Galeet Dardashti on Performance, Anthropology, and the “Revolutionary” Revival of Piyyutim

Illustration by Eve Levy

Introduction by Sophie Levy

In April 2019, some friends and I went to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn to attend Jews for Racial and Economic Justice’s first Mimouna celebration. Inside the venue, it was humid and alive with movement and sound— the room was packed with a diverse crowd of people who had come from all over New York to enjoy Moroccan and Iraqi sweets, hear stories of familial remembrance and Muslim-Jewish solidarity, and dance to traditional Mizrahi music and tunes from A-WA’s first album.

A few hours into the night, I stepped aside to get some water and wash my face, and passed by a woman just leaving the corridor after fixing her very curly hair in a mirror. “Is it frizzy? Is it good?” she asked. I said, “It looks great!” and she flashed me a smile, thanking me before quickly heading back into the main area.

My brief and endearing introduction to Galeet only made me all the more excited to hear her sing when she took the stage a few minutes later, introducing a series of Mizrahi piyyutim— or liturgical songs— to the audience before performing them alongside an ensemble complete with tombak drums, a violin, a guitar, and a flute. Rarely had my run-ins with traditional Mizrahi music included pieces that were Iranian in origin, and rarely had I heard them sung in a such powerful voice that reverberated with a rounded sort of clarity throughout the room. 

Almost a year later, just before the pandemic hit in March 2020, Evan and I went to see Galeet’s band, Divahn, perform at Joe’s Pub in NoHo. It wasn’t even one minute into their set before we knew we had to talk to her— and so we did. The conversation we began in the lobby of the Public Theater eventually continued over Zoom, when we met with Galeet to talk about her family’s ties to Iranian and Jewish music, her multifaceted approach to her work as both a scholar and a performer, and her thoughts on the future of music in American Jewish congregations. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Zaman Collective: Hi Galeet, thanks for being here. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how your family factors in to your story?

Galeet Dardashti: I lived in LA from ages 6-13, when my father [Farid Dardashti] was a cantor at Valley Beth Shalom. I remember what it was like back then, but I wasn’t fully integrated in the LA Persian community ever. My mom is not Persian, so my dad didn't see any value in teaching us Persian, and because he went to JTS, he was doing Ashkenazi style cantorial music. It’s not that we didn't have any connection to the community, though; my dad still did some Persian weddings.

My grandfather, Younes Dardashti, was one of the most famous singers of Persian classical music in Iran during the 1950s and 60s, and he was famous specifically for Persian classical music, not Jewish music. Being a cantor is not really a profession in the Middle-Eastern Jewish realm. If you’re good at leading services, then you lead; it was an honor given to men in the community. 

My dad was the first born. He was an amazing singer himself, but he didn't want to touch Persian classical music. He was a teen idol, and he had this weekly show where he would sing international folk songs on Israeli TV during the 1950s. Then he eventually became a cantor.

ZC: How did you come to develop a career in Jewish music both as an anthropologist and as a performer?

GD: I grew up performing with my family. We would do these real potpourri performances where we sang all forms of music— international music, Jewish music. So from a young age I was always very comfortable on stage. On the other hand, I was also a very nerdy student, so I always knew I wanted to combine that nerdiness with my passion for music. 

Because I grew up in an entirely Ashkenazi environment, I wasn’t very in touch with my Persian-ness. But when my grandparents would come visit from Israel, I saw my grandfather sing at weddings and bar mitzvahs, which was beautiful to me— but it was very, very foreign. I went to Israel during my junior year of college, and because my grandparents were living there at the time, I got more of a sense of who they really were, and this got me asking questions about our family history as well as Mizrahim more generally. This broadened my general understanding of Judaism, because nobody spoke about this stuff in the US — not in Hebrew school or in people’s households.

While I was in Israel, I attended the Persian synagogue that my grandparents founded in Rishon LeZion, where I was able to have more experiences with real Persian Jewish religious observance. I felt much more immersed. But in the end, my interest really came through my academic studies, because when I went to grad school at UT Austin, I created the first incarnation of Divahn and started studying Mizrahim more formally. By this point I had performed some cursory “Middle-Eastern” Jewish music, but it wasn’t deep Middle-Eastern music. There were no quarter tones, and it certainly wasn’t Persian. 

