahi star, and Infected Mushroom, kind of known internationally in those circles as kind of the biggest electronic music makers, and then referencing the kind of music, too, that was playing as kind of like, gives me a little bit of chills, but the massacre was happening, right? Like people were actually dancing.

So like kind of really anchoring you in that moment of like extreme trauma. And also like there is some rage even in those electronic beats too right? Like that sense of, that we were talking from Harbo Darbo, the kind of frenziness of the rap music. There is that sense in that song too.

Yehuda: Yeah. If you haven’t visited the Nova site, I went there a month or so ago. It’s not a concert venue. It’s basically an open field in the middle of a park outside of Kibbutz Re’im. It’s now become a shrine, but it helps you channel the absolute chaos that we have video from, which I encourage nobody to watch. You have a sense of the total chaos, would be experienced by hundreds, if not thousands, of young people, largely who are on drugs, in the middle of this festival in a rave, dancing in a rave, and part of what is psychologically so difficult for many of the survivors is that it’s hard for them to parse the difference between what might have felt like a bad trip and what was actually real life transpiring at the same time.

So, the whole premise of being in that kind of environment is that you feel basically like you’re in an immersive container of those who are high with you and dancing with you, and then to have that punctured and infiltrated, as I think what the music is trying to kind of signal, I get at the refrain, even use the phrase, you’re gonna dance forever, which has this deeply scary reference to those who are killed in the middle of dancing, because it essentially makes them permanently stuck in this kind of altered state of consciousness.

Lior: Yeah, I mean the vibes that are in these kind of spaces, I haven’t gone to these specific kind of festivals, but I’ve gone to music festivals in nature in Israel, it’s very peaceful, it’s very communal, it’s very exactly the kind of antithesis of what happened, right? Everyone’s together, nobody fights about politics, everyone’s kind of united by music. And so what happened specifically at Nova, I think, is such a hard thing to digest, to process.

Yehuda: Hmm. Let’s stay on this, on the anger and sadness theme with the third song. And I made reference to Aviv Geffen in the opening, but Aviv Geffen has his own post-October 7th song called Black Sunrise. Title tells you a lot of what you need to know, but what’s notable about this, you’re gonna hear a second voice in the clips that we’re gonna play. It includes Mia Leimberg, who was one of the hostages, who was ultimately released from Hamas captivity with her dog. She’s also a musician. And so Aviv Geffen brought her along to sing this song, Black Sunrise, together. We’ll hear two clips.

I’m curious, Lior, what it feels like for you to hear Aviv Geffen’s voice here, given his role in such an important musician of the early. 

Lior: It’s so activating. I feel like his voice is there. It’s so unique. There’s no one else that sounds quite like Aviv Geffen. And he started out as a singer for like a disillusioned youth, generation of youth, right? Like, his first song, like, you know, like these songs about being a, messed up, I’ll use the alternative to the explicit, generation. And now here he is singing with someone who is very similar to how he started his road. And then also, you know, when Mia Leimberg was singing this song, she was there, you know, she still had family in captivity, who were just freed in Rafah, I think. 

So the way these hostages became also, and the people in the front line became part of the music and kind of have these connections with these really great singers, I think is unique to this moment again, because of like what technology enables us and what a lot of things enable us. But I thought it was very moving for me to see that, especially knowing kind of him starting as like a rageful teen singer and then singing this song.

Yehuda: That’s such a powerful insight, you’re right. I mean, Aviv Geffen was the bad boy of Israeli music in his early days, the early 90s, and actually was a symbol of, I don’t know, post-capital, post-capitalism, you know, neoliberalism, like here’s the screwed up. And he becomes like an older statesman in this song. You can see, you can see if you watch the video actually, the video is hard to watch because it shows images of the destruction of Southern Israel, the places from which these kids were abducted. 

