#israeli musicians

[israelihunks]

[david-goldrock]

I realize I never translated "hatikva"

As long as in the heart, deep inside

A Jewish soul yearns

And towards the east, forward

An eye to Zion is scouting

Our hope has not yet been lost

The hope is two thousand years old

To be a free nation in our land

Land of Zion and Jerusalem

[yourdailyqueer]

Hen Yanni

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Bisexual

DOB: 20 January 1983  

Ethnicity: Ashkenazi Jewish

Nationality: Israeli

Occupation: Actress, model, musician

[importantwomensbirthdays]

Chava Alberstein

Singer and composer Chava Alberstein was born in Szczecin, Poland in 1946. Alberstein's family later emigrated to Israel, where she would become one of the country's most popular musicians. She performs in English, Hebrew, and Yiddish, and has released more than 70 albums since 1967. Many of Alberstein's albums have gone gold and platinum, and she has received numerous honors, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Israel Association of Composers and six Kinor David prizes. She is also a fervent peace activist and supporter of liberal causes, and faced intense backlash for her criticism of Israeli policies.

[genderful-ghoul]

6,000+ musicians have signed the Musicians for Palestine letter

AND YET NONE OF THE ARTISTS I LISTEN TO HAVE 😤

This is a great resource to find good, reliable artists to listen to.

[waugh-bao]

@thedookieshooter and @charlesandkeef tagged me to share my instafest lineup (I’ve only had Spotify for a week, because I finally gave up on Amazon Music, so the results might not be super holistic):

Tagging: @charliesmydarling and @aiaiawar

[gone2soon-rip]

CHAIM TOPOL (1935-Died March 8th 2023,at 87).Israeli actor, singer, and illustrator. He is best known for his portrayal of Tevye, the lead role in the stage musical Fiddler on the Roof and the 1971 film adaptation, performing this role more than 3,500 times from 1967 through 2009.Topol began his acting career during his Israeli army service in the Nahal entertainment troupe and later toured Israel with kibbutz theatre and satirical theatre companies. He was a co-founder of the Haifa Theatre. His breakthrough film role came in 1964 as the title character in Sallah Shabati, by Israeli writer Ephraim Kishon, for which he won a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer—Male. Topol went on to appear in more than 30 films in Israel and the United States, including Galileo (1975), Flash Gordon (1980), and For Your Eyes Only (1981). He was described as Israel's only internationally recognized entertainer from the 1960s through the 1980s. He won a Golden Globe for Best Actor and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for his 1971 film portrayal of Tevye, and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actor for a 1991 Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Topol

[crystalis]

'During the aid efforts amidst the Israeli war in Gaza, a musician plays the oud to bring solace to displaced Palestinian children residing in tents in Rafah.'

from Quds News Network

[dughole]

radiohead’s complicity in israeli-occupied palestine

my feelings on radiohead are complicated these days, as i’m sure they are for many. i'm using this post as a method of sorting out my own thoughts & to provide sources.

for me, the bottom line is this: radiohead is both a brand & a musical group. the brand of radiohead has always had deep roots in the israeli colonial project - they have played many, many shows there throughout their career. their breakout single - creep, was intially only a hit in israel (x, x) & the personal choices of some of radiohead's members remain just as involved. jonny greenwood met his future wife - the israeli artist, antivaxxer & vehement zionist (x) sharona katan - at a show radiohead played in israel in 1993 (x). jonny consistently collaborated with zionist musician shye ben tzur & his projects continue to tour in tel aviv as recently as last september. as for jonny himself - his only statement in regards to the war on gaza has been in mourning for the israeli concert goers on october 10th - w no such empathy spared to the 100,000 palestinians dead, injured, or missing. as for thom, while he’s thrown a few bitchfits (x) through the years abt criticism of radiohead’s shows in israel, he has imo - only paid lipservice to the criticism, saying “playing in a country isn’t the same as endorsing its government” going against the pleas of his peers & coworkers in the music industry. as well as the pro-palestine activism undertaken by his long term friend micheal stipe (x & x). (note: stipe stood by radiohead’s performance in israel in 2017, but his current political choices suggest his understanding of the situation has evolved). even his own son - noah yorke, a fellow working musician, has voiced his opposition to the genocide in gaza via instagram stories. as for the other members, rhythm guitarist ed o'brien has called for a ceasefire, as well as making a few tweets about "solidarity with palestinians & israeli peacemakers". while bassist colin greenwood reportedly refused to accept letters of dialogue from the fan-run organization radiohead fans for palestine. drummer phillip selway's commentary is similarly brief but defensive, saying radiohead's 2017 tel aviv concert "felt right"

to me, this paints a picture of a band who's members stances on israel range from abhorrent to simply not enough. & as a brand, their particular combination of action & inaction amounts to a fundamentally zionist perspective. you cannot separate radiohead as artists from radiohead as a brand name.

