Expressive forms of culture offer a look into changing social phenomena that have not yet crystallised into clear patterns or accepted categories. Accepting the view that music is embedded in the wider culture system, we use a particular form of it – popular music – as a means of investigating class and ethnicity in Israeli society. At the same time we attempt to deepen the understanding of the place music plays in society, and of societal influences on music.

The Americanisation of British popular culture has been the subject of intensive study and debate. Most of this, however, has had a national focus. It is the purpose of this article to examine aspects of a popular culture at a local level in order to discover the extent to which people were, or felt themselves to be, dominated by America. The history of popular culture is the history of the little people, how they passed their time and recreated themselves. Discoveries made here should cast illumination on the more global claims made by social historians.

In the late thirties, the syncopated rhythms of American jazz swept through Europe, an event encouraged by both the US record industry and Hollywood. In Germany, Fascist resistance to jazz culminated in the imposition of a ban by the Reich Chamber of Music on ‘jazzified, judified dance music’, a convenient way of dealing with American competition. Nevertheless Gene Krupa and Teddy Wilson were still entered in Brunswick's German catalogue for 1939, and German bands continued to swing (on radio and records) into the forties. It is not wholly surprising to read of Goebbels and Goering dancing, in uniform, to the swing music of Jack Hylton and his Orchestra at the Berlin Press Ball in 1937. Among the young, however, swing was already beginning to symbolise a resistance to authority and non-cooperation with the Third Reich. Even newspaper articles intended to demonstrate the demoralising and corruptive effects of jazz whetted the appetite. Thus, a Frankfurter Zeitung article on ‘The Jitterbug’ attacked the bandleader Harry James, but also explained the latest swing terms such as ‘jive’ and ‘hep-cat’.

In the last few years, in Britain, one of pop's cycles has turned again and folk has come back into fashion. It can be seen in the success of the Pogues, in the reformation of Fairport Convention, in the revamping of the magazine Folk Roots, in the content of Andy Kershaw's Radio One show, and perhaps most dramatically in the celebration of ‘world music’. The revival of folk entails more than a revival of old names and sounds, it also contains a redefinition of the idea of ‘folk’ itself. This shift takes its clearest form in Folk Roots where the editor, Ian Anderson, displays equal enthusiasm for examples of almost every musical genre, from country to pop to ‘world music’ to traditional folk to soul to ‘roots rock’ (Ry Cooder, The Bhundu Boys, Kathryn Tickell, Paul Simon and the Voix Bulgares are all included). Folk no longer means ‘beards and Fair Isle jumpers’; it includes punk-influenced groups like the Mekons who see folk as an approach in which ‘the ineptitude of the playing becomes stylised and eventually becomes part of the music’ (Hurst 1986, p. 17). The musical eclecticism is linked by an underlying theory of the way good music is identified.

That we identify with those around us, whether in novels, movies, poetry, songs, the news or on the street, is natural. To a certain extent we mirror what we perceive, but we also perceive it in our own ways and make it fit, to a certain extent, our concept of the world. However, we, and the things we communicate, are also moulders. How much we mould and how much we mirror is difficult to discern, and of course problematic in something like objective news reporting.