But you almost see her, almost pinching herself with enthusiasm at singing with Aviv Geffen. He’s a legend at this point, 30 years on. And he’s not here doing what you would think early 90s Aviv Geffen would be doing, which would be screaming at the government, screaming at the army, screaming for peace. He’s actually representing this sadness of the loss of something Israeli, something pristine, something whole. And he’s on the Israeli side now, if you might say such a thing.

Lior: Yeah, of trying to bring the people together and, as opposed to the big middle finger like to everything that he started as. Yeah, I mean, there’s like subtle criticism in the song, but it’s all kind of wishy-washy.

Yehuda: Yeah, no, it’s true. In fact, subtle criticism is different than overt criticism. But the main message of the song is, we woke up to a black sunrise, right? And nothing’s gonna be the same again, right? Children who got up in the morning are no longer gonna play in the yard. It’s with us and it never leaves and nothing passes. This is a, it’s a critique of what happened and the perpetration of October 7th, more than it’s a critique of the conditions that, you know, brought about, that led to October 7th.

Lior: That led to it. Yeah.

Yehuda: We’ll stay a little bit on the sadness theme but shift a little bit. The next song we’re going to listen to is one of the more prominent songs that has been heard throughout the kind of Israeli soundtrack since October 7th, and especially as relates to the experience of the hostages. The song is by Yigal Oshrai. It’s called Latzeit B’Dikaon. Here’s a clip.

All right, Lior, tell us what we’re listening to.

Lior: Well, we’re listening to a song that came out long before October 7th, right? And kind of started resonating with people, it became, you know, like the viral TikTok song of soldiers returning, hostages returning, and to this refrain of like even in the darkest hours, you know, like, you know, it’s always darkest before the sunrise, you know, and in a song, it’s a very personal song about the experience. It’s literally called Getting Out of Depression, about the experience of getting out of depression, and the conversations that you have and the experiences that you go back to, and these kind of comforting images, and a lot of the music that people found the greatest comfort in weren’t the songs that came out after October 7th. They were the songs that came out before and kind of took on a different meaning and this was really one of the songs that really kind of captured this wanting to wake up of this nightmare, you know, because the feeling of after October 7th was nightmarish, was impossible to process, didn’t feel real. You know, you’re talking about a trip, but even people who weren’t on drugs, you know, like conversations that I had with my family, it just felt like something happened to reality that was so inconceivable. And this song is really about waking up from, you know, depression, the darkest, your body pulling you to the darkest, lowest places. And it so resonated with Israelis.

Yehuda: Yeah, the social currency of this song largely derives from the fact that it’s the song in the background of a lot of the videos of the returning of the hostages, which in other words, captures both ends of the story, the depression that October 7th brought about, the fatalism that’s actually very pronounced in Israeli society right now. 

I wrote about this, I described being in Israel six weeks ago as experiencing national, a vast sense of hopelessness. A few people wrote to me and said, no, that’s not fair. It’s not totally hopeless. It’s resigned-ness, meaning, but it is a little bit of hopelessness, but you get a little bit of a gasp of hope when somebody gets returned. That’s why the music works. It’s sad, and then you get a crescendo of the emergence. 

I guess the other thing that feels powerful about a song like this is that the mental health crisis among young people is global. So this song about depression, about mental health, is, it works prior to October 7th, it works after October 7th, but it helps to kind of connect the dots between something that many young Israelis are already feeling and then October 7th kind of coming and hammering them over the head of like why they were right to be depressed beforehand.

Lior: I actually like takes me back to like personal moments with like mental health struggles I used to watch videos of soldiers coming back home to their families or their pets to kind of get that quick release of like, and those moments really give you that quick release of like, there’s something good in the world, oh, people love each other this deeply, or like oh, there’s still these hopeful moments that happen.

Yehuda: Yeah. Oh, that’s very hard to hear. I mean, yeah. It’s hard to, it’s hard especially because, you know, please God, there’s going to be further negotiations that succeed at getting more of the hostages home. And that provides what you’re suggesting is kind of like a dopamine hit of optimism and positivity even though the, you know, hostage releases don’t solve the conflict, don’t eliminate the possibility that these things happen again.

