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music; the bands Astral Projection and Infected Mushroom have become globally recognized
in this genre.
Music has also come to play a new role in Israel as a sort of secular equivalent of prayer.
Israeli music is given a special place in Memorial Day commemorations, on holidays, and in
various types of ceremonies. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's peace rally in Tel Aviv in 1995 is
a prominent example. His last action before leaving the stage was to sing a song; and after he
was assassinated, young people began to mourn by singing songs.
THEATER
Theater was virtually unknown among Jews until the late nineteenth century. Yet in its Israeli
incarnation, various genres are blended to create a distinctive national theatrical style. The
HaBima Theater, founded in Moscow in 1917, marked the beginnings of Israeli theater. This
Hebrew-speaking company was under the leadership of the Russian director Constantin Sta-
nislavski, perhaps the single most infl uential theorist on acting in the modern Western world.
Its famous actress Hanna Robina (1892 -1980) went on to became the “fi rst lady” of Hebrew
theater. The theater was established to further the national revival of the Jewish people while
simultaneously setting a high artistic standard in the performance of ideological plays. In 1931
the entire company immigrated to the Land of Israel, settled in Tel Aviv, and became the na-
tional theater of Israel.
Plays written during the fi rst years of statehood mirrored contemporary events and por-
trayed a composite of stories of heroic victory. Because they tended to align with the core val-
ues of the state and the establishment, they rarely included Arab characters or open criticism.
In fact, they criticized deviations from this standard. The most prominent playwrights were
Moshe Shamir ( He Walked Through the Fields , 1947), Yigal Mosinzon ( On the Negev , 1949),
Nathan Shaham ( They'll Arrive Tomorrow , 1949), Nissim Aloni ( Most Cruel the King , 1954),
Aharon Megged ( Hedva and I , 1954), and Ephraim Kishon ( His Name Precedes Him , 1953).
Most of these pioneers were in the same age group, shared the same background, and em-
ployed similar writing styles. Many eventually shifted to prose and left theater altogether. Only
Nissim Aloni remained in the of theater. His most extraordinary play was his fi rst, Most Cruel
the King , in which he makes use of perspectives and historical analogies to relate to the present.
Experimental Theater
Theater in the 1960s was characterized by experimentation and adaption of infl uences from
Europe and the United States. Among the strongest of these infl uences was the work of the
German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht; other infl uential writers were Pirandello, Samuel
Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean Genet. Their work had a tremendous infl uence on the writ-
ings of four prominent playwrights who effectively created the new Israeli drama and theater:
Nissim Aloni, Nathan Alterman, Yosef Bar-Yosef, and Hanoch Levin, with Aloni and Levin the
most prominent among them.
Aloni's most important work, The King's New Clothes (fi rst produced at HaBima in 1961),
opened a new chapter in the evolution of Israeli drama. Aloni's plays were mostly anchored in
 
 
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