Papers by Tanya Sermer
Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, 2019
For more than twenty-five years the Western Wall in Jerusalem has been the focus of heated contro... more For more than twenty-five years the Western Wall in Jerusalem has been the focus of heated controversy over gender roles in Judaism, the character of public space in the city, and the relationship between religious and state authority. At the center of these controversies is the women’s prayer group Women of the Wall (WoW), and a group convened to work against them, the Women for the Wall (W4W). In this study, I examine performances by and of the WoW and the W4W through the lens of bodily practices and power relations, building upon theories regarding performativity, agency, and the material manifestation of discursive norms. By considering how governing authorities control movement, access, and bodily practices in order to impose a particular framework of gendered behavior, I look at how each group reclaims its voices and bodies to challenge and reinscribe gendered religious practice. I analyze how the WoW’s practices are affected and mediated by the presence of a large viewing audience (supporters, opposition, police surveillance, and the media), ultimately articulating a critique of liberal agency and the extent to which the uncritical valorization of choice and voice can distort scholarly perspectives across a range of cultural and religious contexts.
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Jewish Music Research Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2016
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Soundscapes of Wellbeing in Popular Music, edited by Gavin J. Andrews, Paul Kingsbury, and Robin Kearns, 77-88. ‘Geographies of Health’ Series. Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2014.
American Jewish singer-songwriter, Debbie Friedman, composed melodies in the style of American fo... more American Jewish singer-songwriter, Debbie Friedman, composed melodies in the style of American folk-rock and wrote lyrics that combine Jewish texts with English interpretations, making prayer accessible to American Jews in new ways and turning worship into a participatory event. Among Friedman’s most substantial contributions to liberal Jewish life was her emphasis on spiritual healing; her adaptation of the central healing prayer, “Mi Shebeirach,” became her most famous and beloved song. It is sung in synagogue worship and special “healing services,” a ritual that Friedman was instrumental in developing. Friedman’s theology, expressed through music, approached the divine as a source of spiritual renewal, whose help could benefit all from the healthiest to the incurably ill. Her compositions instilled a sense of hope and empowered participants to become active agents of healing, and her innovative performance contexts transformed the liberal Jewish approach to healing. Employing ethnographic methods, this chapter traces the development, transmission and significance of Friedman’s healing repertoire, analyzing song lyrics, music, and contribution to the reinvention of ritual.
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Moods and Modes of Jewish Music, edited by Yuval Shaked, I-XI. Haifa, Israel: University of Haifa... more Moods and Modes of Jewish Music, edited by Yuval Shaked, I-XI. Haifa, Israel: University of Haifa, 2014.
Music constitutes a key medium through which political actors in Jerusalem embody, perform, and negotiate competing paradigms of nationhood and, more specifically, their visions of the future of Jerusalem. In this paper, I focus on the community espousing religious Zionism—the datiim leumiim—and their performance of neo-Hasidic pop and rock. In this paper, I analyse this genre of music as a form of political discourse within the public sphere of Jerusalem. Although the music was not originally intended to be political in nature, the contexts of performance of this repertoire have endowed the music with political meaning: the yearly Rikud’galim procession (celebrating Jerusalem Day), various public demonstrations, and displays of opposition to other Jerusalemites. I explore a number of issues that emerge out of this ethnographic research.
First, this serves as an excellent demonstration of performance as a vehicle through which to claim and occupy public space. Tens of thousands of people singing, dancing, and processing through both West and East Jerusalem on Yom Yerushalayim enacts the unification of the city and claims both sides as Jewish space. Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization,” as well as Lefebvre’s “production of space,” are particularly salient here.
