Praying for Divine Forgiveness at a Pop Concert

One of the more noteworthy recent phenomena in Israeli culture has been the emergence of piyytutim (liturgical poems)—especially from the Sephardi tradition—as a popular musical form. At a recent concert, the Israeli pop singer Osher Cohen demonstrated how this form can cross divides between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, and between the religious and secular—as Amit Segal puts it, how “Judaism is infused into the national culture” of Israel: