and the Atlantic Connection
Levinski Street, the congested hub of migrant south Tel Aviv, came to be one of my regular haunts during fieldwork. But when I first stepped off the train from the airport in July 2008, I had the same initial impression as most Tel Aviv residents—that it was run-down and looked unsafe. It hardly resembled the “White City,” the secular, left-wing, and gay-friendly Bauhaus capital on the beach that is notoriously isolated from the rest of the country. I walked the length of Levinski en route to my friend Sam’s apartment, passing a number of Ethiopian businesses on the way, the bus station (see Hankins 2013), and the Nahum Records Ethiopian music emporium, plus the abandoned spots that would some years later become the Red Sea Internet Café and the Ethiopian restaurant Tenät. As I turned onto Ha’aliyah Street, the neighborhood began to change, and by the time I reached Florentin Street I was in a different world. This was the neighborhood of Florentin, the capital of hipster Tel Aviv, and its aforementioned main street is lined with renovated Bauhaus buildings, mixed with bars like the nearby Hudna (“truce” in Arabic, a mixed Jewish-Arab project, where deejays spin records outdoors until 4 a.m.). This former working-class Mizrahi neighborhood (inhabited by Jews of Muslim lands who have immigrated to Israel, known in Israel as Mizrahim, the plural term) has slanted younger in the past decade, with the soundscape of Greek folk songs on Friday afternoons replaced with psy-trance, and Bukharian pastries traded in for quinoa. Florentin is still grungy, but it’s privileged, and today it’s the epicenter of creative energy in the controversial capital, a gathering-point for left-leaning middle-class young people postmilitary. There aren’t many Ethiopians on this side of Ha’aliyah, though, and the imaginary border between Levinski and Florentin delineates Israel’s insiders (middle-class citizens) from its others (visible minorities, ’48 Palestinians, African refugees). Yet thanks to the profusion of hipsters who listen to reggae and sport dreadlocks, iconographies of blackness adorn the bodies of Tel Aviv’s tastemakers. These young people have a patron saint: her name is Ester Rada, she is Ethiopian-Israeli, and her music navigates marginality through the musical vernaculars of the Middle Passage.
Rada wasn’t known yet to the residents of Florentin in 2008, and given the stark contrast between rich Bauhaus Tel Aviv and poor migrant Tel Aviv, perhaps separated by Ha’aliyah, I couldn’t have predicted upon my arrival that an Ethiopian-Israeli soul singer would be Israel’s next ambassador to Glastonbury and WOMAD. Ethiopian-Israelis are not just economically marginalized in Israel; the admittedly complicated basis of their citizenship is still sometimes called into question by the religious mainstream (Anteby-Yemini 2004, Seeman 2009). Yet in just a few years, Rada became Israel’s most popular export in Europe, and she did so by negotiating a complex relationship with Israeli society. Rada’s musical style connects her to Ethiopia and to the African diaspora, and in this chapter I examine the musical vernaculars that she references in her repertoire, arguing that she exemplifies a key Ethiopian-Israeli strategy of citizenship by mobilizing Harlem, Kingston, and Ethiopia—i.e., the “New Zion” of Rastafarian imagery (see Raboteau 2014 or Ratner 2015 for comparison)—as an alternative narrative of embodied otherness. This strategy is a paradox. In order to negotiate the contested citizenship of Ethiopian-Israelis, musicians connect to alternative narratives of belonging, and in the case of Ester Rada, the compelling insertion of Ethiopian-Israelis into the imagined community of the black Atlantic has earned the acceptance of Ethiopians in Israel. Making it as a performer across the African diaspora has facilitated belonging in Israel.
