Intercultural Music Teacher Education in Israel: Reimagining Religious Segregation
Amira Ehrlich and Belal Badarne
This chapter emerges from an uncommon effort at interreligious dialogue between two colleagues in Israeli music teacher education — one an Orthodox Jew, the other a devout Muslim. Through collegial sharing, we use intercultural conversation as a research tool. Our documented attempt to communicate culturally grounded perspectives to one another sheds light on taken-for-granted norms and habits, while expanding our understanding of the cultural assumptions that currently shape religious segregation in Israeli music teacher education. Working to reimagine these structures, we question whether interculturalism is possible within a segregated context, and consider cultural responsivity as a potential starting point. By tracing the constraints of cultural diversity, as well as policy and music teacher education, we reimagine socio-religious segregation in Israeli music teacher education as an opportunity for culturally responsive teaching. Our analysis and vision are rooted in our experiences as lecturers in two specialized segregated programs of music teacher education — one serving Arabic-speaking populations and the other the Jewish Ultraorthodox community. Our conclusions aim toward cultural specificity within each community as a foundation for future intercultural sharing that we believe can enrich Israeli society at large.
Exposing Cultural Assumptions Through Interreligious Dialogue
This chapter stems from a rare effort at interreligious dialogue between two Israeli music teacher educators: Amira, an Orthodox Jew, and Belal, a devout Muslim. As colleagues at Levinsky College's Faculty of Music Education in Tel Aviv, we chose to engage in dialogue to share our respective cultural perspectives on our profession. In this act of collegial sharing, intercultural conversation becomes an instrument for research. Over two academic years, we documented monthly conversations structured around the concepts of sharing, co-interpreting, and reflecting on each other's work. This chapter presents an important frame of conversation that emerged, along with selected quotations from our recordings.
We believe that our documented effort communicates respective, culturally grounded perspectives, forcing us to clarify, question, and reflect on our own cultural and professional premises. The insights gained illuminate taken-for-granted norms and habits of ourselves and our surroundings, while expanding our understanding of how culture affects our work.
In this chapter, we use these insights to expose cultural assumptions that currently underlie structures of religious segregation in Israeli music teacher education. As we work to reimagine these structures, we question interculturalism in the context of segregation, advocating cultural responsivity as one possible starting point.
Our conversation acknowledges the vast tradition of sociological discourse on segregation and multiculturalism, though a comprehensive review exceeds the limits of this undertaking. We contribute perspectives from our lived experience to this ongoing scholarly discussion, challenging it by reframing our specific cases of educational segregation as opportunities for promoting diversity and inclusion rather than acts of suppression.
Context
Amira and Belal live and work at opposite socio-religious poles of Israeli society. They first met as graduate students in music education at Levinsky College and later became faculty members there. Levinsky's Faculty of Music Education includes three main tracks of undergraduate music education: a general program open to all local populations, a segregated track for Jewish Ultraorthodox women, and a separate track mostly attended by Arabic-speaking populations. At the time of this study, Amira taught across all three tracks, while Belal taught in the separate track for Arabic-speaking populations. Our collaborative study aimed to explore our experiences teaching within culturally segregated programs of music teacher education. We recognize that such programs exist within broader norms of socio-religious segregation in Israeli social structures and public education.
Israeli Norms of Socio-Religious Segregation
Interreligious dialogue in contemporary Israel functions both as a daily reality and a framework for social activism. In earlier work, we described a gap between social structures and everyday interactions between Jews and Arabs in Israel. Many basic infrastructures of Israeli society enforce religious segregation: neighborhoods, towns, and even entire cities are characterized by categories and subcategories of religious affiliation. Public education in Israel is mandated through a paradigm of linguistic segregation that results in overall separation between Jewish and non-Jewish populations. At the same time, daily interactions in public places of commerce and culture often involve close contact between Jews and Arabs of diverse religious and ethnic affiliations. This gap between everyday encounters and structural segregation is further visible in the abundance of NGOs active in facilitating meaningful interreligious dialogue between Jews and Arabs in Israel. A similar gap appears in music education and music teacher education.
Opening the Classroom Door
Although NGOs rarely invest in cultivating institutional dialogue within a college of education, our commitment to collegial dialogue is at least as important as the interreligious dimension of our work. The stereotype of the closed classroom door, with each teacher autonomous and independent within their institution, is an accurate description of our professional context. Therefore, the mutual sharing between two music teacher education lecturers working within the same institution represents an additional layer of interaction that made this chapter possible.
