This paper traces the recent revivification of deceased Kurdish musicians from the twentieth century to demonstrate how they, in collaboration with living music producers, continue reimagining the Kurdish nation. Ethnomusicologists have previously shown that in the absence of a Kurdish state, music broadcast on twentieth-century Kurdish radio stations enabled the creation of a Kurdish “listening public” and “imagined nation” (Blum and Hassanpour 1996, Bullock 2022). Although most musicians of this radio era are no longer alive, their voices continue to be present—literally and symbolically—in the Kurdish musical scene through the recombination and remixing of their recordings with new sound effects, samples, and musical texts. In this paper, I ask how and why the scattered and nonlinear agency of social actors, from both sides of the life–death divide, come together to shape Kurdish music and society. Through analyses of social media and interviews with music producers and musicians, I show how the musical legacy of the twentieth century is continuously recruited, reinterpreted, and manipulated in response to contemporary sociopolitical developments. I argue that temporally transcendent creative activities between deceased icons and living social actors—their “intermundane” (Stanyek and Piekut 2011) collaboration—reproduce the imagined Kurdish nation and enact what Jon Bullock (2022) calls the “defiance of the colonial logics of place and time.” This study contributes to existing debates on distributed and nonlinear agency by showing how these models help explain the reimagination of a nation through cross-temporal musical practices.

This paper offers an exploration of the musical social life of Kurdish Jews in Israel as it unfolds on social media platforms. By examining the production and circulation of digital musical artifacts, it analyzes how online musical practices sustain communal identity while enabling transnational forms of Kurdish imagination. The paper focuses on digital performances of Chopi (Kurdish line dance), arguing that this specific dance and its music constitute a central medium through which Kurdish identity is preserved in Israel across digital and analogue contexts. Through close readings of digital Chopi, the paper investigates how real and imagined communities are constructed - communities that blur the boundaries between Kurds of different religions and citizenships. These practices generate what I term “Digital Kurdistan”: a transnational, digitally mediated formation in which land, landscape, and belonging are reimagined. I argue that Kurdish Jews in Israel actively contribute to this emergent digital sphere, participating in a broader pan-Kurdish episteme. By studying this episteme, I pose critical questions regarding the diasporic or non-diasporic ties of this community to Kurdistan. Finally, the paper traces how Kurdish Jews engage, preserve, and reinterpret cultural forms historically identified with their predominantly Muslim Kurdish neighbors. Historical research testifies to the ways Jews lived within Muslim tribal contexts in Kurdistan while preserving distinct linguistic, religious, and cultural practices. The paper shows how, on social media, new modes of interaction are activated across geopolitical and religious divides, generating renewed forms of transnational Kurdish culture within contemporary Jewish-Muslim digital publics.

This study examines how sacredness and communal belonging are reconfigured as Yārsān ritual music and sacred texts circulate within digital environments. The Yārsān, an ethno-religious minority located in western Iran and parts of Iraq, have historically maintained an esoteric religious tradition in which sacred texts along with ritual music are performed within the closed setting of the Jam ritual. In this context, sacred music generates collective solidarity, reinforces group boundaries, and sustains religious belonging. With the expansion of digital platforms, Yārsān sacred music and texts increasingly circulate beyond ritual space and initiated participants. This shift raises critical questions about how sacredness is transformed as ritual performance becomes digitally mediated and detached from physical co-presence, and how online circulation reshapes authority and belonging among geographically dispersed communities. Drawing on Randall Collins’ theory of interaction rituals, this study argues that sacredness is not diminished under digital modernity but reactivated through mediated forms of interaction. When shared, commented upon, and re-engaged online, these performances function as circulating sacred objects, extending ritual-generated symbolic effects into networked space. Even without bodily co-presence, digital engagement can reproduce elements of ritual solidarity and contribute to sustaining minority identity. Methodologically, the research combines cyber-ethnography with qualitative online content analysis, examining audiovisual materials, circulation patterns, textual framing, and audience engagement. By comparing Jam performance with its digital mediation, the study demonstrates how sacred music becomes a dynamic site where ritual, memory, and belonging are renegotiated in contemporary digital contexts.

This paper examines the Kurdish anthem “Be Tenya Cêm Mehêlin” (“Do Not Leave Me Alone”) as a living sonic site through which collective memory, survival, and historical continuity are enacted. Written in response to the 1988 Halabja chemical massacre, the song has endured through time as a resonant expression of Kurdish grief and resilience. Its reemergence during 2022 protest movements in Iran and in funerary gatherings demonstrates how music transhistorically links moments of resistance to state violence, reanimating earlier trauma within renewed contexts of collective loss. Rather than serving as a memorial to a single historical event, the anthem functions as an ongoing embodied ethical practice through which communities process recurring trauma. This anthem sustains historical consciousness both by evoking collective modes of musical narration, and by facilitating affective encounters through sound. Methodologically, the study combines close readings of music and lyrics with contextual examination of performances across time. The study also draws on media documentation and circulation patterns, showing how this song reappears in contemporary protest settings. Engaging theoretical perspectives that conceptualize music as a resource for post-catastrophic social continuity and as a sensory mode of historical witnessing, the paper argues that the anthem operates as a living archive that collapses temporal distance. By doing so, this study contributes a novel perspective on the ways music functions as a form of resistance, sustaining historical consciousness and communal resilience amid violence.