Second, the musical choice of actors in this community functions as a form of political language—both as general expression of personal and communal political commitments and in dialogue with actors of opposing positions. Mainstream (non-religious) Zionist activists—both left- and right-leaning—exploit the repertoire of Shirei eretz yisrael as a manifestation of their commitments to both Jewish nationalism and secular liberalism. The radical left, maintaining a post-Zionist and universalist position, performs samba in an attempt to transcend religious, ethnic, and nationalist symbolism. In contradistinction to both of these communities and their chosen genres of music, the performance of neo-Hasidic pop by the datiim leumiim reinforces the liturgical and biblical underpinnings of religious Zionism and the yearning associated with life in the Diaspora. Yaron Ezrahi argues that the rhetoric of settlement is “pre-state” rhetoric; this musical discourse manifests parallel rhetorical strategies.
Lastly, the ideologies inherent in the performance of neo-Hasidic pop and rock relate to the aesthetics and ideologies of the Hasidic niggun. Given that Hasidism was founded on Kabbalistic ideas in which music and dance were key vehicles to unification with the divine and were believed to have the power to affect the Godhead, and that Rav Kook was himself a kabbalist and incorporated theurgist elements into his Zionist teachings, I suggest the following parallel; whereas the Hasidim engage in singing and dancing as a personal redemptive process, the datiim leumiim transport this into the political realm and engage neo-Hasidic music and dance as a process of the redemption of the Land of Israel.
Analyzing musical language as a manifestation of political interaction provides a portal into understanding the forces competing to define the public sphere of Jerusalem. Additionally, it highlights the ways in which Jewish music acquires various meanings through the act of performance and the appropriation by individual agents.
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Dissertation by Tanya Sermer
(Abstract below ) Link to download: https://urresearch.rochester.edu/institutionalPublicationPubl... more (Abstract below ) Link to download: https://urresearch.rochester.edu/institutionalPublicationPublicView.action;jsessionid=158422E49E900DF756A066A42E4C18D5?institutionalItemId=29613
Music constitutes a key medium through which political actors in Jerusalem embody, perform, and negotiate competing paradigms of nationhood and their visions of the future of Jerusalem. Among the Jewish population, the most intense, recent occurrences (and recurrences) of public protest tend to involve the intersection of Jewish religion, nationalist discourses, and the character of public space. My research explicates the ways in which this triangle of relationships is articulated and negotiated within the public sphere of Jerusalem by means of music, prayer, dance, and other performative modes. I interpret music as an expressive political language and a tool used by agents to make an impact on their environments. My work is situated within a growing body of scholarship on expressive culture that aims to problematize the distinction between symbolic and instrumental action, challenging the binary opposition between the “cultural” and the “political.” The symbolic, dynamic, and constructed nature of space forms an analytic base of my study. Performance in public space works to create actors’ imagined idealizations of the city and to stake their claims to contested spaces. I foreground the relationality between actors of diverse populations, and argue that musical interaction is a rich space in which the cultural work of music-making is achieved.
I conducted ethnographic research within several spaces throughout Jerusalem and among communities with diverse musical languages. The religious right expresses itself using neo-Hasidic popular music, paralleling the liturgical and biblical rhetoric of religious Zionism. The Women of the Wall recite their prayer service out loud and communally at the Western Wall, in contradistinction to normative orthodox women’s prayer. The Zionist Left exploits the repertoire of modern popular song known as “Songs of the Land of Israel,” which constitute one attempt to grapple with the tensions between Jewish nationalism and secular liberalism. The Radical Left seeks a universalist political language; it protests by performing Brazilian-style samba drumming, in an attempt to transcend both Israeli and Palestinian ethnicity, religion, and nationality.
Several issues emerge as framing the performative expression of political actors. First, competing definitions of Zionism manifest themselves through diverse musical languages. Representative genres have come to articulate each group’s position on Zionism, demonstrating the range of national imaginaries that co-exist in the public sphere. Second, gendered performance emerges as representative of the struggle between secularism and orthodoxy and the fight for religious pluralism. I analyze gendered performances and protests in terms of the production of space, their juxtaposition of gender and nationalism, and the place of these struggles within religious politics. Third, I outline several ways in which governing authorities control movement, access, and bodily practices in order to impose a particular framework of gendered behavior and how women use performance to challenge discursive norms that delineate gendered religious practice. Fourth, I explore the discursive roles of performance in conflict. Within ongoing conflict between specific groups, symbolic understandings of violent acts become juxtaposed onto cultural performances that are not themselves violent, but which are intended by performers or interpreted by receivers as communicating similar symbolic messages. Thus, performance contributes to shaping the terms of conflict and becomes embedded in larger discourses of power, violence, and resistance.
