‘For you were strangers’: Jewish ritual, black musics, and commemorative politics in Tel Aviv’s Refugee Seder

ABSTRACT

Each Passover since 2009, hundreds of East African asylum seekers and Israeli activists have gathered for ‘Refugee Seder’, a public event to support Sudanese and Eritrean communities in Israel. Featuring a ceremonial seder meal, storytelling, speeches, and a dance party, Refugee Seder draws on age-old Jewish rituals and contemporary global black pop musics to symbolize Africans as members of the Israeli national collective. This article explores Refugee Seder’s modified commemorative practices, which engage dual narratives of Jewish nationalism and cultural cosmopolitanism. I show how seder rituals enable African participants to temporarily embody a Jewish spiritual identity, and how black pop musics help publicly reframe Africans’ ‘blackness’ as a cultural asset instead of a political liability. Ultimately, I argue that Refugee Seder distills larger ideologies of identity and belonging that are deeply rooted in Israeli collective consciousness, and which shape the trajectories of ‘refugee issue’ politics and policy-making.

KEYWORDS:

• Israel
• refugees
• black music
• ritual
• cosmopolitanism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Afropop is a genre category in transnational commercial music markets that encompasses a wide variety of popular musics from across the African continent. The term was popularized in English-speaking American and European markets in part through the National Public Radio program Afropop Worldwide, which has aired in different formats since 1988. Although ‘Afropop’ can refer to linguistically and stylistically diverse African musics, the term is closely aligned with ‘world music’ industry esthetics of acoustic and analog instrumentation, and, as such, it does not necessarily include contemporary African hip-hop or electronic dance musics. For further discussion of Afropop and the world music industry, see Taylor (1997), Feld (2000), and Murphy (2007).

2 ‘Refugee Seders’ take place in many different locations around the world, especially in American and European cities with large Jewish communities (HIAS.org, truah.org). Other types of modified seders are also commonplace within Diaspora Jewish communities, from queer and feminist seders to ecumenical seders and socialist seders, which focus Passover’s themes of oppression and freedom on specific social causes or communities.

3 After the Israeli government tightened restrictions on African refugees’ freedom of movement in June of 2011, tensions came to a head between refugee and Israeli communities in south Tel Aviv, and remained high through the following year. The Times of Israel and other newspapers reported several anti-refugee incidents in May of 2012: an Israeli ‘mob’ vandalized African shops near Levinsky Park, and anti-refugee activists were suspected in the firebombing of a refugee housing complex and kindergarten facility (Times of Israel, 24 May 2012).