One of the nice things about the Keshet community that our family just joined in Mazkeret Batya in Israel is that it has study evenings on various themes. One of the themes is Zionism. I just returned from the first meeting that was very interesting. We read a contemporary introduction text that was meant to contextualize the texts that appear in Zionism (a collections of Zionistic texts by eight authors). What troubled me was that the author of this introduction text (I forgot his name) tried to attach ‘fashions’ such as Postmodernism simply be calling them ‘fashions’.

This reminded me the last IMS conference on writings in Hebrew on music, where Dr. Elisheva Rigbi similarly titled Postmodernism as a ‘fashion’ (accompaining it with a sarcastic smile). There is something misleading in calling Postmodernism a ‘fashion’. It is probably true that Postmodernism will pass from the world as many streams of thought did. However, if one truly wants to criticize Postmodernism, or perhaps in a wiser manner, a certain Postmodern thinker or opinion, one would be better doing so by relating to specific claims and trying to refute their content. Simple titling Postmodernism, which contains many, often contradicting opinions as ‘fashion’, seems to me simplistic. What one does not hear reasonable arguments why it is a ‘fashion’ or why its argumets are problematic.

I think that the music circles in Israel contain conservative people who fail to engage themselves with contemporary thought such as Postmodernism, Gender studies, Performance studies, Post Colonialism, etc. Perhaps I was wrong, and this conservative phenomena is an integral part of more fields.