Nostalgia Sunday – Eurovision and A-ba-ni-bi’s lasting legacy

May 10, 2009 - 12:40 AM by Rachel Neiman · 3 Comments
Filed under: General, Israeliness, Life, Music, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture 

The 53rd annual Eurovision song contest takes place this week! Oh, joy! And if you live under a rock, or in a country where they have better things to do, and don’t know about this annual Europe-wide musical extravaganza, here is a brief explanation.eurovision_logo_1

This year, Israel will be represented by singers Noa and Mira Awad, and while we wish the duo well, their entry, a message song called “There must be a better way”, isn’t the sort of light fare that has put Israel up top in years gone by.

Israel won Eurovision for the first time in 1977, with the entry A-ba-ni-bi, sung by Izhar Cohen and Apha-beta. It was a great moment in Israeli pop culture history, when we proved to the world we could be a nation like any other, crafting light, catchy Europop ditties, wearing tight outfits and dancing to the disco beat. (When Israel won Eurovision again the following year, national euphoria hit heights not seen since the Six Day War).

Over the years, it transpires, A-ba-ni-bi has developed a following, particularly among those nations whose agenda includes proving to the world they could be a nation like any other, crafting light, catchy Europop ditties, wearing tight outfits and dancing to the disco beat. Here we present a variety of renditions, starting with a camp version in Thai:

Chinese Mandarin:

Iceland’s 2008 Eurovision Song Contest entrants Euroband:

Netherlands:

A trance version in Spanish:

And of course, the good old original:

Izhar Cohen is still around, still performing and even appeared in a commercial for the Israel Postal Service. For more versions of A-ba-ni-bi, check out NME and the EuroCovers blog. And check out the official Eurovision YouTube site for more videos, past and present.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nostalgia Sunday – Yemenite Embroidery

February 15, 2009 - 10:14 PM by Rachel Neiman · 2 Comments
Filed under: Art, General, History and Culture, Nostalgia Sunday, Profiles, design 

Back in the early Sixties, most kids’ mothers wore frilly cocktail aprons to entertain. Not my Israeli mother. Hers looked like this.

img_5094

And her miniskirts and pantsuits looked like this.

mini_pantsuit

My mother, a singer of international folksongs, had a great collection of gowns. Many were created at Esther Zeitz, a Jerusalem house of fashion that employed a team of Yemenite seamstresses that sat, day in and day out, stitching threads of silver and gold onto splendid garments. Who needed jewels when you had something like this bedecking your neck?

shirt_neck_detail

Wearing Yemenite embroidery was very cool among Israeli women who came of age during the 1940s and 50s. This dress was made for my mother when she was a teenager during the 1948 War of Independence.

mommy40s

In the Sixties, after the 1967 war and the reunification of Jerusalem, she combed the Old City looking for a velvet jacket with Bedouin embroidery to wear over a black velvet gown. She found one, too.

img_5079

In the early Seventies, she scored some Bedouin-style embroidered garments from the Arab Women’s Union of Bethlehem, an embroidery cooperative.

img_4721

But my favorites will always be the Esther Zeitz outfits. As I recall it, Zeitz – whom I remember as a large woman with swollen arms – closed down in the Eighties when she became too ill to manage. It would be nice to find out more about what happened to the workshop, which was located at the junction of Ben Yehuda and Bezalel streets – I think it is a hairdressers’ today.

My sisters and I wore many of these garments during the Go-Go Eighties. Today, however, they are fragile – the polyester fabric is forever but not the cotton threads that hold down the metallic threads. We are not sure what will happen to this collection, and so decided to document the clothes that, for us, are part of a happy memory.

rachel_white_dress

Tags: , , , , , , ,

 

© 2009 ISRAELITY | Site by illuminea | Sitemap