Steve & Eydie and the Sounds of Zionism
Sometimes I come across videos on YouTube that I simply can’t resist sharing with you all here.
Today, I present Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gorme singing the hits of Israel:
I wish I had grown up in a time when this is what Zionism sounded like. I wonder if we’ll achieve a time when Zionism can once again sound like this. May it come speedily and in our time.
I grew up in Israel when this stuff was the norm. Ugh. What an American might miss is how this was the sound track for a ‘mobilized’ society that enforced conformity and where ‘culture’ was what a fairly small elite said it was.
Back in 4th grade, I remember the local scouts had an perfectly typical sing-a-long event. The concrete basketball court was lined with benches and risers, a sheet with a film projector was mounted at one end, and we wanted movies of lyrics and graphics will singing these Noami Shemer-ish songs. All dressed in military style uniforms. Because the older chanichim were modeling for us that ‘this is what you do.’
Only…. it’s not really what you do of your own free will, no more than anyone would submit to a Lawrence Welk show unless they are either old or can’t change the channel. Unless of course, you are like this pro-Putin youth militia types, turning your loyalty, patriotism and reverence for the form and the content of the past into a kind of cult.
I think what I miss about the Israel of those days is a kind of innocence, a feeling that everyone you might encounter was on some fundamental level, a friendly. It was a lie of course, but a pleasant fantasy.
Their son wrote the scores to the High School Musical movies. More people will hear that than the total output of the talentless nobodies (sorry, edgy alternative world music, etc, etc) this site promotes.
You know who’s even more famous than that? HITLER
BZ – way to invoke Godwin’s law! Zing! All I can say is, no one expects the SPANISH INQUISITION!
I feel a certain spiritual kinship to David Lawrence since his first and last names are my first and middle names.
However, since he wrote the underscoring to HSM and not any of the songs, I think it’s safe to say that while more people may hear his music than many of the other musicians we have written about here, fewer are likely to have been touched by it in any appreciable way. And I say that with absolutely no disrespect to the fine profession of film scoring.
Is this some sort of apology?
boxthorn you are such a trollllllllll! Seriously, google that handle and all you come up with are snarky comments on progressive Jewish blogs. $100 for anyone who can out this fokker.
Ah, dlevy… it’s a surprise that Zionism ever caught on with the children of the Steve and Eydie generation- who will forever (and ever) associate Zionism with folk-dancing men in tight white pants, cousins who thought they were the beytzim in dorky 2-colored kibbutznik bucket hats and grandmothers who stuffed suitcases with toilet paper and Levis when they traveled to the holy land (you could pretty much bargain for anything with a pair of boot cut 32X32s). One popular form of torture around my house was אילן ואילנית (which my parents’ friends pronounced “Ellen and Ellaneet” for some bizarre reason…) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYYo00JbCks
My dad also had a stack of albums by the Arbah Kolot, apparently the Kingston Trio of Israel (but one better, he used to say). Ha. Ha.