I want to surface two songs, the next two songs do something that are both interesting in that they are intertextual, they reference earlier moments in the history of Israeli music. It’s worth noting that I even had a podcast about this. There was such little, this is a devastating and ironic thing to say, there was very little buildup, I felt, especially in the American Jewish community, and even in Israel also, about the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, surprisingly less than I thought there would be. I thought it was gonna be like a major theme of the year. It wasn’t as pronounced as I thought it would be. 

And then on October 7th, you got the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, which was reliving it, in a surprise attack, that comes from the South and that shocks people with its brutality and essentially the southern part of Israel is held by foreign enemy forces for quite some time. 

So we want to play two songs here. You know, maybe we’ll play them back to back and then we’ll talk about both of them. One of them is called Lo Levad, which channels 1973, and then we’re gonna listen to Ruach Halochamot Tenatzeach, which is also a channeling back of the ’73 music tradition. We could talk about the ramifications of both.

Yehuda: Okay, so both of these are echoes of ’73. You wanna walk us through both of them and why? Why, in what ways they’re channeling the earlier phase, both musically and thematically? So we’ll start with Lo Levad.

Lior: So Lo Levad is by Jane Bordeaux, the really great kind of Israeli, indie-ish band. And it has a lyric about what are we going to do with the wheat that is growing again, you know, and it took me back a little bit Hachita Tzomachat Atzuv, like one of the perhaps most iconic, the Wheat Grows Again, one of the most iconic post-Yom Kippur songs. And it was written after a trauma that after October 7th seemed so small, but 11 members of the kibbutz who fell during the Yom Kippur war and this feeling of, nature is still, you know, the wheat is still growing. The fields are, still need to be tended. I had a friend who had an uncle who worked for, you know, like he had to come back because the cows needed milking. Even though the kibbutz was abandoned, you have to come back and milk the cows. But this idea of nature and the growth and that everything continues, even though it feels like our world has stopped.

Yehuda: Yeah, the Yom Kippur War music is far more, I don’t know what the word would be. It tends to be a little bit sadder than the Six-Day War music for obvious reasons. Six Day War was, you know, a great moment of military triumph, surprise, the emergence of Israeli power. The Yom Kippur War, only six years later is like kind of a reflection of the hubris and the loss and maybe some sense of a kind of indefinite nature of what this conflict is going to be about, even though then six years later there’s the First Peace Treaty. So maybe you get that a little bit in this first theme.

I love the idea that it’s by quoting that verse, they’re directly channeling the piece by Gevatron For what it’s worth, Gevatron re-released their own song. They re-released that song, The Wheat Grows Again, which is a worthwhile YouTube watch to see this old folk group get back together and sing the same song, even as their music is getting kind of sampled in a new version of this piece by Jean Bordeaux.

Lior: Yeah, and came back actually to the Kibbutzim in the south to sing it there.

Yehuda: Yeah, to the actual sites to see it play out. 

Lior: And rewriting the lyrics around the hostage crisis and around is very, very moving.

Yehuda: Yeah, the second song, Ruach Halochamot Tenatzeach quite different. I mean, it’s literally a direct re-rendering of an earlier song. And what’s different, nu?

Lior: The difference is the gender, obviously, you know? The difference is that this is like a very macho song about, you know, don’t worry about me, I’m a man in the front lines, don’t send me anything, blah, blah. And so showing all these women who are in the front lines right now in the video, really, like you get to see the amount of women, it’s a little bit bitter, right? Because we talk about October 7th, there was like a military failure that was also, if it’s okay to say, like also kind of informed by women on the front lines kind of not being listened to. But they are very much a part of the front lines too.

Yehuda: Yeah, so to make it explicit, the song comes out in comes out in 1974 about the Ruach Halochamim, the Spirit of the Fighters, gets re-released 50 years later about the spirit of the fighters, but they change it from masculine to feminine. And you have to watch the video because the video essentially is this, I don’t know, almost looks like a propaganda video about the Israeli army, but all the soldiers are women. 