(How) Can Segregation Promote Interculturalism?
In this collaboration, the theme of opening the classroom door intersects with our interreligious effort as we consider the challenges of Israeli music teacher education regarding two segregated populations of contemporary Israeli society. Through the lens of intercultural frameworks, we, as researchers, examine constraints and affordances that affect cultural contexts of music education. We believe that explicit awareness of these cultural considerations is essential for preparing pre-service teachers for future educational challenges. Such awareness is also necessary as a foundation for imagining a future of cultural enrichment within each population, which can then serve as a basis for intercultural sharing. This collaboration aims to outline the cultural constraints and affordances of Israeli music teacher education as experienced in our respective practices.
We begin by outlining the structures of socio-religious segregation in the Israeli education system. After interpreting Israeli music education policy as enforcing a standard of Western-Classical hegemony, we trace how this policy shapes institutional standards of music teacher education. The main focus of our conversation emerges as we explore the effects of these policy structures on our involvement in current institutional interventions targeting Arab and Jewish Ultraorthodox populations. By sharing our perspectives as active music teacher educators working within these cultures, we discuss future visions for more culturally responsive music teacher education.
The Structures and Policy of Israeli Music Education
Israeli public education is government-mandated and structured through a paradigm of socio-religious segregation. There are four main streams of education operating as separate institutions, with separate inspectorates and curricula: Jewish Secular, Jewish Religious, Jewish Ultraorthodox, and Arabic-speaking populations. While Jewish populations have been formally separated into subcategories of religious affiliation, Arabic-speaking populations — including Muslims, Druze, Bedouin, and Christians — officially fall under a single, non-Jewish category. Some subcategorizations and segregations of Arabic-speaking groups exist de facto in certain areas as a result of community considerations or geographical constraints.
Segregation That Facilitates Social Cohesion
Several scholars describe the sectarianism of Israeli State Education as a system based on civilizational and ideological principles, historically designed during the establishment of the State of Israel. One researcher interprets the irony inherent in this system: accommodating sectarian differences by allowing different groups to pursue different visions ultimately created a greater sense of social coherence and even unity. By promoting segregated educational streams, the Israel Ministry of Education has historically recognized the benefits of developing different curricula for certain school subjects as a catalyst for socio-religious and cultural diversity.
Historically, the broadest example of this development is the 1953 legislation that established the Jewish Religious stream of Israeli public education. Pre-state Jewish educational institutions had existed in separate streams — separate schools for Zionist socialists, religious Zionists, and general Zionists (liberals). These later merged into the two basic streams of Israeli state education: a Jewish secular system and a Jewish religious State School system. Tensions between these separate educational schools throughout the State's early history triggered political crises, the most dramatic being the collapse of the Israeli government in 1951. A controversy over the division of new immigrants between secular and religious educational streams created a deep political divide that toppled the entire government.
Ironically, the 1953 resolution legally recognized two segregated streams of public education — the secular and the religious. This legislative segregation enabled the reestablishment and cohesion of a government that had been impossible as long as the different visions of Israeli and Jewish education were conceptualized without it. Later educational reforms in the 1980s followed a similarly paradoxical logic, as they aimed to accommodate sectarian differences by allowing diverse groups to pursue different visions. For many subjects — such as history, literature, and civics — schools developed separate curricula, teacher training programs, and textbooks to accommodate differences between secular Jewish schools, religious Jewish schools, and Arabic-speaking populations. The more legitimacy governmental educational policy afforded to segregated difference, the greater the sense of social stability.
Echoes of this seemingly paradoxical approach can be found in current public discourse and debates on Israeli public education. Israeli President Rivlin's 2015 speech, later known as "The Speech of the Tribes," described Israeli social order as four segregated tribes living in conflict. The President named these four main sectors as secular, religious, ultraorthodox, and Arab. Since 2015, this concept of conflicting "tribes" has become an explicit and dominant feature of Israeli public discourse. According to a 2016 Pew Research Center survey on Israeli society, there are "deep divisions in Israeli society — not only between Israeli Jews and the country's Arab minority, but also among the religious subgroups that make up Israeli Jewry." The survey described Israeli Jewish identity as "complex," constituted by subcategories that function as "separate social worlds" and are "reflected in starkly contrasting positions on many public policy questions."
