“Shir ha-Freha”: The Stereotype of the Mizrahi Woman
Ofra Haza
Assi Dayan
1980
Credits
In 1979, Assi Dayan, the son of Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan, directed a film called Schlager (“The Hit”), which included a song he wrote, performed by a young Ofra Haza: “Shir ha-Freha.” Haza had been born to a Yemenite family in the poor, immigrant neighborhood of Ha-Tikva. When Dayan had her sing “Shir ha-Freha,” she was already a rising pop star, and her fame only increased. She represented Israel at Eurovision; recorded songs with Paula Abdul and Iggy Pop; and played and sang in the Dreamworks film The Prince of Egypt. She was versatile in her music, and her international breakout album, Yemenite Songs, brought traditional Yemenite music to a wide audience. Despite these successes, “Shir ha-Freha,” a song that stereotypes Mizrahi women, continued to be associated with her (as Tsabari explains in her essay).
Listening to the song “Shir ha-Freha,” and reading the lyrics in English, do you think this piece of art reinforces Mizrahi stereotypes or challenges them?
What do you make of the song’s ending? Why does the narrator shift her current life of lipstick and fun to a future in a housing project with air pollution?
Mizrahi music has become very popular in Israel. Should “Shir ha-Freha” be played on the radio today? Should it come with a content warning?
Creator Bio
Ofra Haza
Ofra Haza was born in the Hatikvah area of Tel Aviv, the youngest of eight children, to a poor Yemenite immigrant family. She joined the Hatikvah Theater group at the age of thirteen and began singing Israeli pop music, winning the prize for “Female Singer of the Year” four years in a row and eventually representing Israel in the 1983 Eurovision song contest. But it was her album of Yemenite piyyutim and street songs (Yemenite Songs, or Fifty Gates of Wisdom), a tribute to her family, that brought Haza international fame. One of the songs on the album (Im nin’alu), based on a seventeenth-century piyyut by Shalom Shabazi, was sampled in a popular hip hop song, propelling the song itself to hit status. In the 1990s, Haza’s international career was flourishing. In 1997, she married an Israeli businessman, Doron Ashkenazi, and left her long-time manager, Bezalel Aloni. After voicing the character of Yocheved in the Disney film The Prince of Egypt, and singing the opening song “Deliver Me,” Haza was beginning to write her own compositions. Tragically and suddenly, she died of pneumonia, a complication of AIDS, having apparently been HIV-positive for years.