Israeli radio relegated Mizrahi music to folkloric ghettos while prioritising Western classics

Evidence

In 1952, after the great immigration from Yemen and Iraq had finished, there were about eight hours of western music daily but only fifteen minutes of “musikah mizrahit.” This program was broadcast in a popular time slot, between 8:30 and 8:45 every morning, whereas a special program of Yemenite music was aired at 4 P.M., in the middle of the workday, and on Kol Yisrael’s second program, reserved for educational programming. The Yemenite program was classified under the rubric of folklore and was framed by scholarly commentary by Ashkenazic experts. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 705

Categorization

• XREF: The framing of minority culture as ‘folklore’ requiring expert scholarly commentary parallels the World Fairs/‘human zoos’ dynamic and the Addison-note colonial pattern of the curator framing the native.
• SEED: An essay angle: how the ‘folklore’ label served as an instrument of cultural subordination — the annotator’s frame as a form of control across radio programming, museums, and world fairs.