i've loved radiohead since i was 14. i was brought into it by another longtime fan. i cried & danced when i saw them live back in 2017 - it was, & remains, a moment that allowed me to live through the hardest parts of my life. i felt for the longest time, that radiohead's music & political positions encouraged my empathy - my questioning of conservative political authority. & while all celebrities are failures in some sense - it is still heartbreaking to know how wrong i was.

i don't think it's possible to disconnect the decade of connection & love i have for their music - I won't ask that of myself or anyone else. & the idea of scrubbing one's taste of the "morally impure" is useless effort & an inappropriate simplification of both art & our conceptions of what makes someone "bad". but i can say with certainty - i will not be giving them any more of my money, whether that be streaming their music or buying their merch - & i encourage you to do the same. silence is complicity - this is beyond silence.

in the words of nina simone - "an artist's duty, as far as i'm concerned, is to reflect the times. how can you be an artist and not reflect the times? that to me is the definition of an artist."

[israelihunks]

[david-goldrock]

Suddenly a man rises in the morning

And feels that he's a nation

And starts to walk

And all who is found in his way calls to him "hello/peace"

Grains rise to his face, from between the cracks in the sidewalk

And smells to his head, spread, magrosa trees

The dew sprays, and mountains, a lot of rays

They would birth a sun canopy to his wedding!

Suddenly a man rises in the morning

And decided he's a nation

And start to walk

And all who is found in his way calls to him "hello/peace"

And he laughs a generations' might from the mountains

And the wars become as nothing, bow to him

To the glory of 1000 years, they bubble in the hidings

1000 young years are in front of him

As a cool (geological) fraction, as the song of shepherds, as a stick

Suddenly a man rises in the morning

And decides he's a nation

And start to walk

And sees that the spring returned

And a tree greenifies again from its autommn leaves

Suddenly a man rises in the morning

And decides he's a nation

And he starts to walk

And all who is found in his way calls to him "hello/peace"

[gothhabiba]

An Appeal to Our Food and Hospitality Community to Take Action Now for Gaza

Dear Industry Friends, 

We have come together as chefs, farmers, media makers, business owners, beverage professionals, and food workers from across our industry to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and an end to U.S. support for Israel’s war crimes. We must break the silence around the genocide in Gaza. As of today, more than 7,000 Palestinians have been massacred in less than three weeks. Nearly half of them are children. Over 8,000 bombs have been dropped on Gaza, killing a Palestinian every 5 minutes. After hospitals run out of fuel,  the death toll will rise exponentially. Every second we choose to stay silent, without demanding that our government stop arming Israel with billions of our tax dollars, we allow another massacre to take place. 

We can prevent this violence by refusing to allow our government to fund and arm Israel’s decades-long military occupation. History has shown us that peace and safety for all in the region cannot come from the violent subjugation of Palestinians. We grieve the loss of all innocent life. However, violence begets violence, and we know this latest eruption did not occur in a vacuum. For 75 years, Palestinians have been killed, imprisoned, tortured, and robbed of their land and homes. In Gaza, 2.2 million people — more than half of whom are children — have been living under an inhumane siege for almost 17 years, and are cut off from the world, without access to water, food, or basic amenities needed to live a dignified and healthy life. For those living in Gaza, the last decade has been a slow genocide. 

As cultural stewards in this country, we have the power to counter the dehumanization of Palestinians. Israel has long weaponized food, erasing Palestinian people while claiming their cuisine. Here in the U.S., the appropriation of Palestinian foods as “Israeli” has led to more than Israelis profiting off of Palestinian culture; it is an erasure that has had real implications for Palestinians. It allows us to negate their cultural currency, and turn our attention away with more ease when we see Palestinian death. 

We must join our voices with Palestinians pleading for justice and protection right now. The situation is dire, and no amount of media coverage has discouraged Israel from its policy of ethnic cleansing and land theft as the U.S. government continues to protect Israel from global pressure for a ceasefire. We have been called upon by Palestinian civil society to join their struggle for freedom by joining the global movement for divestment and cultural boycott of Israel until it ends its horrific human rights abuses.

We ask our fellow food and beverage community to take a stand against genocide and ethnic cleansing and commit to three actions with us:

Call your congressional representatives to demand an immediate ceasefire and an end to unconditional U.S. funding of Israel. 

Divest from products, events, and trips that promote Israel until it dismantles its apartheid system and military occupation. 

Invest in events and projects that promote justice for Palestinians, whether connecting to a local organization to learn how to support, or amplify Palestinian voices and support them to share their food and culture on their own terms.

We recognize that this may be difficult given the frightening pressure put on us to remain silent. McCarthyist tactics cannot marginalize and divide us – we know we are not alone as the whole world is rising up against injustice and genocide. Thousands of artists worldwide have publicly endorsed BDS and the cultural boycott of Israel, including musicians, DJs, filmmakers and actors, visual artists, Black artists, Latin American artists, and countless others across all fields and continents. This is in spite of efforts made by Israeli government-linked lobby groups to suppress this solidarity. 

