The Campaign to Bring Pearl Jam to Israel

There is a running joke in American pop culture about how difficult it is to get into a Pearl Jam concert. The Seattle-based 90s grunge rock band has maintained its popularity over the years and, married with their crusade against Ticketmaster, Pearl Jam remains a tough ticket to get. Nobody tell the Israelis that.


A YouTube video of students from Olam Hamuzika music school in Maccabim-Reut is starting to go viral in Israel and is the latest push in the remarkable Bring Pearl Jam To Israel campaign. In the video, a mixed group of teens is crammed into a small studio where they daringly perform the classic Pearl Jam song Alive on guitars and drums, spurred on by a long-haired conductor in Converse-sneakers.

It’s not the first time young Israeli music students impress with their ability to rock. In fact, this video is inspired by a similar one. The Artik Music School Rock Orchestra from Yehud did a rock rendition of Taylor Swift’s I Knew You Were Trouble, which got close to 1.5 million hits on YouTube last year and prompted Swift to tweet about it and post it on her website. Since then, everyone knows that enthusiastic kids covering popular songs are the way to grab the public’s attention. And Israel’s 88FM Radio presenter Ben Red knows it too.

Red initiated the Bring Pearl Jam to Israel campaign last January, and opened a Facebook group devoted to the cause, in hope of fulfilling his dream of seeing his favorite band perform in the Yarkon Park, which has hosted concerts by some of the biggest international stars, from Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney to Madonna and U2. In the first six days, Red’s page gathered 5000 Likes. Today it has more than 23,500 Likes – an extremely impressive number for Israel.

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Like a Rolling Stone

Rock legend Al Kooper opens up to Princeton’s Sean Wilentz about making music with Bob Dylan, and more

Last fall, the people at Tablet asked if I’d be willing to interview my friend Kooper: just put a recorder between us and talk. A couple of months later, Al and I sat in his living room and switched on the little machine and talked about growing up Jewish in black churches, meeting Elvis, playing on “Like a Rolling Stone” with Bob Dylan, and hearing Mike Bloomfield play for the first time. With a bit of editing, this is part of what we said. It’s always a treat to see him and his wife Susan in situ: It means a fine supper, some wonderful chat, and listening to all sorts of stuff from his suitably enormous music collection.

If you keep your ears and eyes open, you might catch word of Al performing, and he always appears in February at his annual birthday bash at B.B. King’s near Times Square. He’s lost not a step. Many more of his stories appear in his acclaimed book, Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards, which is still very much in print. And, since you’re reading this on the Internet, go and check out his exceptional music blog, “New Music for Old People.” For now, though, read him getting right to the point at hand.

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Al Kooper: Culturally, one of the things I don’t like about the Jewish religion is that you can’t play instruments in temple as part of the service, like you can in Baptist places. So, I have attended more services in black Baptists churches than in temple. Why can’t they put instruments into temples? It would increase attendance. All you got is some guy blowing the shofar.

Another thing was, at both my parents’ funerals the rabbi didn’t allow me to play the organ, and I wanted to play the organ. However, when my father-in-law died, they let me.

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Curse of the Survivor

Singer Vera Gran was haunted by allegations of Nazi collaboration. A new book asks if survival made her guilty.

In 1930s Warsaw, a young beauty named Vera Gran made a name for herself as a seductive and charming cabaret singer with a voice fans likened to Edith Piaf’s and Marlene Dietrich’s. Gran (born Grynberg) was, along with her mother and sisters and thousands of other Jews, forced to live inside the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. During her time in the ghetto, she continued performing until she managed, with the help of her Polish husband, to escape its confines and go into hiding in 1942. Her family perished.

As devastating as that loss was, Gran’s nightmare took a harrowing new turn after the war, when she was suddenly accused by other survivors—including her accompanist, the pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman—of having collaborated with the Gestapo. Her story captivated the Polish writer Agata Tuszyńska, who was born after the war but whose own mother and grandmother struggled to survive in the Warsaw Ghetto and who feels still the effects of that confinement in her own life. Tuszyńska, in New York as part of the PEN World Voices Festival, made Gran’s acquaintance in Paris, when Gran was old and bitter and ever suspicious. Tuszyńska’s new book is Vera Gran: The Accused, and she talks with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about how she convinced the paranoid old woman to talk to her, about the nature of the accusations made against Gran, and about the slow process of discovery that has followed from Tuszyńska’s learning, at age 19, that her mother was a Jew.

Click here to listen to the interview.

 

Isra-Alien: Acoustic Rock for Dueling Mothers-in-Law

It's not so unusual these days for 2 guys with acoustic guitars to play venues around New York City. But it's pretty rare for those 2 guys to have met during their Israeli army service, and to include traditional Jewish simcha dances on their albums.

Enter Isra-Alien, a duo whose music stubbornly defies categorization. As Isra-Alien, Gilad Ben-Zvi and Oren Neiman play rootsy instrumental music – semi-classical, semi-flamenco, semi-Mediterranean. More Gypsy Kings than Garfunkel, more Haifa than Greenwich Village.
The pair has just released their new CD,  Somewhere is Here!.  It starts with a catchy rock number with a riff that could have been lifted from Jethro Tull's Aqualung, then settles into a classical groove. At times, the CD goes dreamy and soft, then spins off into intricate solos and counterpoints. It ends with 3 very different Jewish numbers: a hora, a classic klezmer ditty and a brogez– a wedding dance that revels in the tradition of the difficult mother-in-law.
Oh, and the name, "Isra-Alien?" A play on a common Israeli English mistake.