Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History

Assaf Shelleg is the Schusterman Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology and Jewish Studies in the Department of Religious Studies and the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Virginia. He was previously the visiting Efroymson Scholar in the Jewish, Islamic & Near Eastern Languages and Cultures department at Washington University in St. Louis. Specializing in twentieth-century Jewish and Israeli art music, Shelleg's research has been published in some of the leading journals in both musicology and Israel Studies. A trained pianist, he is also a regular musical contributor to Ha'aretz newspaper.

• Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History ; TABLE OF CONTENTS ; Jewish Contiguities ; Abbreviations ; I ; Hava Nagila? Decentering the Eastern European Soundscape ; Jewish Inversions ; Aesthetic Confines ; Rethinking Bloch ; Disarticulating Jewishness ; Historiographical Silhouettes ; Control Cases ; In Lieu of a Summary ; II ; From Pre- to Post-Statehood; Hebrewism Diluted ; Ringing the Bells-and-Whistles of the Zionist Project: National Musical Onomatopoeias ; Adjacent yet Oppositional: Subversive Hebrewists ; Statehood and the Demise of Romanticist Nationalism ; Destabilizing Western Metaphors of the East ; Consuming the Source ; Thematic Incongruities (or, Violating Ciarological Time) ; III ; 1960s-1970s; Articulating Jewishness in Israeli Art Music ; Enter the New Pioneers ; The Multivocal Negation of the Diaspora and its Dissolution ; Avni: Counterpointing Modes of Memory ; Epitaph for Whom? ; Kopytman: Transcribing Jewish Heterophonies ; Hebrewism Diluted; Judaism Deterritorialized ; Muting Oneself ; Postlude; Reshuffling Historiographical Cards

Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History is a complex, bold and highly original study of the history of art music in pre- and post-state Israel. With an exceptional erudition in each field he brings to bear (musicology, Hebrew literature, Israel history, cultural studies) and superb command over the musical metier, Assaf Shelleg stages an arresting narrative about a unique musical modernism, adding an exemplary chapter to our understanding of how music negotiates with nationalism, exoticism, and dislocation, gradually allowing for a repressed sonic past to emerge into a vexed foreground.