The film revisits Robert Lachmann’s 1936-1937 radio program for the Palestine Broadcasting Service, where he showcased the musical traditions of diverse communities in and around Jerusalem—Samaritan, Bedouin, urban maqam, rural village songs, and Jewish migrant repertoires from North Africa, Kurdistan, and Yemen. Eighty years later, Manna surveys some of these same musical traditions, which have endured into the present.

 The film critiques the Eurocentrism of the Zionist settler-colonial project, which sought to erase Palestine and assimilate Arab Jews into its nationalist framework. Amid the ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza, presenting this work has become essential, as increasingly grotesque displays of Mizrahi loyalty to the settler-colony emerge — celebrating the very historical process of dispossession that stripped Arab Jews of their rootedness in the Arab and Islamic world and continues to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their homeland. (136)