Rita Jahan-Foruz, who recently turned 50, has been Israel’s most popular female singer for a quarter-century. Known simply as “Rita” throughout Israel, the singer recently decided to try something new in her act—Persian songs.
Rita has sung for years in Hebrew and English. But her latest album, which has sold like hotcakes in Israel, is sung entiely in Farsi. Many around her questioned her decision to advertise her ethnicity just when Iranian-Israeli relations had hit a new low and many Israelis feared a nuclear attack by the Islamic Republic. But the album has been astonishingly successful.
Rita said, “I want to introduce the world to the real and immensely rich Iranian culture. Extreme regimes are so temporary compared to the eternal and endless richness found in Iranian culture…. In my personal, musical way, I want to introduce the world to its real face as much as I can.”
The tunes in the album, “My Joys,” are mostly Iranian songs she recalls from her childhood in Iran. Some are traditional children’s songs. Others were hit pop tunes in the 1960s that are officially verboten now in Iran. Pirated copies of the album are very popular in Iran, where they sell in unmarked cases.
Rita is performing six concerts this month in North America: November 1 at UCLA’s Royce Hall in Los Angeles; November 3 at the Dinkelspeil Theater in Stanford outside San Francisco; November 5 at the Teatro Nextel del Parque in Mexico City; November 8 at the North Miami Beach Theater in Florida, November 11 at the Town Hall in New York City and November 13 at the Strathmore Music Center in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside Washington, DC.
Born in Iran in 1962, she moved to Israel with her family when she was eight and grew up in a suburb of Tel Aviv.
Rita started singing professionally during her draft service in Israel. In 1986, she became a nationwide sensation when she appeared in a national song contest and soon thereafter released her first album, which became a best seller in Israel.
Her second album achieved triple platinum sales and is regarded as one of the highlights of Israeli music. Her fourth album achieved quadruple platinum sales and her fifth album quintuple platinum. Her Persian album is her 12th.
In 2010, Rita published a children’s book, “Shiraz’s Heart,” based on Persian folkloric stories she grew up on and raised her own two daughters on. It, too, became a best seller in Israel.
In 2008, she was voted Israel’s Number One female singer as part of the country’s celebration of the 60th anniversary of its independence.
A year ago, she decided to revisit what she tells audiences is the “soundtrack of my childhood” by adapting Persian classics that most Iranians know by heart. Her 2011 single “Shaneh” is based on a traditional song that Iranian grandmothers are known to whisper to their grandchildren as they comb their hair. An homage to a lover, it includes lines such as, “Oh, love, don’t comb your hair because my heart rests in its waves.” Rita reworked the song, staying true to the lyrics but giving it a more modern sound, somewhere between pop and Jewish gypsy music.
In September, when Rita visited a Persian-language Internet radio station based in a Tel Aviv suburb, the studio was flooded with calls from Iranians around the world.
In an Israeli television interview, speaking of her Iranian fans, she joked that if she ever traveled to Iran, she would like to sing a duet with President Ahmadi-nejad. “Maybe I can soften him with my feminine charms,” she said.
The Fars News Agency wrote last July that Rita is Israel’s “latest plot in a soft war” to gain access to the hearts and minds of Iranians.
Hard-line Iranian websites and blogs expressed particular displeasure when Rita sent a message to Iranians this past March for Now Ruz via a video posted on the Persian website of Israel’s Foreign Ministry. “I hope that we all live alongside each other by dancing and singing because this is what will last,” she said in her message.
In May, Rita performed a sold-out concert in the city of Ashkelon, on Israel’s Mediterranean coast, singing mostly Persian songs. Fans crowded the stage and danced in the aisles.
After the show, concertgoers said they were swept away. “Listen, I’m not Persian,” Meir Kanto, a 72-year-old farmer, told a reporter from The Wall Street Journal. “But the culture is so colorful and so beautiful, from my perspective, let them conquer us. It wouldn’t hurt.”