The class explores the history of Kol Yisrael’s Arabic Orchestra, a unique cultural institution that, from the 1950s to the 1970s, broadcast Arabic music to audiences across Israel, the Middle East, and beyond. Staffed largely by Mizrahi musicians—many of them immigrants from Baghdad, Cairo, and other Arab cities—the orchestra held a paradoxical place: created within Israel’s Arabic-language broadcasting, initially intended for propaganda and psychological warfare, it also became a vibrant arena for preserving and reinterpreting Arab musical traditions. During the class, we will discuss how these musicians navigated the cultural and political tensions of performing within a (Israeli) state apparatus that sought to distance Israeli identity from Arabness, while simultaneously sustaining a shared Arab–Jewish musical heritage. Through archival recordings, historical context, and rich stories from the period, the class will explore how music as both a bridge and a boundary in the intertwined histories of Mizrahim, Palestinians, and the wider Arab world.

Yuval Evri is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and Marash and Ocuin Chair in Ottoman, Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewish Studies at Brandeis University. He is a cultural historian who specializes in Sephardi/Arab-Jewish modern history and culture. He is particularly interested in Palestine during the first half of the 20th century.
His current book project traces the invention of the Mizrahim/Sephardim as go-betweens and mediators on the borderline that emerged between the Jew and the Arab and between Hebrew and Arabic and explores how the fluidity inherent in this position became a source of resistance to the dominant national and monolingual forces. His last book, titled: The Return to Al-Andalus: Disputes Over Sephardic Culture and Identity Between Arabic and Hebrew, was published by Magnes Press in 2020. The English edition of Evri's book, titled The Return to Sepharad and the Erasure of al-Andalus, is scheduled for publication by Indiana University Press in 2026.