Description
Book SynopsisIn City of Song: Music and the Making of Modern Jerusalem, author Michael A. Figueroa presents an extensive history of Zionist musical discourses around Jerusalem in the long 20th century (1880-2010s), reorienting our understanding of the city's place in the Israeli-Palestine crisis.
Trade ReviewThe book charts how musical lyrics not only rally, memorialize, entertain, and shape political consciousness but also echo biblical prophecy of a longed-for messianic Jerusalem...this is solid a musical history of modern Jerusalem via the humanities. * D. B. Levy, CHOICE *
Roaming the city's sonic spaces with histories managed and unmanaged by Zionist accounts, City of Song synthesizes Jerusalem the metaphorical and the material while traversing through its diasporic outposts, poetic longings, and contemporary anxieties. Read this book and you too will consider referring to Jerusalem in the plural. Jerusalems! * Assaf Shelleg, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; author of Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History (OUP 2014) and Theological Stains: Art Music and the Zionist Project (OUP 2020) *
City of Song is an important addition to the growing bookshelf on Israel/Palestine and its musics. Through his engaging dialogue with multiple disciplines, Figueroa exposes Jerusalem and its representation in Hebrew song as a treasure trove of contested meanings, historical narratives, and political imaginations. * Oded Erez, Bar-Ilan *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Musical Jerusalem: Listening to the City of Song 1 Metaphorical Jerusalem: Longing in Zionist Cultural Production 2 Forgotten Jerusalem: Zionism without Zion? 3 Haunted Jerusalem: Musical Memorialism and the Politics of Bereavement 4 Gilded Jerusalem: "The Song that Took a City" 5 Heterotopian Jerusalem: Politics of Difference in Dan Almagor's My Jerusalem Epilogue
