The high ranking homo in the Holy Land

One of the interesting things about Israel is the amazing diversity of people which exists here. Even though the country is 80% Jewish, there is no prototypical "Israeli". There are immigrants from all over the world, including from Beta Israel in Africa, all of who have come here for vastly different reasons: financial stability, fleeing racial persecution, freedom of religious worship, whim, or Zionism to name a few.

Outside of the Jewish/Arab conflict, this creates huge amounts of conflict just within the Jewish community. There are all kinds of power struggles just to get through daily life, as ideology of Zionist immigrants clashes with the "I just want to live my life"-attitude of Israeli-born seculars and the Orthodoxy is passing laws based on Halacha that affect everyone, Jews, Muslims and Christians alike. Then add in Ashkenazi vs Mizrachi/Sephardi, sabras vs olim, or settlers vs. everyone else, just to name a few, and suddenly the whole Arab/Jewish conflict seems like a small squabble (albeit with bombs).

One of the biggest examples of this odd mixture of contradiction is Ivri Lider, one of Israel's most popular musicians. Openly gay, Lider has been a hit on the charts for the past 10 years, even being voted as the number one male performer of 2000. In a Middle Eastern country dominated by religious law and conflict between two fundamentalist religions, somehow one of their biggest stars is an openly gay man who not only writes and performs his own music but also has written soundtracks for some hugely popular Israeli films which themselves feature significant gay themes, itself an interesting cultural clash. Keep in mind that homosexuality in any of the countries bordering Israel will get you jailed at best and killed at worst; yet another opposite.

But, like any good contradiction, Lider is not without his own. He's no kind of spokesman for gay pride. He opposes the annual March for Pride and Tolerance in Jerusalem and doesn't advocate for gay rights or societal acceptance, despite being very open about his own life and sexuality. He's hugely popular with the army which, though gays can serve openly, is still a bastion of Eastern machismo culture.

Now maybe this isn't so unexpected. Religious people don't listen to popular music and the Muslim population doesn't listen to Hebrew radio, leaving the live-and-let-live secular population in control of popular culture. Still, even if that's true, it means the face of pop culture in Israel is different than many of the people who live there.

What an interesting contradiction...


Below, the two singles off Lider's new album "The Steady Rhythm of Body Movements":

עלוף העולם The Champion of the World


רק תבקש Just Ask


And just for fun, his cover of Katie Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" (which they played on the radio incessantly for weeks):