Israeli radio officials treated Mizrahi voices as unlearned and unworthy of general broadcasts.

Evidence

These experts did not necessarily look upon their subject matter in a favorable light. In 1949, two music teachers presented broadcast lectures on what was called “the problem of oriental music”; both considered the oriental voice to be “unlearned” and “natural.” One of the teachers, seeking to distinguish his own lectures from those of his colleague, wrote “Mrs. Barnai condemns Oriental music as a vocal phenomenon without any reservation, while I speak only of the dangers bound up with the use of this type of music by ‘distortion of the natural timbre’ of the performer.” This line of thinking was shared by Yehoyakhin Stochovsky of the Radio Council. At a meeting in 1952 he complained that there were too many Yemenite singers on the popular daily listeners’ request program. They sing “naturally,” he said, without artistic training. He concluded: “There are already special broadcasts for Yemenite immigrants. Isn’t that enough?” — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 706

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Orientalism generally — the coding of non-Western cultural forms as ‘natural’ rather than ‘artistic’ echoes Edward Said’s framework and the same dynamic in Complaints About Immodesty where non-Western dress reads as primitive.