American pop culture vs secular Israeli pop culture

I am not up on current pop culture. However, secular Israel pop culture has traditionally been much better from a Jewish point of view than American pop culture, which is generally emptiness. Naomi Shemer, Yehoram Gaon and Arik Einstein in particular wrote very good songs. BTW, Einstein denied that he wrote “Hu Chazar b’Teshuva” about Uri Zohar. He said that he wrote it after he saw a TV show in which parents whose BT children cut off contact were interviewed.

bmyer – I agree. I definitely think there are different levels when it comes to these things.

I think that SadiguraRebbe may have thought that you were talking about a case in which both have the same assur content, and didn’t realize that you were trying to find out which one has content that is less bad.

Secular Israeli culture is frankly embarrassing. It’s a rotten facsimile of Western pop culture with ‘traditional’ Jewish influences, and it’s facile, immature and laughable. That the purported ‘Jewish State’ feels the need to copy Western pop culture is bad enough, without it being a crude, facile cheap version. They’re genuinely bad at it. And as to the opening question, neither are okay, and furthermore, neither are really worth your time anyway.

Since no else is speaking up, I guess I have to man up…

Avi K: our zemiros contains no crude language, no thanks for the comparison.

Seriously speaking, if people a lot holier than you or me deemed folk music fit for zemiros, that doesn’t make it okay for us to listen to vulgar lyrics, or “kasher” music that has non-Jewish vibes.

Frankly, I didn’t consider that comparison worthy of a response. I was very specifically displaying my disgust at not only the low moral standards of ‘pop culture’ in general and Israeli ‘pop culture’ specifically, but at the fact that the artistic standards are through the floor too. Even putting aside the moral repugnancy in question, it’s simply rubbish, and the Israeli cultural scene is particularly embarrassing. In neither respect does the above comparison work. Plainly there is a world of difference between pastoral Polish melodies and modern pop, and besides at least some of those tunes were actually nice enough to be worth kashering. Thanks for your help, though, Mammale.