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Israel’s New Reality-TV Sensation

Oct. 22 2015

A new Israeli TV show, called ha-Paytan, features young men competing with their vocal renditions of traditional liturgical melodies. Remarkably, writes Liel Leibovitz, the program manages to touch a spiritual chord:

The men vying for glory on the show are, with almost no exception, thoughtful and sweet and immensely talented, and when they sing, they do so with all their heart. Which is a must when the song you’re trying to sell is intended not only for man’s ears but also God’s. Instead of the archetypal entertainers we get on The Voice and elsewhere—the bad-boy rocker, the sensitive crooner, the country boy, the R&B dynamo—ha-Paytan offers real people displaying real emotions, just as they do, one imagines, every Shabbat when letting loose on the bimah. . . .

[E]ach contestant brings his unique tradition to his lyrical interpretations. Some sing tunes learned by their grandparents in small synagogues in Morocco, others songs imported from Turkey or Yemen or Egypt. Each episode, then, is a mosaic of Jewish music, offering the pleasure of hearing so many variations on the same basic themes and contemplating once again the richness and diversity of our culture. Which is why you finish each episode of ha-Paytan feeling wholesome, a sentiment rarely associated with evenings spent lazing on the couch and glaring at the screen.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Arts & Culture, Israeli society, Jewish music, Piyyut, Television

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic