Mixing Rituals represents the first major musical ethnography dedicated to Israeli weddings, focusing on wedding DJs and their audiences. Supported by an ISF grant (2020-2023), this is also the first ethnomusicological study anywhere to investigate the central role of wedding DJs As cultural brokers. Wedding DJs, we argue, are at once heirs to the core traditional functions of the professional wedding musician, mediators of elements from club culture into the realm of familial and communal celebration, and actors in the commercial field of the wedding industry. Through interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and the collection and analysis of almost 100 home videos from the last 40 years, we trace the formation of local DJ-centric ritualized practices of celebration, and explore the performative dialogue between DJ and audience, and between members of the audience as facilitated by the DJ. This countrywide, cross-sectional study of wedding music will provide an updated bottom-up image of Israeli cultures in their plurality, demonstrating how the meaning of social categories and collective identities is negotiated in the intersection and interaction of musical styles, rather than simply represented or embodied by them.

The project is headed by Dr. Oded Erez and accompanied by Omer Pshititski.