The academic study of Islam has to a large extent failed to recognize visual and sonic expressions in favor for textual based monomodal research. Perhaps surprisingly, this is true also when it comes to the field of Islam and hip-hop. Even though research has shown that the cognitive universe of Islam has changed the language and message of hip-hop, little research effort as been put into multimodal investigations of the interplay of Islamic semiotics in audio, visual as well as textual cultural modes, such as for example soundscapes, record covers arts or fashion. This paper provides a multimodal investigation of the semiotic functions of Islam in hip-hop culture, based on a case analysis of the music video “Paid in Full (Mini Madness – The Coldcut Remix)” (1987), performed by Eric B and Rakim and directed by Bruno Tilly. The “Paid in Full” video is not only a landmark remix that exemplifies the transnationalization of Islam through music, long before the Internet became an integral part of public life. As will be demonstrated by the analysis of the staging of Islamic semiotics, the video also provides an interesting example of the emergence of alternative Islamic traditions, shared by Muslims in the Middle East and beyond. Finally, the paper pays attention to the dynamics of Muslim and non-Muslim actors, in the current staging of Islam in hip-hop. This aspect tends to be overlooked in the current study of Islam. Social agents of varied backgrounds, creeds and identities utilize Islamic semiotic resources within hip-hop culture. In short, non-Muslims as well as Muslims are part of the complex interplay shaping the artifacts and processes currently defining what is perceived as Islamic.

This paper considers the concept of cultural alliance as a reflection on globalization, and political and economic alliances, by examining the recent spate of adaptations of Israeli television programs for American audiences. Since 2009, the dramas In Treatment (Be Tipul), Homeland (Prisoners of War), Hostages, and the game show Who’s Still Standing? have all been adapted to air in the U.S. Demand for content from the Israeli market increased to the degree that Hostages was contracted for adaptation by U.S. television executives before it aired in Israel; two new shows from Homeland creator Gideon Raff (Tyrant, depicting the return of an Arab dictator's son and his American family to a fictional Middle Eastern nation, and Dig, about an American FBI agent investigating the death of an archaeologist in Jerusalem) are now in production in partnership with U.S. television networks. As a center of media production the U. S. television content airs widely throughout the globe, but only a select number of international television programs make it to air for U.S. audiences, and even then only after they have been adapted to an American scenario using American characters. U. S. networks adapt content from nations they perceive to be socially and politically akin. In this context, the adaptation of Israeli television shows can be thought of as a mode of demonstrating these perceived affinities through cultural production. I explore how narratives in these cultural products enforce and complicate notions of sameness and difference/allies and others, particularly when the topic of the show is a global political conflict in which the U.S. and Israel are currently engaged in. This paper explores the confluence of factors that have created the heightened, rapid paced cultural exchange between the U.S and Israel in the realm of entertainment television. This begins with an analysis of the emergence of the television industry in Israel in 1966 and its subsequent growth, the long-term importation of U.S. media to Israel, as well as the ways in which Israeli television content is influenced by the broader political context in which it exists. That analysis is put into conversation with a consideration of the specific political historical moment of the 21st century, and the era of the War on Terror, in which these television shows are being produced. Finally, this study examines the process of adaptation itself, to think about how Israeli stories are interpreted to become American stories.

In his book, "Trauma: A Social Theory," Jeffrey Alexander observes that in the wake of the Sabra and Shatila massacres after Israel’s 1982 Lebanon War, “it was not only the public war of words between right-wing Likud officials and their Peace Now critics that allowed the Holocaust narrative to be extended to Palestinians for the first time. It was the extraordinary and unprecedented ritual of the ‘400,000 Protest,’ the spectacle of hundreds of thousands of patriotic but outraged Israelis massively protesting against the massacres in a Tel Aviv square.” Ari Folman’s "Waltz with Bashir," an animated pseudo-documentary about the massacres and the narrator’s guilty sense of complicity in them, would appear to confirm Alexander’s thesis that the massacres triggered a recognition among many Israelis that the Palestinian nakba [catastrophe] of 1948 and its horrendous consequences for the Palestinians in general might, like the Holocaust for Jews and non-Jews alike, be understood as a collective trauma. But, contradictorily, the film also seeks to absolve both the narrator and the Israeli state of any real responsibility for the massacres, by suggesting that the trauma being explored by the film is an individual one (that of the narrator), and the real and only collective trauma with a claim to universal status as a traumatic event for all of humankind is the Holocaust.