Outside the concert hall, Tel Aviv hipsters stand in a long line, smoking cigarettes and waiting. “The tickets have been sold-out for days,” says Ayala Kapoury, a student. “I bought mine a few weeks ago.” At last, the doors are unlocked and Kapoury joins the crowd flowing into the auditorium. Saraleh Sharon, a voluptuous woman in her 50’s with short-cropped red hair and bright lipstick, takes the stage. The audience, almost all of whom are under 30, rise, breaking out into cheers and applause. Sharon takes a seat at the piano and begins to play a patriotic Israeli folk ballad. The crowd goes wild. They jump onto chairs and dance on top of tables, clearly delighted to have Sharon lead them in “Shira Betzibur,” an evening sing-along of numbers from their parents’ generation.
Only a few years ago, Sharon was the laughing stock of the Israeli music scene and trendy Tel-Avivites like Kapoury wouldn’t be caught dead at her concerts. Competing in the 1993 Eurovision song contest—a high-profile, international pop music competition—she sang about the strength and spirit of Israel, encouraging others to join her: “The country may have changed in spirit/but the singing of the masses doesn’t lose its strength/ …from generation to generation/the nation carries a song.” The performance was an embarrassment—Sharon finished 24th out of 25 contestants, which automatically eliminated Israel from the following year’s contest. Israelis blamed Sharon for her humiliating Eurovision failure, and mocked her excessive patriotism.
During the ’90s Israel was increasingly prosperous and negotiations with the Palestinians, spearheaded by the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, offered a genuine hope for peace. The young looked outward for new music. “The ’90s, as a whole, represents a period where people tried to push away everything that was old and nationalistic, and tried to bring in American pop, disco and rap,” says Tomer Galler, a 26-year old solo artist and student from Haifa.
Today, Sharon is selling out nightclubs and auditoriums and leading Shira Betzibur communal sing-alongs three times a week. Box-office agencies selling tickets for Shira Betzibur, or other concerts featuring old-fashioned Zionist music, often sell out weeks before a performance. Israeli television currently features three weekly prime-time Shira Betzibur programs. Remakes of old songs top the music charts. According to the Israeli radio station Gal Galatz the most popular song of 2002 was a rendition of the pioneering favorite “Darkayno,” (“Our Path”).
That young people are going to discotheques and concert halls in Tel Aviv for Shira Betzibur shows is “really a bizarre phenomenon,” says Orli Kaufman, a student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “It was completely out of fashion and now, all of a sudden, singing together is the hottest thing.”
Israeli folk music originated in the early 20th century. Patriotic composers, convinced that there should be one kind of music that would unify the various immigrant groups, invented a “new” folk tradition, writings songs to inspire the young nation. But as the country’s pioneering days became more remote, younger Israelis showed less interest in the patriotic message of songs like “Ain Li Eretz Acheret” (“I Have No Other Land”) with its inspiring message: “I have no other land, although my land is burning/Only a word in Hebrew manages to go deep inside me.” The Jerusalem Post reports that until two years ago, the audience for Sharon’s Shira Betzibur shows was “mainly made up of the generation that founded the state [of Israel].”
Shay Tshuva is 24. A student at Hebrew University, he dresses sharply, accentuating his dark features and strikingly good looks. Initially, he admits, he went with his girlfriend to a Sharon concert “only because it’s trendy.” But now, he says, “If I could, I would go every week.” Sarit Caspi, a 25-year-old graduate student at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, went to her first communal sing-along more than two years ago. At a recent overnight Shira Betzibur near Stay Boker, a large desert canyon in southern Israel, Caspi says she was just one among hundreds of young people sitting in the desert, reading song lyrics projected onto an adjacent cliff, and singing along to “classic Israeli songs.”
In communal singing, says Caspi, “there is an element of getting out of the current situation and imagining, romanticizing the past.” Young people seem to draw comfort from singing songs together that evoke a simpler, more idealistic era. “It’s the atmosphere,” says Tshuva. “Everyone is singing and smiling…They are dancing on the tables with their arms around each other and singing about a time that is better than what we know today.”
Zohar Stolhar will often take out his guitar and sing Israeli folk songs with his friends, but he thinks the current craze is just “the newest Tel-Aviv trend.” Stolhar grew up on a kibbutz with communal singing as Shabat entertainment. “Shira Betzibur at the kibbutzim was about community,” he says. “There is nothing egalitarian in a concert where you have to pay a great deal of money to sing and put your arms around people you don’t know.”
But for some young Israelis, Shira Betzibur is more than just following a trend; it’s a way to deal with living in a war zone. The renewed popularity of folk music is undoubtedly “an expression of the situation,” says Tshuva. Israelis confront terrorist attacks, military service, an economy teetering on the edge of collapse, and plummeting public morale. “Today, you can’t survive if you think, write, or sing about all the pain and terror in our society,” says Lior Daniel, a student at Hebrew University. “[Young Israelis] suffer unemployment, emergency call-up notices and a harsh reality,” Sharon told the Jerusalem Post in an interview. “So they must have a space to rejoice and forget the daily troubles.”
Such a revival might seem to threaten young musicians seeking to break into the relatively small Israeli music scene. But Galler, the solo artist from Haifa, feels differently. “I believe the trend of nostalgia is good for the future of Israeli music. Having influences from the past inform the future enriches what we do today,” he says.
“Through music, we hope to bring people to a more gentle place,” says 26-year-old Gabriel Bell Chasan of the Israeli pop-rock band Algiers. And that is what nostalgia music seems to be doing. Too often, Israeli television is awash with screaming ambulances and black body bags. In contrast, the nostalgia music game show “Lo Nafsik Lashir” (“We Won’t Stop Singing”), where players compete to win prizes by singing lyrics from old-school Israeli songs, practically bursts from the screen with laughter and enthusiasm. Another show, Shira Besidor, features a circle of happy youngsters singing along to folk tunes. In the background, musicians play accordions and guitars while audience members laugh, dance and sway with their arms around each other. “Music gives expression to our often numbing reality,” says Gabi Horowitz, a singer from Jerusalem. “Israel has always found a catharsis through singing.”
Israel desperately needs such catharsis. Striving for euphoria, however artificial, might well be a balm for Israelis’ troubled psyches. “If singing together in masses can diminish the pain and anger in our society,” says Galler. “Then, by all means, sing.”
