Tel-Chai Nation

This showbiz article tells about singer Odeya, who's into Judaism and wears hot outfits, which is interesting in itself. Though in the early paragraphs, another music specialist is cited who was involved in something tasteless:

The first music videos for Israeli singer Odeya were filmed in Ukraine well before Russia began its onslaught three and a half years ago. It was spring 2019. Odeya, then a newly signed artist with Aroma Music, had just celebrated her 18th birthday. She traveled to Ukraine for the shoot with her mother and music-video director Vadim Mechona.

"I remember wandering around Kyiv trying to find her kosher food," he recalls with a laugh. He also remembers that everything that could go wrong did. The drone operator he hired to give the videos an epic feel struggled to control the contraption, so the shoot in the frozen Ukrainian forest dragged on.

"Spring in Ukraine is close to zero degrees," Mechona laughs, referring to the freezing point in Celsius. "And Odeya was dressed pretty lightly. She was shivering from the cold, practically on the verge of hypothermia. But she handled it like a heroine."

Mechona – which means machine in Hebrew; he was born Kartashov – is also a former member of the Acre-based punk band Shitty City. He has shot music videos for a raft of Israeli pop singers.

This is an unfortunate part in this article - the male interviewee wasn't just member of a punk rock band, he was also member of one using a vulgar name. Which is perhaps what dampens the impact of this showbiz item.

"In those few days in Ukraine, I realized that Odeya wasn't just another pop singer," he says. "You could tell she was looking beyond, that there was real depth there.

"What struck me most was that it was absolutely clear that this girl – at the time a complete unknown without a single song out – was destined to be a star. Something in her energy radiated that. There was never any doubt."

Did she say, "I'm going to be a star"?

"No. But she radiated it – a frequency of confidence and success ... when a person knows how to create their own reality. I'm not even talking about the music, as her music isn't really my cup of tea. But I felt in her energy that frequency of inevitable success. It's a power she projected even when she was still just a girl."

Six years after that trip to Ukraine, Odeya Azoulay at 24 has become one of Israel's biggest pop stars. In early July, she played three sold-out shows at Tel Aviv's Menora Mivtachim Arena, performing to around 30,000 fans, the vast majority of them girls and young women screaming every word to every song.

When I told the promoter, Guy Dan, that I had never heard such a loud, ecstatic roar, he laughed. "Which show were you at? The one on Saturday night?" he asked.

"You should know, the screaming was even louder at the Thursday show. She's the guru of this generation. These girls look at her the way people once looked at the Beatles."

The three shows sold out the day tickets went on sale a few months ago. "We could have added more dates, but it felt right to stop at three," says Michal Weissberg, managing director at Aroma Music. "Better to leave them wanting more."

With over 700,000 monthly listeners, Odeya is now the second-most-streamed Israeli pop star on Spotify Israel, trailing only Omer Adam.

In mid-July, two of her singles, "Papi" and "Alice," ranked among the platform's five most streamed tracks. Leading the chart was another Hebrew-language song, "Queen of the Generation," which Odeya wrote for Adam and sounds very much like one of her own.

Five more Odeya hits made it into Spotify Israel's top 30. On YouTube, "Papi" and "Alice" were the most-watched Israeli songs of the week. But actually, the real story is that Odeya's meteoric rise is a product of her strength as a creator.

She's almost certainly the most interesting and influential Israeli pop artist of recent years, the one who best embodies the new generation of Israelis and the changes society is undergoing.

"I think she's by far the most interesting young musician in Israel today," says director Tom Nesher. "That's true in every way – as a cultural phenomenon, but also when it comes to the songs themselves. I think they're excellent."

Nesher, the director of the film "Come Closer," chose Odeya to perform "Hitragut" ("Relaxation"), which plays during the closing credits. The song is linked to Nesher's loss of her younger brother, Ari, who was run over by a car and killed when he was 17.

"This song was sung at my brother's funeral by the choir at the high school where he and I studied," Nesher says. "I knew that this was how the film would end. Choosing the singer to perform the song was as important to me as choosing the lead actress. I wanted someone who would reflect the spirit of the film. "The song is old and quiet, but the film is very young, provocative and edgy. I wanted someone who embodies that. ... Odeya has all those qualities: someone very intelligent but someone who also knows how to speak raw and tap into primal places inside herself."