Now you’re pointing out both a piece of this women were not listened to on the front line, but I think that this song is also doing another corrective to the story about the war, which for weeks and months now has been about the victimization of women, especially through the sexual assaults that took place on October 7th, and we assume continue to happen while they’re hostages. 

The other thing that song is basically doing is like, no, that’s not the whole story of women as part of this. Women are fighters. They have broken the barrier of being combat soldiers in Israel in every aspect of the Israeli military. I think this is a little bit of a push also against that kind of global narrative that this was the victimization of women and children, when it’s also saying, actually the Israeli army that’s capable of fighting back is not just men protecting the dignity of women, but it’s actually women fighting on behalf of the State of Israel.

Let’s look at the last couple of songs here. And since I’m an American Jew, we’re doing a little bit of an arc here from the despair towards the optimistic. And this is the first song we’re going to listen to from Yoni Bloch, the song is called, of everything, From the River to the Sea, a phrase that obviously has a lot of connotations and a lot of implications, but is actually a attempt to raise something of an optimistic vision, a vision for peace.

Yeah, so Lior, the music is totally different, the message is totally different. What do you hear going on in this particular song?

Lior: It’s this soft whisper of a possible distant peace, of a possible different kind of future, a different kind of sunrise and sunsets over Gaza and the sea and the river and all the land. It channels a little bit the helplessness but a little bit the hope, I think, in ways that are different from other songs that mostly sing about unity. And the word shalom isn’t really like a big kind of global word outside of shalom benenu, as brothers and sisters and as a people. And it’s so beautiful. 

I mean, I love Yoni Bloch, he’s a very special and unique Israeli creator. And it’s a very rare song in this, unfortunately, in this landscape of music that we’re talking about, that is growing every day. So maybe…

Yehuda: I mean, listen, it’s a relief that the song is popular because a song like this, which makes reference from the river to the sea, but not imperialistically, as a way of saying, there can be hope between the river and the sea, there can be little prayers for peace, you know, he says not everything is going to get fixed. 

But like Naomi Schemer’s Al Kol Ele, focusing on little things. He says like, blessing over the quiet, raising a glass, things like that which signal a seeking of some sort of just basic, quiet normalcy. Thank God it’s popular. 

In contrast, one of the most popular songs that’s emerged from the war is Eyal Golan’s Am Yisrael Chai. I wanna register that we’re playing the song under protest. Eyal Golan is one of the most controversial musicians, and is one of the most popular or one of the most controversial, he has had credible allegations of sexual assault, actually of statutory rape. He was not convicted, but he was accused in court. He has been convicted of various other crimes, financial crimes. I don’t know whether his notoriety can be separated from his fame, but he has written what many people would call the kind of anthem for Israel of this war. 

Let’s listen to a clip and then, Lior, I’m sure you’ll have what to say.

Lior: I feel so torn, like I’m bobbing my head to this, because I agree with you. I think it’s a little bit telling on Israeli society that, you know, I feel like someone like Eyal Golan, maybe, I don’t know, people, cancel culture is debatable, you know? Do people ever really get canceled? Even here. So maybe, maybe we’re not so different after all. 

But yes, this song is all about kind of unity and being a people. And I notice, I don’t know if you feel the same way, I just wanted to, that a lot of these songs have a spiritual and religious element to them that I feel like songs of previous wars don’t really have. Hakadosh baruch hu shomer aleinu, you know, like that’s not so much, you know, like God is watching over us, we’re the chosen people.

It also has a little bit of this feeling of like screw everyone else, we’re together, no one else matters, we just need to be united, it’s very populist, you know, like I think the current Prime Minister of Israel would agree with this call, you know. It’s a very populist song and Eyal Golan is, despite being so controversial, is very good at channeling that kind of populist feeling.