During the 2017-2018 school year, Israeli media reported recurring allocations against religious foundations allegedly infiltrating secular school systems as a form of religious coercion — a reminder of the ethos of separation upheld by the Israeli government's status-quo agreements. In 2017, President Rivlin's 2015 "tribes" speech was translated into an activist initiative called "Israeli Hope." Its approach is evident in its double commitment to fostering internal cohesion within each sector alongside devotion to mutual respect of diversity and acts of sharing. This Israeli approach to conflictual sectarianism deems the challenge of social cohesion no less important than the commitment to diversity, and conceptualizes segregation as both an opportunity and a challenge.
Common Core in Music as Hegemony
Despite the development of sectarian, differentiated curricula in many school subjects, the Israeli Ministry has traditionally considered music and most arts subjects as "neutral enough" to be taught in a consistent manner, with similar standards across all sectors of Israeli society. Music education is mandated through a single National Curriculum for all socio-religious sectors. Although the Curriculum allows 30% of content to include specialized electives developed with respect to local culture, it is based on a common core principle in which Western-Classical content and pedagogy function as the main mandatory components. While we support the inclusion of additional musical cultures as electives, we interpret the hierarchy of core knowledge relative to electives as evidence of an overall Western-Classical hegemony.
One of us has explored the hegemonic structure of the single Israeli National Music Curriculum and described a "kind of imagined (or real) exclusive dependence on Western repertoires and pedagogies as a function of personal, social, and institutional conceptualizations of professionalism in music and music education" in Israel. Another scholar analyzed the music component in the Israeli Early Childhood Curriculum, summarizing this sense of absurdity by describing the State of Israel, as manifested through such educational structures, as "what has become a Western-oriented country situated in the Middle East."
Israeli Music Education Caught in a Double Bind
Interpreting the macro-structure of Israeli education alongside the micro-structure of Israeli music education reveals a double bind: the norm of socio-religious segregation in education at large, combined with the Western-Classical hegemony in music education, seems to preclude any prospect for cultural diversity. While the norms of segregation have historically been praised for allowing each sector to develop curricula that cater to cultural specificity, the core of the National Curriculum of Music effectively denies cultural specificity.
Experiences in Current Institutional Interventions
Working within this double bind, we have taken part in current social interventions toward diversity and inclusion as Israeli music teacher educators. Levinsky College's Faculty of Music Education is active in promoting music teacher education in two socially segregated populations: Arabic-speaking sectors and the Jewish Ultraorthodox sector. Over the past decade, the Faculty has developed specialized segregated tracks for music teacher education and accreditation.
As mentioned, Levinsky's Faculty of Music Education includes three main tracks of undergraduate music education: a general program open to all local populations, a segregated track for Jewish Ultraorthodox women, and a separate track mostly attended by Arabic-speaking populations. Potential students can choose to study in either the main socio-religiously integrated program or the appropriate segregated parallel program.
As collaborating authors, we each have experience with the Arabic-speaking classes — Amira as a cultural outsider and Belal as an insider. Amira adds to this her experience in the Ultraorthodox program, where she is somewhat of an insider. Sharing our experiences of teaching within these segregated programs allowed us to reflect on what currently exists and what could be, moving beyond policy and curriculum.
Segregation That Enables Inclusion
Amira described her experiences teaching at the women-only Jerusalem campus for music teacher education. This unique self-segregated campus was established to cater to the special cultural needs of the Jewish Ultraorthodox community. Strict social norms of complete sexual segregation, modest dress and behavior, and religious censorship of content make it impossible for women from this sector to study in an integrated program. These norms affect considerations of personnel, content, and pedagogies, requiring all to conform to cultural-religious dictates. Reflecting on this religiously and sexually segregated program, Amira recognized how segregation functions here as an enabling factor.
Translation Instead of Transformation
Levinsky’s segregated music teacher education programs essentially replicate the curriculum originally developed for the Faculty’s integrated program—a copy-and-paste approach we interpret as translation rather than transformation. In 2015, the Israel Ministry of Education’s Music Subject Committee commissioned a task force to create an Arabic version of the State Music Curriculum originally published in Hebrew in 2011, a broader gesture aimed at recognizing diversity and serving culturally segregated populations. Yet most efforts have focused on the literal translation of existing policy documents from Hebrew into Arabic, rather than fundamentally reconsidering the needs at hand.