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Book Reviews by Tanya Sermer
Musica Judaica Online Reviews, 2024
https://mjoreviews.org/2024/02/04/city-of-song-music-and-the-making-of-modern-jerusalem/
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Papers by Tanya Sermer
http://jewish-music.huji.ac.il/content/debbie-friedman%E2%80%99s-shema%E2%80%99-koleinu-ancient-prayer-new-musical-garment
Music constitutes a key medium through which political actors in Jerusalem embody, perform, and negotiate competing paradigms of nationhood and, more specifically, their visions of the future of Jerusalem. In this paper, I focus on the community espousing religious Zionism—the datiim leumiim—and their performance of neo-Hasidic pop and rock. In this paper, I analyse this genre of music as a form of political discourse within the public sphere of Jerusalem. Although the music was not originally intended to be political in nature, the contexts of performance of this repertoire have endowed the music with political meaning: the yearly Rikud’galim procession (celebrating Jerusalem Day), various public demonstrations, and displays of opposition to other Jerusalemites. I explore a number of issues that emerge out of this ethnographic research.
First, this serves as an excellent demonstration of performance as a vehicle through which to claim and occupy public space. Tens of thousands of people singing, dancing, and processing through both West and East Jerusalem on Yom Yerushalayim enacts the unification of the city and claims both sides as Jewish space. Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization,” as well as Lefebvre’s “production of space,” are particularly salient here.
Second, the musical choice of actors in this community functions as a form of political language—both as general expression of personal and communal political commitments and in dialogue with actors of opposing positions. Mainstream (non-religious) Zionist activists—both left- and right-leaning—exploit the repertoire of Shirei eretz yisrael as a manifestation of their commitments to both Jewish nationalism and secular liberalism. The radical left, maintaining a post-Zionist and universalist position, performs samba in an attempt to transcend religious, ethnic, and nationalist symbolism. In contradistinction to both of these communities and their chosen genres of music, the performance of neo-Hasidic pop by the datiim leumiim reinforces the liturgical and biblical underpinnings of religious Zionism and the yearning associated with life in the Diaspora. Yaron Ezrahi argues that the rhetoric of settlement is “pre-state” rhetoric; this musical discourse manifests parallel rhetorical strategies.
Lastly, the ideologies inherent in the performance of neo-Hasidic pop and rock relate to the aesthetics and ideologies of the Hasidic niggun. Given that Hasidism was founded on Kabbalistic ideas in which music and dance were key vehicles to unification with the divine and were believed to have the power to affect the Godhead, and that Rav Kook was himself a kabbalist and incorporated theurgist elements into his Zionist teachings, I suggest the following parallel; whereas the Hasidim engage in singing and dancing as a personal redemptive process, the datiim leumiim transport this into the political realm and engage neo-Hasidic music and dance as a process of the redemption of the Land of Israel.
Analyzing musical language as a manifestation of political interaction provides a portal into understanding the forces competing to define the public sphere of Jerusalem. Additionally, it highlights the ways in which Jewish music acquires various meanings through the act of performance and the appropriation by individual agents.
