In this book, Assaf Shelleg maps the emergence of European modern Jewish art music ( Kunstmusik ) and its partial migration to Palestine/Israel. Traversing through Jewish and cultural cultural histories Shelleg defies the paradigms of Hebrew national culture by tracking its dilution and eventual collapse into the larger canvas of modern Jewish culture.

In this book, Assaf Shelleg explores the history of Israeli art music and its ongoing discourse with modern Jewish art music. He introduces the reader to various aesthetic dilemmas involved in the emergence of this music, ranging from auto-exoticism through the hues of self-hatred to the disarticulation of Jewish musical markers. He then considers part of the music's translocation to Mandatory Palestine, studying its brisk discourse with Hebrew culture, and how composers grappled with modern and Zionist images of the self. Unlike previous efforts in the field, Shelleg unearths the mechanism of what he calls "Zionist musical onomatopoeias", but, more importantly, their dilution by the non-western Arab-Jewish oral musical traditions.
The English original edition of this book, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2014, won the 2015 Engle Prize for the Study of Hebrew Music, and the 2016 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award.

Autorentext
ist Assistant Professor der Musikwissenschaft an der Hebräischen Universität Jerusalem. Von 2009 bis 2011 lehrte er als Visiting Efroymson Scholar am Institut für jüdische, islamische und nahöstliche Sprachen und Kulturen an der Washington University in St. Louis; von 2011 bis 2014 war er Schusterman Visiting Assistant Professor der Musikwissenschaft und Jüdischen Studien am Institut für Religionswissenschaften der University of Virginia. Sein Buch Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History wurde mit dem Joel Engel Prize (2015) und dem Jordan Schnitzer Book Award (2016) ausgezeichnet.