As faculty members in these programs, both Belal and Amira attest to ongoing efforts toward including students whose cultural backgrounds differ from standard Western benchmarks. Through collegial conversations, program directors and Faculty heads have described these segregated tracks as acts of social intervention, working to expand potential student inclusion. Amira recalled a Faculty meeting where one program director admitted: “Efforts for inclusion sometimes entail creativity, for example, in investing in a wider perspective of in-depth interviewing, and in observing applicants within their own fields of practice, rather than depending solely on standardized institutional entrance exams.”
Further examples emerged in their dialogue. Amira noted that some women accepted to the Ultraorthodox program begin music studies for the first time, with minimal previous knowledge required. “Little to zero demand for previous knowledge is required—it is mostly a future-oriented approach,” she said. “Women who show some previous acquaintance with music, usually some high school music education, alongside a commitment to develop themselves professionally can be accepted. Some of these women choose vocal training as their lead instrument because they think it will be easier than starting an instrument so late in life.” Belal observed similar patterns among Arabic-speaking populations, adding that there are several prominent musicians from Arab communities with no formal music education who have no chance of passing written exams but are exceptional performers. “When they perform, it is like ‘wow’! Some of them are really great performing musicians, but they have no experience in reading Western notation or understanding the basics of Western music theory. In my experience, I think all musicians should have Western music literacy as part of their training because this contributes to developing international professionalism. But if we accept only those students who already have this knowledge and skills, we will be limiting the potential of the program.”
Constraining Musical Knowledge
Though acceptance standards are sometimes relaxed for broader inclusion, once admitted to either segregated program, students must prove themselves through the same Western-oriented studies as those in the college’s main integrated program. This often proves no less challenging for faculty than for students. Mostly the same faculty members teach across all three programs, with only minimal matching of culturally affiliated teachers. Belal explained: “Since the program is inclined towards Arabic speaking populations, you would think more could be done to accommodate these students. Most of them lack in-depth musical knowledge of Arabic musical traditions, and that is something they should be getting through the program and are not. Also, as far as language is concerned, there should be more space and preference for Arabic speaking teachers.”
Amira agreed: “In both segregated programs it often seems that all efforts are aimed at bringing the students to the content and level of the ‘regular,’ non-segregated program—as if that is the base, the standard. I often wonder if more can be done to affirm and develop students’ own culturally affiliated musical worlds. I have no doubt that the more they can interact with teachers from inside their own cultural worlds, this can happen more.”
Thus, while the first step toward broader inclusion and flexibility at the gateways into music teacher education has been taken, curriculums, course contents, and pedagogies have yet to undergo major reconsideration. Levinsky’s Faculty of Music Education now echoes broader structures of Israeli music education, where socio-religiously segregated groups of students share a single, hegemonic standard of teaching and learning. Even though Israeli public elementary and high schools are socio-religiously segregated, all share the same Western, classically dominated, core music curriculum. Similarly, the college Faculty houses two culturally segregated programs but has done little to develop their cultural specificity.
Translation Instead of Transformation
Levinsky’s segregated music teacher education programs replicate the curriculum previously established in the Faculty’s integrated program. We interpret this approach as an act of translation rather than transformation. In 2015, the Music Subject Committee of the Israel Ministry of Education commissioned a task force to create an Arabic version of the State Music Curriculum published in Hebrew in 2011—an outward effort to recognize diversity and cater to culturally segregated populations. However, most efforts have focused on literal translation of policy documents from Hebrew into Arabic, rather than an overall reconsideration of the needs at hand.
The Mystery of the Missing High-School Music Programs
Our questioning of these efforts stems from lacunae in our respective fields of practice. The Israeli public education system currently lists over 130 registered high-school music-major programs nationwide, all within Jewish school sectors. While several operate in schools open to non-Jewish populations, not one high school music program exists in any school within the segregated Arab sector. The percentage of Jewish Ultraorthodox schools in this realm is also almost non-existent.
Similar proportions appear in elementary school music, where over 80% of Jewish secular and Jewish religious schools teach music as a subject, compared to almost non-existent percentages in Arab and Jewish Ultraorthodox schools (National Inspectorate of Music). This situation may not be surprising, given that both Arab and Jewish Ultraorthodox education systems have been repeatedly interpreted as lagging behind the standards of other Israeli public-education sectors (Jabareen and Agbaria; Perry-Hazan). Socio-cultural constraints in Islamic decrees identify music as Harram (unholy), and both Islamic and Jewish conservative traditions associate music with licentious behavior (Badarne and Ehrlich, in print; Dalal; Shiloah). These constraints may contribute to low priority for music education within both religious contexts.