Dissertation by Tanya Sermer
Music constitutes a key medium through which political actors in Jerusalem embody, perform, and negotiate competing paradigms of nationhood and their visions of the future of Jerusalem. Among the Jewish population, the most intense, recent occurrences (and recurrences) of public protest tend to involve the intersection of Jewish religion, nationalist discourses, and the character of public space. My research explicates the ways in which this triangle of relationships is articulated and negotiated within the public sphere of Jerusalem by means of music, prayer, dance, and other performative modes. I interpret music as an expressive political language and a tool used by agents to make an impact on their environments. My work is situated within a growing body of scholarship on expressive culture that aims to problematize the distinction between symbolic and instrumental action, challenging the binary opposition between the “cultural” and the “political.” The symbolic, dynamic, and constructed nature of space forms an analytic base of my study. Performance in public space works to create actors’ imagined idealizations of the city and to stake their claims to contested spaces. I foreground the relationality between actors of diverse populations, and argue that musical interaction is a rich space in which the cultural work of music-making is achieved.
I conducted ethnographic research within several spaces throughout Jerusalem and among communities with diverse musical languages. The religious right expresses itself using neo-Hasidic popular music, paralleling the liturgical and biblical rhetoric of religious Zionism. The Women of the Wall recite their prayer service out loud and communally at the Western Wall, in contradistinction to normative orthodox women’s prayer. The Zionist Left exploits the repertoire of modern popular song known as “Songs of the Land of Israel,” which constitute one attempt to grapple with the tensions between Jewish nationalism and secular liberalism. The Radical Left seeks a universalist political language; it protests by performing Brazilian-style samba drumming, in an attempt to transcend both Israeli and Palestinian ethnicity, religion, and nationality.
Several issues emerge as framing the performative expression of political actors. First, competing definitions of Zionism manifest themselves through diverse musical languages. Representative genres have come to articulate each group’s position on Zionism, demonstrating the range of national imaginaries that co-exist in the public sphere. Second, gendered performance emerges as representative of the struggle between secularism and orthodoxy and the fight for religious pluralism. I analyze gendered performances and protests in terms of the production of space, their juxtaposition of gender and nationalism, and the place of these struggles within religious politics. Third, I outline several ways in which governing authorities control movement, access, and bodily practices in order to impose a particular framework of gendered behavior and how women use performance to challenge discursive norms that delineate gendered religious practice. Fourth, I explore the discursive roles of performance in conflict. Within ongoing conflict between specific groups, symbolic understandings of violent acts become juxtaposed onto cultural performances that are not themselves violent, but which are intended by performers or interpreted by receivers as communicating similar symbolic messages. Thus, performance contributes to shaping the terms of conflict and becomes embedded in larger discourses of power, violence, and resistance.
Book Reviews by Tanya Sermer
http://jewish-music.huji.ac.il/content/debbie-friedman%E2%80%99s-shema%E2%80%99-koleinu-ancient-prayer-new-musical-garment
Music constitutes a key medium through which political actors in Jerusalem embody, perform, and negotiate competing paradigms of nationhood and, more specifically, their visions of the future of Jerusalem. In this paper, I focus on the community espousing religious Zionism—the datiim leumiim—and their performance of neo-Hasidic pop and rock. In this paper, I analyse this genre of music as a form of political discourse within the public sphere of Jerusalem. Although the music was not originally intended to be political in nature, the contexts of performance of this repertoire have endowed the music with political meaning: the yearly Rikud’galim procession (celebrating Jerusalem Day), various public demonstrations, and displays of opposition to other Jerusalemites. I explore a number of issues that emerge out of this ethnographic research.
First, this serves as an excellent demonstration of performance as a vehicle through which to claim and occupy public space. Tens of thousands of people singing, dancing, and processing through both West and East Jerusalem on Yom Yerushalayim enacts the unification of the city and claims both sides as Jewish space. Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization,” as well as Lefebvre’s “production of space,” are particularly salient here.
Second, the musical choice of actors in this community functions as a form of political language—both as general expression of personal and communal political commitments and in dialogue with actors of opposing positions. Mainstream (non-religious) Zionist activists—both left- and right-leaning—exploit the repertoire of Shirei eretz yisrael as a manifestation of their commitments to both Jewish nationalism and secular liberalism. The radical left, maintaining a post-Zionist and universalist position, performs samba in an attempt to transcend religious, ethnic, and nationalist symbolism. In contradistinction to both of these communities and their chosen genres of music, the performance of neo-Hasidic pop by the datiim leumiim reinforces the liturgical and biblical underpinnings of religious Zionism and the yearning associated with life in the Diaspora. Yaron Ezrahi argues that the rhetoric of settlement is “pre-state” rhetoric; this musical discourse manifests parallel rhetorical strategies.
