This article deals with the emergence of a popular musical field as an Arab Jewish borderland on the margins of the Middle East conflict. This borderland has crystallized as a site of empowerment for some Arab Jews, mostly Yemenites, and has simultaneously encompassed multiple ethnic conflicts. The conflicts have emerged between the borderland itself and the dominant Israeli musical style and concurrently through the inner struggles between different Arab Jewish styles competing for cultural supremacy. This study demonstrates the paradoxical nature of the Arab Jewish musical borderland, in which frequent crossings of musical borders not only fail to breach national boundaries but also serve to sustain them.
This article addresses Mizrahi (or Oriental) identity in Israel by focusing on a well-known musical scene in the town of Sderot, in the south of Israel, populated largely by low-income Mizrahim. This group has undergone a unique Orientalization process in Israel. This process triggered the crystallization of a diverse musical scene in Sderot that exposed three practices of molding Mizrahi identity. By engaging with a dialectic model that appears in the later writing of Edward Said, I argue that the Mizrahi subversion of Israeli Orientalism encompasses a re-creation of it in different degrees of intensity.
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