In this remarkable book, Assaf Shelleg examines the ways Israeli composers have negotiated the ever-changing ideologies of their state's identity. Drawing on a deep knowledge of historical contexts and repertories from the 1950s to the early 2000s, he addresses the irresolvable tensions — religious and secular, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, Jewish and Arabic — that have troubled Israeli society since its founding; he demonstrates how these tensions inform
compositional strategies even at a fundamental level. Theological Stains is a major contribution to studies of Israeli cultural history and a model for contextual music analysis.
Assaf Shelleg is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His award-winning first book, Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History (OUP, 2014) examines the emergence of modern Jewish art music in Central and Western Europe in the early twentieth century and its translocation to Palestine/Israel from the 1930s through the 1970s. It was translated into German in 2017 with Mohr
Siebeck.