Lastly, the ideologies inherent in the performance of neo-Hasidic pop and rock relate to the aesthetics and ideologies of the Hasidic niggun. Given that Hasidism was founded on Kabbalistic ideas in which music and dance were key vehicles to unification with the divine and were believed to have the power to affect the Godhead, and that Rav Kook was himself a kabbalist and incorporated theurgist elements into his Zionist teachings, I suggest the following parallel; whereas the Hasidim engage in singing and dancing as a personal redemptive process, the datiim leumiim transport this into the political realm and engage neo-Hasidic music and dance as a process of the redemption of the Land of Israel.
Analyzing musical language as a manifestation of political interaction provides a portal into understanding the forces competing to define the public sphere of Jerusalem. Additionally, it highlights the ways in which Jewish music acquires various meanings through the act of performance and the appropriation by individual agents.
Music constitutes a key medium through which political actors in Jerusalem embody, perform, and negotiate competing paradigms of nationhood and their visions of the future of Jerusalem. Among the Jewish population, the most intense, recent occurrences (and recurrences) of public protest tend to involve the intersection of Jewish religion, nationalist discourses, and the character of public space. My research explicates the ways in which this triangle of relationships is articulated and negotiated within the public sphere of Jerusalem by means of music, prayer, dance, and other performative modes. I interpret music as an expressive political language and a tool used by agents to make an impact on their environments. My work is situated within a growing body of scholarship on expressive culture that aims to problematize the distinction between symbolic and instrumental action, challenging the binary opposition between the “cultural” and the “political.” The symbolic, dynamic, and constructed nature of space forms an analytic base of my study. Performance in public space works to create actors’ imagined idealizations of the city and to stake their claims to contested spaces. I foreground the relationality between actors of diverse populations, and argue that musical interaction is a rich space in which the cultural work of music-making is achieved.
I conducted ethnographic research within several spaces throughout Jerusalem and among communities with diverse musical languages. The religious right expresses itself using neo-Hasidic popular music, paralleling the liturgical and biblical rhetoric of religious Zionism. The Women of the Wall recite their prayer service out loud and communally at the Western Wall, in contradistinction to normative orthodox women’s prayer. The Zionist Left exploits the repertoire of modern popular song known as “Songs of the Land of Israel,” which constitute one attempt to grapple with the tensions between Jewish nationalism and secular liberalism. The Radical Left seeks a universalist political language; it protests by performing Brazilian-style samba drumming, in an attempt to transcend both Israeli and Palestinian ethnicity, religion, and nationality.
Several issues emerge as framing the performative expression of political actors. First, competing definitions of Zionism manifest themselves through diverse musical languages. Representative genres have come to articulate each group’s position on Zionism, demonstrating the range of national imaginaries that co-exist in the public sphere. Second, gendered performance emerges as representative of the struggle between secularism and orthodoxy and the fight for religious pluralism. I analyze gendered performances and protests in terms of the production of space, their juxtaposition of gender and nationalism, and the place of these struggles within religious politics. Third, I outline several ways in which governing authorities control movement, access, and bodily practices in order to impose a particular framework of gendered behavior and how women use performance to challenge discursive norms that delineate gendered religious practice. Fourth, I explore the discursive roles of performance in conflict. Within ongoing conflict between specific groups, symbolic understandings of violent acts become juxtaposed onto cultural performances that are not themselves violent, but which are intended by performers or interpreted by receivers as communicating similar symbolic messages. Thus, performance contributes to shaping the terms of conflict and becomes embedded in larger discourses of power, violence, and resistance.