A Religious Musical in Secular Tel Aviv

This past Sukkot, a crowd of about 500 children, parents, and grandparents gathered in the Recanati Theater in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The audience was made up of affluent and mostly secular residents of north Tel Aviv and its suburbs—stylishly dressed, sipping lattes and organic juice sold at the trendy coffee shop nearby. To an outside observer, the scene would be almost indistinguishable from a family-oriented play or concert in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The content, however, was distinctly Israeli: a jukebox musical called Aluf ha-Olam (literally, “Champion of the World”), based on the songs of the religious Zionist singer Hanan Ben-Ari, written and performed by Israel’s most prestigious children’s dramatic company, the Orna Porat Theater. Tickets for Aluf ha-Olam are in high demand and sell out quickly, so I booked seats for me and my children several months in advance. One could sense from the anticipation in the theater that many others had done the same.

Hanan Ben-Ari is one of Israel’s best-known musical performers, albeit without the international break-through appeal of peers like the religious music sensation Ishai Ribo. His strength is in his songwriting; catchy tunes, drawn from eclectic influences, and coherent, powerful lyrics that comment on personal, often spiritual, struggles. He is an unabashed product of the religious Zionist community, and a wholesome father of six who always sports a knit kippah. Raised in the settlement of Karnei Shomron, he is the nephew of the former Knesset member Michael Ben-Ari, who co-founded the political party Otzma Yehudit, now led by Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Hanan Ben-Ari’s songs pay frequent homage to his Sephardi heritage, though in his music he describes himself more specifically as being of Persian, Afghan, and Hungarian descent. In a song called “Balance” he sings: “of all the diasporas whence I came/ You could make a continent.” His 2015 breakout hit “Strawberries,” which simultaneously laments and celebrates the difficulties of living in modern Israel, presents a mash-up of Mizraḥi beats and the classic Hebrew folk song “Thank You” by Uzi Hittman. A recent hit, “Hanania,” is a tribute to his Afghan grandfather, a pious Jew who wears an outdated suit, only uses cash, always has liturgical poems (piyyutim) on his tongue, and in his very being is “more Zionist than Ben-Gurion.”