Is it a dance like the polka? Is it a thing you eat? There are interviewees in the 2012 documentary Hava Nagila (The Movie) who do not know exactly what the hymn to the joy of the Jewish people is. They would immediately recognize it if they felt it because it is an integral part of western pop culture. He accompanies the scenes to the Mitzvah bar and weddings in the films, with the spouses who dance sitting on chairs held up by the guests. It was a hit for Harry Belafonte. The two Wedding Crashers Owen Wilson and wins Vaughn dancing happily with an old man with Kippah.
Hava Nagila (let's rejoice) is not just a party song. He expresses in music and words the joy for the journey of the Jews in their history and identity. Strengthens the link with the past. It is the soundtrack of aspiration to the happiness of a people who have always been persecuted. The joyful character derives from the circumstance in which he was composed of the musician Abraham Zvi Idelsohn whose purpose, at the beginning of the last century, was to create a Jewish music that was renovated to an identity of the pre-diaspora people and that was able to accompany the desire of the Jews scattered throughout the world to find a house in the ancient homeland.
Presented for the first time in 1918, Hava Nagila It was written as a celebration of the Balfour declaration of 1917 in which the British government committed itself to creating a “national home” for the Jewish people in Palestine. According to some, on the other hand, it may have been written on the occasion of the control of Jerusalem and Palestine by General Allenby at the end of the First World War or alternatively for the laying in June 1918 of the first stone of the Jewish University of Jerusalem. As for music, it is the transcription of Melody Chassid of Ukrainian origin that was in the prayer without words (the song was at the center of a legal dispute on the paternity of the text claimed by the descendants of Moshe Nathanson, a student of Idelsohn). He has something sacred and profane, politician and private. It is associated with Zionism, but also with pure and simple fun. It is the music of a people who celebrate their joy and history. As Josh Kun of the University of Southern California says in the documentary, it is the national anthem of Jewishness.
Despite being deeply rooted in the history and culture of the Jews, it has become a universal song. As Belafonte said, “there is no better piece than one who says” let's rejoice “to close an evening. Hava Nagila He tells us who we should be and what should aspire as peoples: love, joy, peace ». Lena Horne took music and transformed it into a hymn to civil rights entitled Now! In which he says that “we should all be brothers, people should love each other”. It has become a hymn in America baseball stadiums and in Europe it has been intoned by fans of Ajax and Tottenham.
Son of immigrants from Lebanon and Poland, the king of the surf guitar Dick Dale transformed it into a rowdy instrumental piece. Bob Dylan engraved it in '63 in an almost parodic version by presenting it as “a foreign song that I learned in Utah”. Once Pete Townshend said that at the hearing to enter the WHO, at the time Detours, Roger Daltrey asked him “you know playing Hava Nagila? » “Yes”. “So you're inside. See you on Tuesday evening ». Parody Hava-Nice Christmas It ended up in the Simpsons and no, Christmas is not exactly a Jewish party.
For many Italians, a song that makes color in the films in which there is a Jewish wedding if the Patagarri had not played it at the May 1st concert in Piazza San Giovanni and accompanied by the slogans launched by the singer Francesco Parazzoli and repeated by the public “Free Free Palestine” and “Palestine Libera” would remain. Victor Fadlun, president of the Jewish community of Rome, reacted by writing that «to appropriate our culture, of the melodies most expensive to us, to invoke our destruction, is ignoble. There is something really left, macabre, in the performance of the patagarri. The greatest our hates in history are those who have exploited our culture and mentality ». For Fadlin, the “Palestine Libera” cry is “the slogan of the squares that invoke the cancellation of Israel” and is therefore “an insult and unacceptable violence”.
On the Sheet Today the journalist David Parenzo writes a “letter to patagarri” in which he criticizes the idea of ”taking a Jewish song that is intoned in times of celebration and transforming it into a political scream broken against Israel. Superficiality becomes political gesture, pressappochism is masked with revolution ». And again: “It would have been nice to hear the” Patagarri “remember the absolute lack of rights in the Gaza Strip, so much so that every day – before 7 October Palestinian workers went to work in Israel where instead there are unions and rights. The work deserves respect and something more than some compliant applause to the new mainstream called Patagarri ».
Cited by ReformistNoemi di Segni, president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, said he was astonished for what happened in Rome. “To acclaim the liberation of Palestine (not of the Palestinians), any reference to the real Middle Eastern context and the suffocating presence of Hamas is evaded. (…). A Jewish song, which has the meaning of being together, has been specially distorted with the effect of creating divisions and generating anti -Semitic hatred instead of putting every effort for coexistence among peoples in the field, such as Jewish communities in Italy try to do in every anniversary “. Someone has even ventured an analogy: it is as if it were used Hello beautiful to enhance fascism. It's not true, but makes the climate.
It was a case of appropriation studied, wanted, rational, not an accident or an unconscious act. As the Patagarri explained in a message on Instagram, “we have played a song of the Jewish tradition, which has long been part of our repertoire and part of it because we have never been against one population or another. But we felt the need to deprive her of the original text, which speaks of the joy of being together, to underline that for too long, in the Middle East, that joy no longer exists “.
It seems that in Milan at the end of March they added a more explicit “Israel Boia”. On Instagram, on the other hand, they are careful not to exceed the line that separates the criticism of the work of the Netanyahu government from the idea that the state of Israel should be canceled, which happens with overtime the same frequency with which it boils as anti -Semitic any legitimate criticism of the massacres of the Israeli government. “Let's get along then,” the Patagarri write “on what are the right words to ask that children no longer die, that hospitals are no longer bombarded, without being accused of invoking the destruction of the Israeli people, without ending up in this rhetorical trap of anti -Semitism, accused through unbearable sophisms, while people continue to die”.
The complaints are also legitimate for the symbolic character of Hava Nagila. In music in general, there is nothing well -to -be of sacred or untouchable, but that music in particular is rooted in the imagination of the Jewish people and linked to national aspirations threatened by organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah. But it is precisely what they wanted to do patagarri by taking this song identity and full of life, a hymn to abandon themselves to the happiness of being part of a community. Let's put it this way: they did i Wedding Crashers Not to eat for free and have sex like Wilson and Vaughn, but to say that there is no joy if it is not shared, that the life of one cannot mean the death of another.
In the column of the letters of the Sheet Today, the director Claudio Cerasa invites Patagarri to speak perhaps in a next concert by David Collier, the British journalist targeted to have “unmasked the link between a BBC documentary on Gaza and Hamas”. In other words: “We should ask the patagarri why to speak badly of Israel allows you to end up on the front page and why talking badly of Hamas makes you risk your life”. Yesterday Jonathan Peled, Israeli ambassador in Italy, wrote on X who “profoundly disturbs the Jewish heritage exploited in a Rai national transmission, to spread the slogans used by those who denote the right of Israel to exist. If the patagarri really sought justice, the slogan “Palestine Libera” should have ended with “da Hamas” ». The popular song, however, is a halotive means of expression and pop music does not know equanimity. Only a few intellectual musicians wanted and managed to music the “but also”.
It happens more and more rarely in Italy that a song lifters do not say a debate, but at least a small cultural, political, historical discussion. Not the controversies for a “genocide” called on TV or for a speech made by the stage: a song, its meaning, its history. However, the pen, beyond the political data and the humanitarian considerations, the clash that has been consumed on Hava Nagila It is good news for those who think that music is not only entertainment, but also ideas, society, life. Let's rejoice.