It wasn’t until I did my field work in 2003 when I got deeper into Middle-Eastern music and studied Persian music. I was studying these young Mizrahi Jews, and how they were having a cultural revolution in Israel— taking back their pride— way before any of this began in the US. I was documenting this in the early 2000s, but only now in retrospect do I see that this had an impact on my own identity and how I connected with it. I had already started the band Divahn, but my first album was much less… well, Mizrahi, because I didn’t know as much. But over time, it became something I was way more passionate about, both as an academic and as an artist. 

ZC: So your academic work was always parallel to your performance; they were never happening separately.

GD: Oh no, always at the same time. I always asked myself— am I a scholar or a musician? At first it was very clear that I was a scholar; the music was just a fun side thing I was doing in grad school. But then it took off in ways I never could have imagined. People were inviting me to perform all over, and then when I moved to New York, I became very connected to the Jewish music scene there. 

ZC: Would you say the audience for your work was primarily Ashkenazi at that point?

GD: Yes, because that’s just who was interested. I'm a woman, so the Sephardi-Mizrahi synagogues that were Ashkenazified wouldn’t allow women to come and perform— but this wasn’t really a rule that had existed in most Middle-Eastern countries. Historically, there wasn’t any problem having a female performer in most Middle-Eastern Jewish contexts; that happened in the US. So, instead we were being invited to perform all over the world as part of a secular “world music phenomenon.” 

A lot of Jewish communities and congregations were asking us to perform too, but it was like we were this token, exotic thing. As a scholar, I constantly felt the need to remind them of things like, “Please don’t refer to us as Middle-Eastern Magic.” There were not many Mizrahi Americans interested in connecting with or pursuing their identities, so no organizations really reached out to us.

At a certain point, I was getting commissioned to do these artistic projects so often that I had to put my scholarly work on the side. But right now, I feel like I’m very much both a scholar and a musician. I’m working on finally writing a book on Mizrahi piyyutim, but at the same time I just put out an album. 

ZC: For people who might not know, can you explain what a piyyut is? And from a historical standpoint, what distinguishes Mizrahi piyyutim from others?

GD: In the Jewish world, a piyyut is a sacred song. Many prayers are actually piyyutim -  poetic songs that people wrote throughout Jewish history. Different communities fell in love with different piyyutim. You know a million of them - Adon Olam, Yedid Nefesh, Yigdal, Lekha Dodi - these were all written in very different, specific historical periods, but we don’t think about them like that. 

The rich period for the composition of these piyyutim was in Spain during the Golden Age. Then there was another period in the 16th century in Tzfat. The reason why these piyyutim matter in the Mizrahi community is because they play a really, really important role in cultural life, much more so than in Ashkenazi communities, who also had piyyutim, but were not as maintained as in Mizrahi and Sephardi communities.

A lot of what I write about is how these piyyutim have been embraced by the secular world, too. For example, Israeli rock stars composing music are using them, reconnecting to these texts that they didn’t know existed. Many of these rock stars and musicians are Mizrahi, so part of this renaissance is Middle Eastern Jews connecting to their roots. 

This was originally shunned, because Israel was established as a secular state by Ashkenazi socialists. When Mizrahim came to Israel, not only were they shunned for being “like Arabs” who had cultural traditions of the “enemy”, but also because they were, to a much larger extent, more religious— which didn’t jive with the secular nation. For all of these reasons, this Mizrahi piyyut phenomenon is very revolutionary, and I'm writing about why it happened in Israel between the early 2000s and now. 

ZC: You spoke about your involvement with anthropology and performance and how you balance those two parts of your identity, but how do you feel like they inform each other in your work surrounding Jewish and Mizrahi music?

GD: It’s hard for me to say, because it’s the only way I've ever been. But look, it’s exciting. On one hand I can sing Shabehi Yerushalayim, and on the other I have spent time with and interviewed the person who wrote that melody - I know Avihu Medina personally. And so I have stories about the people who have taught me some of these melodies that I’m interested in, so it's a much different kind of relationship with this music than if I were just a performer. 

At the same time, it’s hard when people in the art world throw around words like “Mizrahi,” because as an anthropologist I understand the complexities that surround that word, and I know that it’s a problematic term in some ways, so I always want to stop and unpack it for everyone— but I can’t do that in a performance because I have to be mindful of what it means to be a good performer, trying not to get bogged down. I try to strike a balance; I give my performances a certain layer of depth because of what I know without overwhelming the audience. In the end, what I’m doing at Joe’s Pub is going to be very different from when I’m giving an academic talk. It’s challenging, but it’s an exciting challenge to try to honor this material in both ways. 

