26-year-old Israeli pop singer Neomi Aharoni-Gal – known by her stage name Nunu – became a national star a few years ago. She is famous for her exaggerated humoristic electronic hyper-pop and over the top colorful look. However, since October 7, she has been showing a softer side to her music as well as her stage persona.

On October 7, she was on a family holiday in Turkey. When she returned to her home town of Tel Aviv, she found it to be empty, like a ghost town. Even months afterwards, it didn’t return to what it once was. This experience prompted Nunu to gravitate towards the lyrics of Meir Banai’s emotive 80s ballad Geshem (“Rain”). “The city is already tired, it is afraid of itself,” Banai sang, and this is exactly what Nunu saw around her on coming back home.

Geshem was the lead single of singer-songwriter Meir Banai’s second album of the same name, produced and arranged by Matti Caspi and released in 1987. Meir Banai, who was born into Israel’s well-known entertainment family, the Banai family, passed away much too young, at the age of 56, leaving us his beautiful musical legacy.

Geshem was his breakthrough album and to this day, its titular song is remembered as one of the best Israeli songs from the 1980s. It is a moving power-ballad full of protest. Banai famously revealed that the song was influenced by Martin Scorsese’s film “Taxi Driver”. In it, Robert De Niro’s character Travis Bickle returned from the hell of the Vietnam War to the urban hell of New York City. The reality of life after a major trauma, life after war, echoes in every note and every word of the song.

In this episode, Nunu also tells the story behind one of her most recent original songs, Aba Bo (“Come Daddy”), which she wrote in memory of Major General (res.) Yonatan Deitch, who was killed in battle in southern Gaza at the age of 34 in December 2023. Nunu knew Deitch since childhood, as he was the older brother of one of her childhood friends. Nunu shares how Deitch and his wife Moran fought when Moran had cancer, and then how they fought to get pregnant. “They entered the battle against cancer and won, and then they fought for nine years to have a child, and finally they won – their son Ari was born,” Nunu recalls. “Then October 7 arrived, and Yonatan fought bravely with his battalion and was killed. At his funeral, Moran said: ‘We were a couple who overcame everything, but this time we lost.’”

However, even with the unbearable loss that October 7 and the war brought with them, there is still hope that the rain will come and wash away all the fear and all the pain.

In the latest episode of “Song of Hope”, Danker reflects on how his music has taken on new meaning during the war. He delivers a moving performance of Shlomo Artzi’s “Come, Let’s Let It Go”, which he has come to see as a love song for his partner and their baby.