Rada’s rise to international prominence happened quickly. In 2011 she was performing for Ethiopian-Israelis on the Tel Aviv club scene with her ex-husband Gili Yalo of reggae band Zvuloon Dub System, and by 2013 she played the Glastonbury festival in the UK. She released her first EP, Life Happens, in 2013, followed by the album Ester Rada in 2014. Her second album, Different Eyes (2017), came out to great critical success just as this book was going to press.1 The transitions from local popularity (among Ethiopian-Israelis) to national popularity (among Tel Aviv elites) and international attention were swift. Yet the social processes through which she rose to the vanguard of the Israeli music scene reveal the complexity of the Ethiopian-Israeli experience. Considering the socioeconomic obstacles facing Ethiopians in Israel (Parfitt and Trevisan Semi 2005), and the isolation of many Beta Israel from Ethiopian society since emigration (Karadawi 1991), the reception of Rada is a surprise—not least to Rada herself; when I interviewed her in 2015, she described her rapid ascent as unexpected. Because of the aforementioned paradox of belonging, Francis Falceto, the producer of the influential Éthiopiques CD series, further remarked to me when I interviewed him that it seemed ironic that she was the first Ethiopian musician to “cross over,” or achieve mainstream success in the all-important European and North American markets.2 However, by examining Rada’s musical style in detail, this chapter will reveal a narrative that borrows from the iconographies and musical vernaculars of the African diaspora as an avenue to accruing cultural capital among Israelis and using “black music” (musiqa sheḥorah) as a main strategy toward integration. A close examination of songs that incorporate influences from soul music, funk, reggae, and Ethio-jazz reveals the common theme of the repertoire: a triangulated narrative of Afrodiasporic origins (see Chivallon 2011).
By exploring the musical influences on Rada’s performance style—the deep, throaty vocal timbre that references Nina Simone (who, as I learned when I interviewed Rada, is her favorite singer), the funky bass lines from Parliament, the hemitonic pentatonic modes on brass from Ethio-jazz icon Mahmoud Ahmed, and the offbeat rhythm incorporated from reggae and dub, I will unpack one alternative paradigm of Ethiopian-Israeli citizenship. In the context of the wider Ethiopian-Israeli experience, it is truly unexpected (particularly to the leftistoriented Rada, but also to producers and promoters) that the biggest Israeli star abroad in 2017 is Ethiopian. Ethiopian-Israelis remain religiously suspect to many Israelis (Seeman 2009), their youth presumed to be criminals by community workers and in the press. I present Ester Rada first in this book as a counternarrative of that experience, beginning with a successful example of integration through music, and of making a success by drawing on alternative paradigms of citizenship.
It is equally bewildering that Europe’s first Ethiopian crossover artist is Israeli, that she trained in Hebrew, and that she sings almost exclusively in English. Finally, it is ironic that given these factors, and the religious baggage that the Ethiopian-Israeli population carries, the first Ethiopian-Israeli solo star performs not Israeli pop music but Afrodiasporic music, acknowledging that the integration efforts of the Israeli state failed to mainstream Ethiopian citizens.3 Despite these ironies, the narrative that Rada promotes stylistically, a grassroots story of black otherness in a white society, has established a valuable model of citizenship for Ethiopian-Israelis, whereby they demonstrate their contribution to Israeli society through a reconfiguration of the paradigm of exile, shifting their experience from the Jewish exile to the African one.4 For the Ethiopian-Israelis who supported Rada’s rise but who do not turn up at her concerts in increasingly elite venues, this musical style points them to a paradigm of belonging, and they increasingly look to the experiences of African Americans to relate to the prejudice in their own society (see Ratner 2015). The citizenship strategy of embodied otherness—of distancing themselves from Israeli society5—transpires at the level of musical style and performance, and this chapter examines how a commercially successful Ethiopian-Israeli musician uses music to position herself as political subject in Israeli society.
ESTER RADA
Ester Rada performs a combination of original songs and soul and Ethio-jazz standards, resulting in what music critics call Ethio-soul. She was not yet a gigging musician when I lived in Tel Aviv in 2008–2009, and I first heard of her as she was about to perform at Glastonbury. Since she sings in English, it didn’t occur to me that she came from Tel Aviv, nor did it occur to me to pay attention to her increasingly busy touring schedule. Between her skin and her lyrics, she doesn’t resemble most international audiences’ idea of an Israeli, and she can travel the festival scene in France with little drama. She tends to be quiet about her origins in concert, and her reticence can lend itself to farce, such as the anecdote she relayed to me about arriving onstage and finding