Policy and Music Teacher Education: Who’s the Chicken and Who’s the Egg?
Addressing this extensive lack of formal music education in Arab and Jewish Ultraorthodox schools, we believe both policy and music teacher education have been instrumental in creating and perpetuating the situation. Israeli high-school music-matriculation exams focus almost entirely on Western–Classical traditions and literacy (Ehrlich). These same traditions and literacy act as gatekeepers to most music programs in Israeli institutions of higher education, where potential music teachers receive state certification. Music teacher education for both elementary and high-school levels is structured through this same hegemonic approach that shapes the high-school music-matriculation exam.
Describing constraints on Arab music education in Israel, Dalal identified Western musical literacy as distracting Arab youngsters from their native musical literacies—those that are predominantly oral, including aural sensitivity to quarter tones that elude Western, well-tempered tuning. He noted a positive shift in the mid-1990s with the opening of several non-Western undergraduate music programs that include dedicated training tracks for music teacher certification.
For this study, we conducted an internet-based search of Israeli higher-education music programs, examining course descriptions and syllabi to-date within two accredited institutions leading this non-Western trend. Our findings reveal a persistent gap between non-Western content of music credits and the Western-dominated music education courses that comprise such programs. Perhaps, as long as Music Education policy remains within its Western–Classical paradigm, music teacher education must comply, while other undergraduate degrees have more freedom to pursue change.
“How Can I Teach What I Don’t Know?”
During daily encounters with Israeli music teachers and music education students in college courses and professional development seminars, Belal and Amira asked current and future teachers from Arabic-speaking and Jewish Ultraorthodox communities to respond to the idea of a more multicultural curriculum. Each conducted several classroom discussion groups on this topic as part of routine music pedagogy classes and professional development courses. Respondents frequently cited music teacher education as responsible for their own lack of knowledge of “other” musics, often remarking: “How can I teach what I don’t know.” Such responses indicate patterns of exclusion, interpreted as proof of Western–Classical knowledge’s dominance.
Another interpretation points to gaps between teachers’ perception of formal knowledge as the basis for classroom teaching, negating other informal or cultural knowledge they may possess. Both Arab and Jewish religious communities incorporate music into community religious practices (Shiloah). Whether the cantillation call to prayer from the Mosque, prayer-song in the synagogue, or impressive musicianship of wedding ensembles, religiously-oriented communities of both faiths boast rich musical traditions. Many rely on aural traditions and include unique musical expertise that cannot be represented using Western–Classical notation.
Re-imaging Change
We interpret Israeli music education as existing within a predicament of a double bind—socio-religious segregation of the school system on one hand, and the hegemonic implications of a single National Curriculum of Music on the other. Addressing the challenges of music teacher education, we envision possibilities for expanding repertoires and pedagogies in ways that connect school music practices with the musical lives of students. Like Gay, we feel a need for more second-order change that can affect deep structures and underlying assumptions, rather than allowing the incorporation of culturally specific musical practices as mere additional knowledge and secondary techniques.
Segregation as Opportunity
Our experience has shown that socio-religious segregation is sometimes crucial for creating safe spaces and enabling music teacher education where otherwise impossible—due to religious observances, language, and geographical distances. Jewish Ultraorthodox women will never be permitted to engage in musical performance in the presence of any men or women beyond their own religious denomination. Arabic-speaking populations were always a small minority in Levinsky’s undergraduate music education programs before the separate program for Northern populations existed. Having a full class of Arabic-speaking future teachers encouraged discussion about developing a culturally specific music curriculum—something previously overlooked or ignored.
Given Israeli school system social segregation, we can imagine possibilities for culturally responsive teaching (Gay; Gaztambide-Fernández; Lind and McKoy). Segregation can become an opportunity to incorporate culturally specific musical expressions as legitimate, formal bodies of knowledge. Lind and McKoy defined culturally responsive teaching as “a mindset that requires careful thought in regards to content, context, and instruction” (p. 97).
