All human societies draw lines between disconnected events in their history and create illusions of continuity or topographies of the past. These traditions of remembering, which began in the Hebrew Bible, played an important part in the renewal of the Jewish festival calendar in the Yishuv. Festivals do this very well because their repetition year after year allows societies to emphasize historical connections and revise their stories of origin by creating unique emotional maps. The Zionist festival calendar did it especially well by revising old Jewish festivals and by inventing completely new ones as part of an updated program that emphasized the ancient Jewish agricultural past and the ancient Jewish military past, all in the spirit of Hebrew nationalism.

Chapter 7 examines music in various Jewish meal-settings: elite Jewish banquets, rabbinic dinners, wedding feasts, public festivals, and the communal meals of the Jewish sects. Music and social dining were occasions for self-definition, personal and corporate, as Jewish elites sought to place themselves along a continuum from resistance to assimilation in relation to the prevailing non-Jewish culture in the Diaspora and foreign rule in Palestine. The occasions included upper-class Jewish dinner parties, as well as Jewish festivals, where national music helped define Jewish identity in settings that included private dinner parties and mass public dining. The Jewish festival was also an occasion for social interaction between Jews and non-Jews. A smattering of non-Jews attended Jewish festivals, and there is reason to believe that many Jews attended the public banquets of the gentiles. Moreover, upper-class Jews such as Philo, who had Hellenic educations, were interested not only in cultivating relationships with upper-class Greeks by dining with them but also in believing that their own people had music just as fine as that of the Greeks and just as ancient in its foundations.