Yehuda: Yeah, there’s so much going on here. I mean, for American listeners who aren’t familiar with it, I’ll go on. It’s like, imagine if America went to war, and Chris Brown or R. Kelly had authored the anthem of American unity in response. It’s not that bad of an analogy, right? I know it’s a little triggering, but it’s not that bad of an analogy. 

Lior: It’s not that bad.

Yehuda: So there’s something a little depressing for some of us who are music fans and lovers of Israel that that’s the connectivity and you’re right, there’s something insular, too, something protective, I think, in your article. You quoted our friend and sometimes guest on the show, Professor Shayna Weiss who talks about that. This is kind of typical of wartime societies, where there’s a sense, we want the home front to all be involved all this is about unity.

And you’re right also to notice the use of religion in a song like this, appealing to faith in God, God is looking over us. A lot of Israeli musicians have kind of turned to religion over the last generation, but I think even in the last couple of months, using religious themes to, you know, to, I don’t know, there’s almost like a great awakening connected to a moment like this.

Lior: Yeah, Odaya who is a young, very prolific singer who released an EP very soon after she had a song called Winter of ’23, a reference to also, you know, the Children of ’73, also like the refrain of her song is and it comes in so many songs, Ba Li L’daber Im Abba, I want to have these conversations with God. A lot of like this kind of like this entrance of faith I feel into the lore of this post-war music, is really interesting, is a little bit telling about how Israeli society has become a little bit more less of the like secular and really reliant on religion and faith.

Yehuda: Yeah, the secular-religious story is just not the story anymore, and the fact that it’s connected to a Mizrahi singer is not surprising also, where there’s a kind of blurring of what does it mean to be secular, what does it mean to be religious? And it’s not crazy that secular Israelis would still gravitate towards a tune that is channeling theological language as a part of national unity. 

So we’re going to look at the last song that we have here today by Jasmin Moallem. The song is called Yehiyeh Tov. This is also a pre-war song that has taken on a lot of currency since the war started. One of the other anthems, another song that’s about prayers for what will be good, Yehiyeh Tov.

Yehuda: So I’ll tell you something, Lior, before you go. The thing that was so jarring for me about listening to this is when I saw the song title, I assumed, okay, well, the most famous, one of the most famous songs in the Israeli song canon is called Yehi Etov by David Broza. It’s a song that took on, was significant prior to Rabin. It was a peace song about even he used a phrase that’s amazing his career didn’t end about ending the occupation evacuating settlements It gets changed after Rabin’s assassination. It’s the closing song on the Shalom Chaver album So I saw this Jasmin Moallem. I figured this must be she must be sampling David Broza. And it has nothing to do with David Broza’s song. What is going on here? Like how do you get away with that? It’s like, it’s like imagine if somebody came along and recorded a song called Imagine and it had no relationship to John Lennon’s Imagine.

Lior: No, that’s exactly it. The David Broza song is beautiful song and has had, so again, like you’re saying so many iterations, but you know, Yehiyeh Tov kind of becomes you know a part of the Hebrew dialect, right? Like, yehiyeh tov. Like, when someone asks you right now how you’re, yeah. When someone asks you right now how you are, it’s very hard to say, hakol beseder, everything’s fine. But maybe it’s easier to say yehiyeh tov. Like, maybe that’s an okay reply. Usually they reply, okay, considering. You know, like, beseder b’mitkhashev, be’mashekol, b’chadshotl like, you know, but, things will be fine, yeah.

This song is so, you know, like Yehi Tov by David Broza is this big song that is anchored in political moments. And Yehiyeh Tov by Jasmin Moallem, who is one of the most beautiful Israeli singers, songwriters right now, like very beloved and her songs have so much, she hasn’t released any new material since, she’s released an old song actually titled Yom Kippur, which like Yehiyeh Tov, is a personal song about an experience. Yehiyeh Tov has very specific images of this, like, one day we’ll sit in the car together. It also has, again, that imagery of, like, the flowers will bloom again, the wheat will grow again. A song that is written about a very personal moment of strife that, because of just the magnificence of Jasmin’s voice and her ability, like, her songwriting skills, and just, like, this ability to paint these feelings and these images in our heads, I think, like, really, like, just resonated so deeply with everyone.