At a recent Faculty gathering, Belal presented an outline of musical knowledge relevant to Arabic-speaking populations, including central concepts of Arabic music theory (maqamat and rhythms) and Arabic music history (genres, composers, performers). Around the same time, Amira challenged students in the Arabic-speaking program to suggest a high-school music curriculum relevant to youth in their own communities. Their efforts echoed Belal’s outline, incorporating listening examples of artists such as Fairuz and Om Kalthoum, and composers such as Fared el Atrash and Mohamed Abdel Wahab. Students demonstrated how to use such examples to practice identification and replication of rhythmic patterns and maqamat improvisational techniques.
Throughout this exercise, Amira noticed that most Arabic students’ lesson planning intuitively leaned toward a holistic approach, with theory, history, and repertoire intertwined in ways Western pedagogies can only aspire to: “No matter what the starting point of any proposed lesson or unit was, the students always took care to move between listening, performing, and improvisational creativity, creating methodological and content-based links between these diverse learning activities.” Belal responded: “Indeed, when you study an Eastern instrument in an Eastern tradition, your teacher will take responsibility for your theoretical knowledge in the most practical way. While you are studying performance, you are obviously gaining knowledge of the structures and functions of maqamat and rhythms that allow improvisation and composition. I am not sure that is how it works with a Western instrumental teacher.”
Thus, while both students and Faculty members can envision a culturally relevant curriculum for Arabic-speaking populations, such a curriculum is not being systematically developed or implemented in teacher education or schools. Amira criticized the automatic adaptation of knowledge into Western formats, noting the tendency to perpetuate the Western split between music theory and music history rather than letting go of this dichotomy.
Amira expressed frustration regarding the Ultraorthodox program, encountering what she describes as ignorance of Christian, pagan, and secular underpinnings of Western repertoire and music history: “The Ultraorthodox suspicion of modernity has qualified anything ‘classical’ as kosher. So long as the music historically belongs to the Western classical tradition, it is deemed ‘proper.’ I often witness women singing or performing music from contexts quite opposite to Ultraorthodox standards of cultural purity, but they are completely oblivious. Mozart’s Aria ‘Voi Che Sapete’, for example, is a standard for beginning voice students—all about passion and desire that are forbidden for Ultraorthodox women to express so explicitly in public. I listen to them singing and wonder what their teacher has told them the song is about.”
Amira imagines that deep thought and awareness of such gaps between local cultural norms and cultural implications of the music involved could facilitate music education more aligned with the community’s actual cultural values. In her work, she has suggested incorporating prayer song and joyous dance tunes that are part of community life.
Conclusions
As music teacher educators committed to change, we negotiate possibilities within our classrooms and lecture halls while also advocating for policy reform. In doing so, we create a space between policy and institutional mandates, and between those mandates and actual practice. Such action begins with a simple acknowledgement of Gaztambide-Fernández’ assertion that “the lives of all students are already filled with meaningful musical practices” (p. 32). By encouraging students to bring such music to class through recordings or live performance, we affirm the concept that all musics constitute legitimate academic knowledge.
Working with music education students from Arab and Jewish populations, we are guided by Gay’s question: “How would teaching attitudes and behaviors differ if they emphasized talent, potential, and strengths of culturally diverse students, families, and communities instead of their problems and pathologies?” (p. 144). Rather than treating Western notation as an essential, mandatory starting point, we invite students to share and explore their own musical lives as they actually experience them. In this way, we promote the musical agency of student–teachers and encourage them to be creative about the repertoires and pedagogies they design for future classrooms.
For now, our work reaches only those individuals who have passed the gatekeepers of higher music education. We hope that such efforts may demonstrate the value and necessity of broadening the pool of music education students, even as they challenge existing policy frameworks.
We believe that social coherence can be promoted through local development of diverse musical practices that align more closely with the specific Jewish and Arab communities these students come from than with Western classical literacy. Future efforts, we imagine, could include frameworks for intercultural sharing grounded in cultural specificity rather than solely in common core Western hegemonies. Ultimately, we suspect that Israeli society as a whole stands to benefit from investment in such enriching diversity.
Culturally specific music education that balances internal community needs with intercommunity sharing can serve as a model of social activism that affirms cultural and religious diversity as a source of social vitality. In this way, Israeli music teacher educators can contribute to the complex matrix of socio-religious tensions, explicitly confronting the challenge of affirming diversity while exploring possibilities for cohesion that do not undermine such affirmations. Such a professional standard can transform music education into a social laboratory committed to experimenting with balances of diversity, inclusion, sharing, and cohesion — issues at the core of both Israeli society and all multicultural societies.