ZC: What does it mean to you to carry Mizrahi music with us into the future? Do you feel a tension between preservation / tradition and reinvention?

GD: Had I not been an anthropologist, I might have been more hung up on the preservation of Mizrahi music, but I know that culture is not static. For example, I have been singing the song Yigdal forever. I learned it in my grandparent’s synagogue in Rishon LeZion, so I always thought it was a Persian melody. But then I found out that it wasn’t a Persian melody at all— they had heard it somewhere else, liked it, and so they brought it into their community. Music travels, and people have always been influenced by and borrowed from different communities. So I give that example to highlight the ways I take liberties with the music I perform. 

I don't take issue with songs not being totally “authentic” because I don't believe authenticity really exists. My grandfather grew up singing Umm Kulthum in Iran— he brought in some of the nuances of her singing in his own singing— so I’m ok with borrowing a little bit from Indian music and bringing it into a Sephardic piece; I’m ok with the fact that I may be singing the piyyut Eini Tzofiya, which is a very Syrian piece, and implementing more of a taghrir Persian solo. I feel like people can take liberties with this music, because if you are deep in it, and you can immerse yourself in the history and in the culture and what was before you, then you can absolutely bring this music to different places that represent who you are and where you are now. 

ZC: Recently, something that came up in conversation between us was this notion that Persian nusahim (liturgical rites) were / are “less musical” than other Mizrahi traditions. In Persian synagogues we’ve been to in LA, piyyutim are sung by the congregation much less often than in Ashkenazi or Sephardi ones, which might be part of the reason some Persians opt for the latter two. We wanted to know if you would refute this idea that traditional Persian nusah is “less musical,” or, if you don't disagree, do you think there’s a way to incorporate piyyutim into Persian services without sacrificing tradition?

GD: Hmm. I don’t want to generalize, because Shirazi nusah is different from Tehrani which is different from Esfahani, but in general, yes— there aren’t as many singable moments in Persian services, which might explain why my grandparents incorporated melodies like Yigdal, or Lecha Dodi. It’s not that the tradition is not musical— it's that things are chanted more than sung.

The reality of the situation is that people are already leaving Persian synagogues and going to more predominantly Ashkenazi synagogues. I think it would be very unlikely that you’d be able to get these traditional Persian synagogues to incorporate music by saying, “Hey, let’s jazz this place up!”

This takes me back to what I was saying before, about how culture constantly changes rather than being static. Though there are probably still some exclusively Persian synagogues, overall, Jewish communities in the US are actually becoming global communities. But because the majority of Jews in the US are Ashkenazi, they forget that they have so many Sephardi-Mizrahi people in their synagogues. So my big thing is to teach people in American synagogues Sephardi-Mizrahi melodies that they can incorporate into their services in order to make their synagogues more inclusive and help Sephardi-Mizrahi congregants feel seen. 

I have so many cantorial students that have asked, “Can I sing these things without being without being appropriative?” And I say, Yes. Not only that— you kind of have to. And you have to do it in a way that shows you are honoring this community; you mention where it's coming from, who taught it to you, and so if you do it in a respectful way, people are going to really appreciate it and feel like they’re being included. You don’t have to sound like you’re coming straight from those places, but you’re going to do it by being respectful of the traditions and getting as deep into them as you possibly can form where you’re at. 

ZC: If people want to learn more about Mizrahi piyyutim, where can we look? Resources sometimes feel few and far between, especially when it comes to Persian Jewish music specifically.

GD:  You can look at Piyut North America for things in English, but all the other resources, like piyut.org.il, are in Hebrew. So you have to have some facility with that, but there's a vast repertoire of piyyutim out there. If you want to know how to sing Lecha Dodi in a certain tradition, you can punch it in to those websites and find lots of recordings. 

You can also check out Divahn’s work, of course!

Galeet Dardashti is a performer, composer, and scholar of Middle-Eastern Jewish music, as well as the lead singer of the band Divahn. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology, specializing in Cultural Politics and contemporary Middle-Eastern music in Israel. She is currently Assistant Professor of Jewish Music and Musician-in-Residence at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and offers residencies, lectures, and workshops on her artistic and academic work.