And it was really, you know, you were talking about how in the moments of post-war and post-terror attacks we play these sad songs, and Yehiyeh Tov was a way to, inside those sad songs, work in a song that is like optimistic, and personal, and you know, that song, it was okay to play in that moment after the war, you know, it’s not am upeabt, happy song. Yehiyeh Tov, how will be okay again? We know, but maybe that’s the most you can say, you know.

Yehuda: Yeah, it’s interesting because I’ve found that in my trips to Israel over the past few months, not a lot of people are using the phrase, yehiyeh b’seder or yehiyeh tov. It’s not really there. There’s just too much sadness and there’s too much fear. But you could do a lot worse if you wanted to do a history of Israeli music on optimism from like Naomi Shemer’s Machar, you know, big guitar, to David Broza’s Yehi Tov, to Jasmin Moallem’s Yehiyeh Tov. 

And not only because the themes are still there, but they sound different, but also because the shift from Ashkenazi to Mizrahi, the shift in the musical styles and intonation, so the same messages are there, but there really is a significant evolution, stylistically, thematically, ethnically, of what’s going on in the music of this story. 

So before we wrap up, Lior, any big takeaways for you of this moment, musically, or anything you think we should be continuing to listen for, especially for American, North American listeners who are trying to, you know, maybe not always process this stuff through the news, but trying to listen for Israeliness in a period of time like this?

Lior: I think the songs really get to how people feel right now in Israel. This idea of, Shayna was actually the one who, is the comforter in chief of this kind of, being there. The musicians, more than anyone else, and the culture creators are, more than anyone else, there for Israeli people, and a good in for what the mood is in Israel, and that’s what I discovered listening, and there’s so many songs coming, I’ve been just like, I wrote this piece, it took me months to write it, and when I filed it, and actually was edited like the Kveller piece was a thousand more words, but there just kept being more and more songs, and when it was published I was like, oh, I missed so much.

The amount of music is incredible to me, and it is really like, the sign of the resilience, too and then, and it’s how Israelis are processing this current moment in a lot of different ways. And there’s more rap music, there’s more Mizrahi music, a lot, a lot of Mizrahi music. Again, you’re saying like more, I think, than in any moment in history, Mizrahi music has really become kind of the music of Israel and thanks to Omer Adam, but also thanks to the people who came before him and Sarit Hadad also released new songs. So I just feel like, yeah, there’s definitely that culture shift of like, Mizrahi music used to be the music that you were like listening to on the side, but now Mizrahi music takes center stage. The biggest songs are Mizrahi music. Nobody is ashamed to say this, listen to Mizrahi music, you know.

The Israeli post-war of music is very diverse and very interesting. And I don’t have clarity about what it’s going to say about the future of Israel. And I don’t think many of us have clarity in this moment about the future.

Yehuda: One of the blessings of art is that it obviously invites interpretation, and it’s the work of interpretation, but it actually helps you resist the kind of clarity of interpretation. You’re watching the news, you’re trying to constantly form your opinions about things, and I think that the music, and thank you for guiding us through it this week, helps us to process and understand an incredibly complicated, sad, tragic, violent moment without forcing us to kind of simplicity of opinion or narrative that we’re oftentimes inclined to do. 

So thanks to all of you for listening to our show this week and special thanks to our guest, the Lior Zaltzman. 

Identity/Crisis is produced by Tessa Zitter. Our executive producer is Maital Friedman. This episode was produced with assistance from Gabrielle Finestone and Sarina Shohet and edited by Gareth Hobbs at Silver Sound NYC. Our theme music provided by Socalled. 

Transcripts of our show are available on our website typically about a week after an episode airs. And of course, the soundtrack for this week’s episode will be connected on our show as well. 

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