"She's someone exposed and sensitive, yet also sharp; someone with a very free and wild spirit, unpretentious but full of faith and thoughtfulness, very deliberate and in control."

A good summary of what Odeya is made of.

"I adore her. I'm truly a fan. People who look at her from the outside, without really listening, might lump her with a string of manufactured artists. But no one is manufacturing her. She's a force of her own making. She's entirely responsible for her success."

In that "string of manufactured artists," many are women. To be sure, a few successful Israeli pop singers write their own songs, like Jasmin Moallem and Yuval Dayan, but they're exceptions.

In the world of blockbuster pop that packs arenas and parks, Odeya is unique: She's the only woman who is both a superstar and a true singer-songwriter. Noa Kirel, Eden Ben Zaken, Nasreen Kadri, Agam Buhbut and Sarit Hadad may occasionally contribute to the writing, but they aren't singer-songwriters in the full sense.

By contrast, plenty of male singer-songwriters fill stadiums; Peer Tasi, Osher Cohen and Eden Hason are just three.

In that sense there's a huge difference between Israeli pop and world pop, which is dominated by singer-songwriters: Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Charli XCX, Olivia Rodrigo, SZA, Billie Eilish. Odeya might be helping Israel close the gap with the rest of the world. She's giving the female Israeli pop star rare meaning and depth.

On the subject of Swift, she's given her backing to anti-Israel causes, so it's decidedly a shame if she's considered a big deal.

"Today I drove my daughter, who's 15 and a half, and we talked about Odeya," says sociologist and gender studies scholar Neta Arnon Shoshani. "We compared her to Noa Kirel, and Noa Kirel suffers a knockout. [Kirel] was the singer most admired by her and her friends when they were 10 to 12, and compared to Odeya she looks manufactured."

One of Odeya's most popular songs is "Intellectuars," which was released in the summer of 2022. Ars is a derogatory term for a lower-class Israeli. The song has an electronic beat courtesy of the Triangle production company, with a dense flow bordering on rap and a unique diction that has become Odeya's trademark.

She sings: "I'm in half a relationship and I have half a job / And I'm half joyful and half ungrateful / And you're half in love with me, half in love with yourself / Writing me half songs, cramping my style."

"This experience of being two things at once is something that older people don't understand about Odeya and about this generation in general," says journalist Elad Bar-Noy. "This generation isn't in between, it's both. Nothing comes at the expense of the other. She's a child of faith [the name of her latest album] who observes Shabbat and visits the tombs of the righteous, and she wears revealing clothes and talks freely about sex.

"For Odeya and this entire generation that's totally okay. For anyone who comes from a Mizrahi home, it's a little easier to see that, but it's mainly a generational issue," Bar-Noy says, referring to Jews with roots in North Africa and the Middle East. "We're lots of things; we can be one thing one day and another thing another day. Musically as well."

Well let me say that sexy attire is entirely compatible with Judaism, Orthodox or otherwise. Mainly because it's not the worst thing that could happen when you have a whole world that's being horrifyingly consumed by barbarism like the Islamofascism that led to October 7, 2023. One of the most angering things about the past 2 decades and more is that you had all these ultra-Orthodox acting hysterical about how women dress and whether they sing, and if they sit at the front of a bus or next to Haredis, and stuff like that took away vital attention that could've been reserved for combatting Islamic terrorism. After Oct. 7, will that change? We can only hope so, but that's if anybody on the right in particular is willing to be vigilant in defending women's dignity. So, let's be clear. If there's anything in this article from a paper like Haaretz that can be declared acceptable, it's whether a woman wants to dress sexy. And any religiously observant who think otherwise would do well to consider the gauntlet they're running of taking the same position as left-wing feminists who espouse body-shaming tactics. Not to mention how sex-negative positions only amount to hysteria, and that's unspeakably repellent, and takes vital attention away from the issue of savagery of the sort Islamofascism wallows in. The Orthodox community, Haredi or otherwise, would do well to apologize for any and all trouble they caused or led to for otherwise innocent women. What matters is personality and how you make use of sexuality, that's all.

Arnon Shoshani agrees with Bar-Noy and mentions "glocalization," a combination of globalization and local – "on the one hand going global and on the other returning to the local and to conservatism," Arnon Shoshani says.