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” —Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

We are all in this industry to affirm life and dignity for everyone. As those who care for others, it is our moral imperative to actively contribute to the care that Palestinians need right now as they struggle to survive and get free. Food and beverage colleagues – it’s time for our community to extend our hospitality and join the movement for a Free Palestine.

Add your name – sign the pledge

[probablyasocialecologist]

In all, at least 100 people set themselves on fire in the US and Vietnam to protest the war. After a long history on multiple continents as a tool of protest against religious persecution—the precedent on which Quảng Đức was drawing—these self-immolations cemented a new association in American culture between the tactic and anti-war activism. In February 1991, during the first US war in Iraq, Gregory Levey doused himself in paint thinner and perished in a fireball in a park in Amherst, Massachusetts, leaving behind a small cardboard sign that read, simply, “peace.” Malachi Ritscher, an experimental musician in Chicago, set himself on fire on the side of the Kennedy expressway during the morning rush hour one Friday in November 2006, after posting a long statement on his website explaining that he felt there was no other way for him to escape complicity with the “barbaric war” the US was then waging. He had been arrested at two previous anti-war protests. Scholars often associate the rise of political self-immolation in the 1960s with the rise of television: a spectacular form of protest for the society of the spectacle. But of course there are less painful ways for protestors to attract eyeballs. The reality is that self-immolation registers the near-total impotence of protest—and even public opinion as such—in the face of a military apparatus completely insulated from external accountability. It the rawest testament to the absence of effective courses of action. When war consists primarily of unelected men in undisclosed locations pouring fire on the heads of people we will never know on the other side of the world, there is very little that ordinary people can do to arrest its progress. But we still have our bodies, and it is in the nature of fire to refuse containment. To ask whether self-immolation is good or bad, justifiable or non-justifiable, effective or ineffective is in large part to miss the point, which is that it is an option, whether anyone else likes it or not. It illuminates our powerlessness in negative space, but it also affirms the irreducible core of our freedom, that small flame of agency that no repression can extinguish. Since Aaron Bushnell’s death by self-immolation this week in protest of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, his detractors have warned about the risk of “contagion,” suggesting that his protest will encourage imitators (who, they imply, share his alleged mental instability). There may or may not be additional self-immolators before the slaughter comes to an end, just as Bushnell was preceded by a woman, yet to be identified publicly, who burned herself outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta in December. But the purpose of lighting yourself on fire is not to encourage other people to light themselves on fire. It is to scream to the world that you could find no alternative, and in that respect it is a challenge to the rest of us to prove with our own freedom that there are other ways to meaningfully resist a society whose cruelty has become intolerable.

[fairuzfan]

What can non-Palestinians do to support connection with the culture currently? I know many are donating and protesting currently so I wanted to ask specifically about cultural connection and supporting those efforts after your last post

Oh! That post was mostly meant for people in @witchywitchy reblogs in another post of theirs where people called using the Arabic original names of towns — which to be clear Palestinians do that as a form of resistance against being forgotten because we are at a pretty immediate risk of that happening and we strongly resist using the Israeli names for towns as they're enforced on us through colonization — as "ahistorical," thereby denying that israel is a colonial state. These people always talk about "caring about palestinians" but then actively ridicule our customs lol.

My biggest thing is to learn about Palestinian culture. Participate in it if you can. Donate to cultural heritage institutions. As a cultural heritage worker, I can tell you a lot of us do projects for free. If you're in a position of leadership, I encourage you to reach out to people and offer to pay them for their knowledge and bring them over to work on/present on things.

I cannot emphasize enough how little we get paid in these situations and sometimes we're even looked down on for getting money for our work. I have done like graduate level presentations for free — it was fine I volunteered to do it and loved it, but I would also like to be paid for doing work lol. And many others would as well.

I would seek our other cultural professionals and institutions and engage with their work. I can put together a list of people I follow/read from later on when I have time. But spreading their work is really important.

I share Samah Fadil and Rasha Albulhadi a lot on here — that's because their words as writers speak deeply to the heart of palestinian diaspora and resistance. I think also @fiercynn has a series on poets and writers.

I shared a post earlier on musicians and Palestinian music. Give those people some views and boost them in the algorithm! Support Palestinian artists! Commission them! There's so much you can do! Even just spreading their work around does so much for us!!

[girlactionfigure]

jewishlifenow

Radiohead Guitarist Jonny Greenwood joined Israeli Mizrachi musician Dudu Tassa in Israel to sing Arabic love songs recently. He received a ton of pushback from BDS and other movements. But he stood his ground.  Jonny is married to Israeli artist Sharona Katan, whose family lost a nephew in the Israel-Hamas war. His appearance came the day after being seen at protests in Tel Aviv, calling for the release of the hostages in Gaza and for new elections in Israel. Not long after October 7, he tweeted, “Condolences to the families of the innocent concert goers, children and civilians of all ages murdered, raped or abducted in these massacres. It’s impossible not to despair.”