THE SONGS OF THE SIREN: Engineering National Time on Israeli Radio

Abstract

One of my early childhood recollections in Jerusalem during the 1973 YomKippur War is how my close playmate from the apartment next door froze in her place when the alarm siren sounded instead of rushing down to the shelter. 1 It turned out that she confused the rising and falling sound of the siren activated during times of emergency with the steady siren sounded on memorial days, when the whole country is brought to a standstill for a moment of silent communion with the dead. In what follows I suggest that underlying my friend's naive mistake is more than simply a matter of inexperience, but rather a deep-rooted association between modes of national emergency and modes of collective commemoration in Israeli-Zionist culture. I shall do so by analyzing a site of music production, which, on the face of it, is far removed from the sounds of sirens, that of radio broadcasting. Informed by an ethnographic study of national and regional radio stations in Israel (Kaplan 2008b), I examine how the growing use of music programming presents new ways for engineering national identification. 2 The structure of Israel's radio scene and its music broadcasting policies regulate collective time in a uniform manner, attempting to abruptly alter the public mood in response to national events, in a sense extending the function of the siren. Alternating between ordinary life and times of commemoration or emergency this occasioning of collective time follows Jewish-Zionist temporal regimes perceived as sacred. Consequently, it produces a parallel between times of emergency and sacred time. I shall argue that times of emergency are represented through and subordinated to sacred, mythic

Structuring the Sacred: Media Professionalism and the Production of Mediated Holocaust Memory

“…Media professionals view the tendency towards repetitiveness on MDHH broadcasts as an essential component of the social ritual. These modes of operation, learned mainly through practical experience (rather than formal training), assist media professionals in their attempt to engineer national time and set national moods of bereavement and contemplation (Kaplan, 2009). Staying within existing ritualistic frameworks involves intertwined conventions of style and content.…”

Marketing Nationalism in the Absence of State

“…As soon as the war broke, the radio switched to airing almost exclusively Hebrew popular music, as opposed to its routine playlist, which mixes English and Hebrew pop songs. But it did so not in the spirit of the solemn, downbeat songs associated with the "commemorative mode" employed during Memorial Days or fatal terror attacks (Kaplan 2009). Rather, immediately following the newsbreak the music editor would make a point of airing upbeat Hebrew songs.…”

“…Elsewhere Danny Kaplan (2009) analyzed how a logic of "mood shifting" in Israeli radio is borrowed from commemoration rituals to times of emergency, and in both cases consists of fluctuations between musical genres or rhythms that signify the development in events on the ground. Radio Haifa applied this logic when editing its musical playlist during the war, purposely attempting to manage the morale of its audience.…”

“…This study is part of a larger research project on Israeli radio during a decade of privatization reforms and its translation of global radio models and music genres (Kaplan 2009(Kaplan , 2012. Between 2004 and 2010, Danny Kaplan conducted fieldwork on state and regional radio stations.…”

“…As the various radio broadcasts accompany and guide the listener during the unfolding of events and systematically signify the fluctuations between times of routine and emergency, instances of violence may not be experienced as exceptionally disruptive, nor are they simply neutralized. Rather, they become "cyclic interruption," chronic disturbances that are naturalized and incorporated into the very fabric of the community (Kaplan, 2009). …”