"I think that Odeya is standing at the moment where the two roads intersect. The revolution taking place is the conservative revolution, and it contains lots of things that seem contradictory, but in the lives of our teenage girls everything comes together and they don't know what to do with this whole mess. There's technology with religion and tradition. There's the Mizrahi identity in the country's outskirts and the accessibility of the world."

Even if for the social media generation the experience of "both things at once" is natural, there's still a lot of confusion in the contradictions in Odeya's songs and image. "She's among the only female singers I've worked with in whom there's more than meets the eye," says Ron Biton, who has written huge hits for popular Israeli singers.

"You try to understand who she is and what she is and you can't. Even when you're sitting with her in the studio you don't know if she's a child of God or of having fun, partying and getting drunk."

She's both things at once, isn't she?

"Yes. But something mysterious remains here, and I think that the audience fell in love with her for that reason too. I was at one of her shows at the Menora Mivtachim Arena. Before she sang 'Ben Adam' ['A Man,' based on a biblical passage and a liturgical poem], they brought a coat to the stage so she wouldn't be in a revealing outfit. And then she immediately switched to the least faith-related song possible.

"There's always this dissonance between 'I'm the religious girl you all love' and 'I'm a totally wild girl.' I don't remember anybody who played around like that between the two worlds. She thrills people with this – really obsessive admiration."

One of the intriguing questions about Odeya is the extent her revealing songs reflect her soul and experiences. It's clear that there isn't a complete overlap. When I mentioned to Michal Weissberg of Aroma Music the gallons of alcohol spilled in Odeya's songs, she laughed and said, "What alcohol? She doesn't know how to drink.

"There's something confusing about her. I love that. On the one hand, she's a good girl, a homebody, she needs her quiet, her privacy. On the other hand, she wears revealing clothes, but at the same time she visits the tombs of the righteous. Nobody tells her what to do. That's her way, and nobody will undermine her."

Hey, of course it's okay to wear hot clothes, assuming leftist Haaretz would rather everybody think all religious people literally believe it's not. Indeed, the Orthodox Judaist community in particular would do well to make sure sex-negativity is obliterated from how they run their lives, if it helps foil whatever Haaretz is trying to make all believe.

"What About You, Father" is a song that can be embarrassing due to its childlike naivete. Odeya turns to Father/God, calls him "My Beloved" and asks whether he needs the embrace of this song.

Arnon Shoshani connects this to traditionalism, but that word could be misleading. Odeya – who grew up in a religious home, attended a secular school for a while and then returned and got closer to religion – was interviewed about a year ago on the Israeli TV channel Relevant.

The interviewer, Yasmin Ishbi, told her: "I think most Israelis are somewhere on the scale of traditionalism, and you in some way normalize that."

Odeya wouldn't have it. "I didn't have any desire to normalize this thing; the opposite, even," she replied. "I actually had a desire to become stronger [religiously], to go in that direction. But what can I do if I'm not 100 percent there?"

That's an important point. Odeya's traditionalism isn't the ideal of compromise between religiosity and secularism. The ideal is totally religious. The goal is to become stronger, but to do it in the conflict between faith and sin, the steamy drama sizzling beneath most of her songs. Odeya still can't rid herself of sin and devote herself entirely to pure faith. Maybe it will happen one day. Maybe not.

Whatever the case, in that sense her work is very political. It shapes the consciousness, even if she isn't aware of that, or doesn't admit it.

When radio host Yaron Ilan asked her whether young artists should express political opinions, she said, "If a person has an opinion and is devoted and sure of himself on that and really understands it, then why not? Me, I have zero understanding."

Something to consider: anybody who supports right-wing politics shouldn't have to be ashamed or unable to say so. But, neither should they act as apologists for sex-negativity, which runs the gauntlet of mirroring what left-wing feminists can support. As far as I'm concerned, if Odeya wants to wear hot outfits, that's fine. I just hope she knows better than to support the kind of far-left ideologies Haaretz does. And if she refrains from embracing the abominations they do, that's a good thing, and will give sex-positivity a good name.

Labels: dhimmitude, islam, Israel, jihad, Judaism, misogyny, Moonbattery, sexual violence, showbiz, terrorism