Course Overview
Course Staff

Songs reflect the societies that produce them. Changing societies produce changing musical forms. These are the simple premises that underlie this course. Every piece of music (and film, literature, architecture, advertisement...) says something about the society that produced it. Each week, participants will focus on a different element in Israeli society as it is reflected through music. They will decipher the cultural codes of these songs to learn more about the society in question.

Course Overview

This course is based on four central suppositions.

1. Israel is one of the most complex societies in the world. This is not a value statement - it is not necessarily good or bad, but it seems to be a fact.
2. Another thing: Israel is a society that changes very fast. Most societies change fairly slowly but Israel in the last generation or so, has totally transformed itself in almost every sphere.
3. Every cultural form - literature, film, theatre, plastic art, architecture and music - says something about the society where it was created. There is no such thing as a cultural text or artifact which says nothing about the society in which it was produced.
4. If all cultural texts reflect something about the society where they were created, then changes in the society reflect themselves in changes in the cultural texts. Unpacking the cultural texts or artifacts of a society should then reveal nuances of change and development in society.

If these suppositions are all correct, and it is the belief of this course that they are, it stands to reason that we can get numerous insights into the development of this most complex of all societies by examining developments in the cultural texts of Israel - through any medium. We could do this in any medium, but for this course we will be restricting ourselves to popular music. In this course we are going to ask the question of the meaning of specific Israeli songs time and time again. What does the song tell me about the society which created it? What does it tell me about the direction of society if I compare it with other songs written earlier or later? These are good reflective questions for all of us to think of all the time whenever we experience a cultural text in one way or other. For teachers and educators it is a particularly important question to ask because it immediately can broaden the possibilities of teaching by the deeper use of cultural texts, in the classroom or outside in informal settings.

In this course we will take four subjects and examine them in general to acquaint ourselves with the issues involved. Having done that, each week we will examine a number of songs or pieces of music and will try and understand what they are saying and how they reflect the general subject. It should be enlightening and it should be fun.

Target Audience: The course is primarily for teachers but Jewish professionals, interested adults and students are welcome!

Course Goals:

• To enable the participants to engage on a deeper level with Israel by providing them with an additional "window" through which additional perspectives on Israel can be gathered
• To model the use of cultural texts in order to illuminate a subject and to provide angles of vision that are enlightening and accessible
• To provide an extra teaching tool that can widen the range of possibilities in the classroom, or in the informal education environment

Time Commitment: 4 - 6 hours a week over a period of 4 weeks.

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Course Staff

Steve Israel comes from a strong youth movement background in England. He is originally from England and came on Aliyah to kibbutz (where he spent my first eight years) in 1975. Leaving kibbutz, he came to Jerusalem where he took a Masters in Jewish history and started to leave thoughts of milking cows behind and reentered the field of informal Jewish education in which he'd been involved in his youth movement capacity prior to Aliyah. He has been there ever since. He does a lot of teaching in various frameworks - including, very centrally for me, the Machon LeMadrichei Chul, where he has been teaching for twenty years - as well as training educators in different skills. In addition he does quite a lot of writing of educational materials. Most importantly, he is married to Dena, an ex-New Yorker and together have four kids (all boys) and a very noisy house in Jerusalem.

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