It was in Hong Kong a few years ago that I ran into an Israeli in a Lan Kwai Fong bar and after having had a few beers displayed my knowledge of Israeli folk songs to him. He dismissed my knowledge with the words “these are very old songs”, an incident that my wife Irene finds hilarious to this day claiming that the guy was more interested in her than in me blurting out some Naomi Shemer classics.

Well, I had to wait until last Saturday when the National Post ran an interesting column by Mireille Silcoff (subscriber link only) that I could claim that there is indeed something to old Israeli folk songs. Silcoff reports on the fact that nostalgia is now part of Israeli youth culture with youngsters gathering in nightclubs to sing the old songs that at one point were considered too old to be interesting in Israel’s culture of moving forward. However with a future looking bleaker and bleaker, dusting off memories from a time when that future did look bright appears to be a way to deal with the low morale that is currently prevalent in Israel. There's always value in old songs and sooner or later they will resurface, for Israelis it would be nice however if today's retro-ism could not only function as offsetting today's bleakness, but also serve as an inspiration for a better tomorrow.

Oh and yes, my favourite Shemer tune was Bisdot Bet-lechem. No idea what it means but it was part of the various folklore albums that were used to teach us children Israeli folkdances back in Holland. That is, Holland in the 1970s.