Music

Both salsa and Israeli muzika mizrahit emerged in the 70’s among immigrant communities in poor neighbourhoods of large urban centres – salsa in the barrios of New York among Puerto Rican and Cuban immigrants, and muzika mizrahit in the southern "shchunot" of Tel Aviv, among oriental Jews.  Both are hybrid genres incorporating the hegemonic popular music and the rich musical heritages of the marginalized immigrant groups. Both genres developed as a cultural resistance to the tendency of acculturation and assimilation into the hegemonic culture, but at the same time provided a “way in”, and became embraced by the "hosting" society.
Furthermore, both genres became cultural signifiers of newly created “pan-identities”.
In this paper identify, demonstrate and examine various common factors between both hybrid urban genres– aesthetic, stylistic, structural, psychological and social.

This essay is based on research among transient undocumented Latino labour migrants in  Israel.  The Tel Aviv Central Bus Station area has been for the last 20 years a transient home for  many undocumented labour  migrants,  Africans, Filipinos, Romanians, Turks, etc. Nowadays it is mostly populated by refugees and labour migrants from Africa, creating a fascinating ethnoscape, but also a social and political conflict with Israelis who live in the area.     
    Back in 2005 there were also many labour migrants from Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia, most of whom were later deported. Just like the other labour  migrants,  the Latinos suffered from discriminating employment conditions, police raids, and even terrorist attacks in the bus station area, but they were “privileged” in one main area– Salsa music. 
    Salsa is very popular in Israel.  Many young Israelis travel to South America after their army service and become Salsa aficionados. In a complete contradiction to their daytime cheap-labour  status, at nights the Latino migrants became guests of honour  in Tel Aviv’s Salsa parties.   
    In this essay I show how Salsa music became a unique identity factor, both creating and maintaining a sense of artificial “pan-Latin” identity among labour migrants from different Latin-American countries, and at the same time creating a cultural interface for interaction with the hegemonic society, and a source of cultural pride and respect. I also pinpoint social and cultural similarities between Salsa and popular-yet-marginalized Israeli “Oriental Music”, and show how musical discourse can create a unique relationship of acceptance,  respect, and social and cultural interaction, between the “underdog” undocumented migrant and the hosting society.

While researching musical genres and events as a space for identity among gay men in Cuba during the period of
austerity known as the Special Period, I came across the role of sentimental and nostalgic Bolero music as an
emotional and psychological space. This essay describes and analyses the characteristics of bolero music and poetry,
such as its hybrid nature, the “self victimization” themes of its lyrics and their gender ambiguity, and its
heroes/divas’ life stories, and shows how they resonate with the life and psychology of older generation gay men in
Cuba. It also describes and analyses the unique “private” ways of consumption of bolero, once a glamorous
night-club genre, by gay Cubans during the Special Period, and how it became a strong vehicle for emotional
therapy and an object for identification.

The intersection of Jewishness and queerness, part of which is the historic correlation between anti-semitism and homophobia, has been investigated by many queer theorists, including Judith Butler, Daniel Boyarin, and Eve Sedgwick.
This book chapter looks at a particular cultural aspect of this intersection - the great American Jewish divas, who became "gay icons", subject to female impersonations in drag shows, and queer heroines. It concentrates on three such popular music Jewish divas– US-born Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler, and, perhaps less known for her Jewishness due to the particular circumstances of her background,  the late Cuban bolero diva Olga Guillot, a “gay” icon in Cuba and in the Cuban Diaspora. 
Melodrama and tragedy on one side, and Camp (“a gay sensitivity” according to Susan Sontag),on the other,  constitute  a common factor in the performance of the three singers,  and their “diva” quality  – from Streisand's vocal melodrama, via Midler's outrageous comedy and camp, to Guillot's heartbreaking boleros and quivering lips.  This paper argues that and demonstrates how the two supposedly opposing powers of  drama  and Camp, via an ongoing dialogue between “tragedy and trash”, are important components of both Yiddish/Jewish culture, and gay culture, 
The article highlights and compares  issues of social acceptance, Diaspora, Jewish fatalism and Camp, religious and political non-conformism, and the way the three Jewish divas became major gay icons in their respective cultures.

This essay describes and investigates the queer space created by transgressing and subverting gender roles in five popular Latino music and dance genres. It moves across the Latin‑American popular music spectrum from passionate Tango, originating in the turn of the twentieth century, via melancholic Bolero originating in 1930s Cuba to the more recent dance genres – pan‑Latino Salsa, Cuban Timba, and Reggaetón which currently dominates Latino dance floors. It is based on longitudinal fieldwork the author conducted in the gay scenes of Havana, Buenos Aires, and the Latino Diaspora in London.

MY FAVORITE HOTEL in Havana is the Inglaterra, overlooking the Parque Central, one of Havana's oldest gay cruising areas. It has been operating as a hotel since 1856, which probably makes it the oldest continuously operating hotel in the city. It had Old World charm, however run-down, especially during the first years of my stay in the mid-1990s, before old Havana started to be renovated with the support of unesco. The fact that Cuba's most respected military general, the " Bronze Titan, " Antonio Maceo—allegedly the only soldier in history to survive 24 bullet wounds—stayed there in 1890 was less exciting to me than the fact that Federico García Lorca did so on a rainy night in 1930. Did Lorca, whose Cuban experience brought out homoerotic elements in his work, note the clandestine cruising activity in Parque Central opposite the hotel? Lorca's visit, his fascination with Cuba, and his interest in both Cuban music and homoerotism have been a great inspiration for me throughout my own Cuban experience. I was therefore delighted to stay at a hotel that he visited, and later on to walk into the García Lorca Auditorium in the majestic Gran Teatro de La Habana, home of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, next-door to the Inglaterra, while conducting field research on Cuban ballet in the early 2000s. This research included in-depth interviews with Cuban gay men who agreed to be part of my research.