Gil Karpas is a journalist and event promoter based in London. He’s also an expert on the evolution of Israeli popular music. We spoke with him about how immigration has shaped the sound and diversity of voices in Israeli music since the country’s founding seven decades ago.

What he does:

Much of Karpas’ own experience is rooted in the Jewish culture of London, where he works. In his own hometown, he finds diverse communities — from the Ashkenazi Jews who came to England during the Russian and Ukrainian pogroms of the 19th and 20th centuries to the Sephardi and Mizrahi communities who have lived in England for hundreds of years longer — reacting to their faith and creating music that speaks both to the past and present.

On the diversity of Israeli music:

Karpas points out that Israel’s history of diverse music has been fueled by successive waves who immigrants, starting with the Europeans who arrived not long after the founding of the country. “Different waves of immigrants come and their children come of age,” says Karpas. “And when they come of age… and there’s a critical creative mass, you see a swath of expression coming out.” In Israeli history, Karpas says, this has happened about every 20 years.

He points to Shlomo Barr, who immigrated to Israel from Morocco when he was young and, as a Sephardic Jew, pioneered some of the more “Middle Eastern” strains of Israeli popular music.

[Bar sang] about longing for origins, of home life. He probably only had a vague memory of coming to Israel, which was a promised land, and finding the reality was different,” Karpas says. “It was really inspirational to a large swath of people. What you see in him is this melding of things in liturgy, superstition, common practice and culture.”

More recently, Karpas points to artists like Dudu Tassa, A-WA, and Axum as artists who have successfully expanded the ethnic mosaic of Israeli popular music.

How music engages Jewish and Israeli identity:

The active engagement with faith and national identity, long a hallmark of creative expression in Israel, is a tradition that continues today, says Karpas. “Each [artist] has a background that is different, and that wouldn’t exist had their ancestors hadn’t interacted with the same text in different ways.”

For his part, Karpas sees the voices of each successive generation eventually melding into a single, overarching national identity. “From a cultural utopian standpoint, that’s how I see it,” he says. “When [voices] come together, and each is represented… that will breakdown over time and form something that is much more of a national identity.”

Playlist:

Ofra Hazar – Im Nin’Alu
Idan Raichel – Ethiopian
Idan Raichel – Orphaned Land
Shlomo Barr and Habrira Hativeet – Kfar Todra

 

MIX: