Radical Writer Tillie Olsen Gave Her Grandson Text Fragments. He Made Music From Them

Jesse Olsen Bay uses his grandmother’s unpublished prose on ‘Makings,’ by turns a whimsical and melancholy album

By Vox Tablet in Tablet Magazine

Writer Tillie Olsen died in 2007, at age 94. During her life, she worked at many jobs—as a union organizer, waitress, hotel maid, and factory worker, among others—and, with her husband, raised four daughters. That didn’t leave a lot of time to write. But once Olsen got to it, publishing her first story at the age of 43—she made a name for herself, writing elliptical, realist short stories and often angry essays taking on the plight of working people, social injustice, and the many ways that creativity is stifled.

Several years before she died, Olsen recruited her grandson Jesse Olsen Bay to help her move out of her San Francisco apartment. Olsen Bay is a musician and singer, and in the move he came upon a couple of boxes of what his grandmother called “blueys.” Named for the light blue type-writer paper Tillie Olsen favored, they contained writing of all sorts—poems, story ideas, phrases, ideas. Jesse was captivated by what he found on these “blueys” and asked his grandmother if they could collaborate on setting them to music. She agreed, and the result is an album called Makings. It has just come out, and Jesse Olsen Bay speaks from his home studio in Sebastopol, Calif., with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the kind of grandmother Olsen was, what Olsen Bay found so compelling in these text fragments, and how her Jewishly grounded activism informed his life.

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The Ballad of Daniel Antopolsky

Or how a Jewish American country music genius wound up farming chickens in France
 

By Daniel Krieger for Tablet Magazine

Last year, Daniel Antopolsky went to Nashville to make his first album, recording 11 songs of the hundreds he’d written over the past 40 years. The sessions had been scheduled for the prior year but one of his favorite chickens on the farm where he lives in Bordeaux fell ill, so he put off the trip to care for her. After she died, he finally set out for Nashville. At 66, he’d like for his songs to be out there on their own rather than gathering dust in a heap of notebooks and scattered papers.

The unlikely path that led Antopolsky from Bordeaux to Nashville began in Augusta, Ga., where he was raised Modern Orthodox, which he said was no big deal in the Deep South of the 1950s. “We thought of ourselves just as Americans. We weren’t closed off at all,” he said, sitting in the back room at the Fanelli Café during a brief visit to New York this past summer. Sporting a few days of stubble, he had on a worn gray Yankees cap and a notepad and pen tucked into the pocket of his black button-down shirt. Observing the Tisha B’av fast, he didn’t consume anything as he talked in a rapid-fire Southern drawl about his life, tossing in a few quotes from Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, whose book The Empty Chair he kept on hand. One message he took to heart was: “Learn to wait. If despite all your determined efforts you cannot seem to reach your goals, be patient. Between acceptance and anxiety, choose acceptance.”

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Top Ten Hanukkah Songs

Move Over 'Little Dreidel'

By Amy Deutsch for Kveller

Maybe it's the Christmas "competition," but it seems like there are more songs about Hanukkah than about any other Jewish holiday. And why not? It's fun and delicious and lasts for eight amazing days. So if the only Hanukkah song you know is "Dreidel Dreidel," read on.

1. Michelle Citrin, "Left to Right"

In 2008, Michelle Citrin and William Levin created this music video (reminiscent of the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company ad from The Office) with help from people across the world who submitted short clips of themselves lighting Hanukkah candles and then passing the candle on to someone else. It’s an awesome video and a catchy and sweet song. And even better, it reminds you which way you’re supposed to light the candles. (I forget every year!)

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Secular Isaelis TAKE BACK Shabbat by Remixing Traditions

From The Jewish Standard

There's a very interesting movement in Israel of secular Israelis retaking the songs and melodies of their ancestors. Pop musicians are increasingly remixing and interpreting traditional tunes and verses, creating Jewish experiences that are not tied to religious law or any organized religious denomination.

This video is of the Revivo Project, which convenes to sing Middle Eastern and North African Jewish tunes, as well as Sephardic interpretations of Ashkenazi traditional tunes, while participants eat, drink and even smoke nargila (Hooka).

This "spiritualization of Israeli culture" is a big focus of Yossi Klein Halevi, who frames it as an emerging phenomenon responding to disillusionment with collapse of the "messianism" of both the left (via the Oslo Accords) and the right (via withdrawal from Gaza and parts of the West Bank). Fascinating video of Klein outlining his thesis, including the actual music involved, in the comments.

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11 Great, Modern Hanukkah Songs

Can you name any Hanukkah songs beyond the cutesy "I Have a Little Dreidel" and Adam Sandler's famous (and slightly inappropriate) "Chanukah Song"? In fact, when it comes to Jewish holidays, Hanukkah boasts plenty of great tunes - you just don't know them yet! Here are 11 of our favorite Hanukkah songs, many of them from the new Chanukah Today album available through URJ Books and Music. Listed in no particular order, here's a sampling of the best and brightest new Hanukkah music, videos for most of the songs.

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Shlomo Katz to Release New Album “Likrat Shabbat” 11 Unreleased Songs of R’ Shlomo Carlebach

During the Hebrew month of Cheshvan, or MarCheshvan, [Bitter Cheshvan] there are no Jewish holidays. Jvillage Network, therefore, will be printing articles relating to Jewish Arts.

As we are approaching the 20th yarzeit of this century’s most influential composer in the Jewish world – I am thrilled to announce the release of ‘Likrat Shabbat’. This album is something I’ve wanted to do for years, but couldn’t find a more appropriate time to share this with the world than now. Recorded in the holy city Yerushalayim, ‘Likrat Shabbat’ consists of eleven original compositions of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach ob’m, songs he never recorded.

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Another Window on Joni Mitchell From Her Jewish BFF, Malka Marom

Why the Israeli child of Holocaust survivors was the right person to hear the reclusive artist out and tell her tale

By David Yaffe for Tablet Magazine

“I think Joni is Jewish,” said Malka Marom, the author of Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words. We were speaking mischievously about a story that Joni Mitchell had, on separate occasions, told to both of us. Some years before the death of her parents, she learned that her father had his name changed at Ellis Island. She had already learned that he also had Native American blood. So she asked her mother, “What’s it like to be married to a Jewish Indian?” But Mitchell, who turns 71 today, is not about to have Henry Louis Gates, Jr. find her roots on PBS, and Marom was speaking figuratively. Marom is definitely Jewish—she is Israeli—and because she feels intimately connected to Joni Mitchell, she feels that Joni is of the tribe, at least in spirit. (Joni’s second husband was Jewish, but their wedding was Buddhist.) “In her soul she is Jewish, even if not in her blood,” Malka said with a laugh.

Joni Mitchell does not like to be limited to any religion, musical genre, or any other pop culture archetype that may be applied to lesser figures. She is, when she feels like it, a marathon talker (Full disclosure: I am writing a book about Joni Mitchell. Our first conversation, which lasted 12 hours and could have gone longer if I didn’t have a plane to catch, ranged from her work on a ballet based on her music, to her new album—her first of new material in 10 years, to her on-and-off admiration of Bob Dylan, her former lover Leonard Cohen, alternate guitar tunings, a memorable night with Miles Davis during his silent period, the stupidity of the music business, and the imminent destruction of our planet, which she, like an environmental Cassandra, sees coming.)

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The Folk Band Named After a Hasidic Rabbi

Zusha’s wordless melodies captivate fans. Just don’t call them a Jewish act.

By Hillel Broder for Tablet Magazine

Selling out an early Sunday night show at the Mercury Lounge on Bowery is nearly unheard of. But on this past Sunday night, standing before a sold-out crowd, Elisha Mlotek told a sobering and existential tale of the Hasidic Rabbi Zusha of Anipoli, his band’s namesake. Zusha, Mlotek explained, bemoaned his life on his deathbed with the self-admonition, “Zusha, when I pass from this world to the next, I will be asked, ‘Zusha, why weren’t you Zusha?’”

On one hand, the wordless original niggunim, or religious melodies, chanted by Shlomo Gaisin, the band’s towering, bearded, and frocked frontman, a forceful and far-ranging vocalist, struck me immediately as a tribute to Zusha’s Hasidic heritage. He offered at once crescendos of musical mastery and nuanced arpeggios of exploratory, religious incantation. He was at once the band’s main instrument and vocalist, offering a ceaseless melody and solo above the backing band, vocals, and harmonies. His voice’s range and character conjured a mix of Chris Martin and Regina Spektor, though he also channeled musical instrumentation—saxophone, guitar—in his wordless and practiced improvisations. During a vocal interlude, he suggested that the wordless form offers audience members the space to insert their own language into the melody—inspired by, perhaps, a Hasidic theology founded on a theory of experimental poetry.


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How Time’s Arrow and the Phrygian Half-Step Make Jewish Music Holy

For centuries, Western classical music propelled listeners toward Christian salvation. Then Jewish music changed everything.

By David P. Goldman for Tablet Magazine

In his 1944 essay The Halakhic Mind, Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik makes a striking assertion about the directionality of time:

The reversibility of time and of the causal order is fundamental in religion, for otherwise the principle of conversion would be sheer nonsense. The act of reconstructing past psychical life, of changing the arrow of time from a forward to a retrospective direction, is the main premise of penitence. One must admit with Kierkegaard that repetition is a basic religious category. The homo religiosus, oscillating between sin and remorse, flight from and return to God, frequently explores not only the traces of a bygone past retained in memory, but a living “past” which is consummated in his emergent time-consciousness. It is irrelevant whether reversibility is a transcendental act bordering on the miraculous, as Kierkegaard wants us to believe, or a natural phenomenon that has its roots in the unique structure of the religious act. The paradox of a directed yet reversible time concept remains.

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Scott Ian: The Hellish Childhood of a Jewish Metal God

In an excerpt from his new autobiography ‘I’m the Man,’ the guitarist from Anthrax remembers growing up in Bayside, Queens

 By Scott Ian for Tablet Magazine

 

I was born in Jamaica Hospital in Queens at 7 a.m. on New Year’s Eve, 1963. It was an auspicious beginning, sort of. Oddly enough, that’s where the legendary Music Building was located, which is where Anthrax, Metallica, and other bands made history writing and rehearsing some of the earliest and most memorable thrash songs. Metallica even lived at the place for a while. And man, it was a slum. When I went there with Anthrax, I used to think, “God, this neighborhood is such a dive. It must have been so much different when my parents were living here.” But maybe it wasn’t, and that was one of the hardships they had to face. If so, it was one of many.

My parents never had it easy. They were second-generation immigrants, and when I was growing up my father, Herbert Rosenfeld, was working in the jewelry business and my mom, Barbara Haar, was a housewife. I think that was part of why she was so unhappy. She didn’t want to be a happy homemaker. She wasn’t cut out for it and didn’t have the patience. My parents came from working-class families and got married way too young. My dad’s father, Harold Rosenfeld, was born in 1908 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and my grandmother Sylvia was born in 1912 in Manhattan. They met in the south shore of Brooklyn while he was driving a Good Humor truck. They got married in 1938 and he continued to work in the summer. Then in the winter before my aunt and dad were born, my grandparents would drive to Florida every winter in a Model-T Ford and live there with the money he made selling ice cream—like they were on vacation.

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The Lady Gaga of Hasidic Music

by Jenny Levison for Jewniverse


He’s been called the Jewish Elvis; he’s been called the Lady Gaga of Hasidic Music. He’s a rock star, he’s a YouTube sensation, and he’s a Hasidic Jew. He is Lipa Schmeltzer, and his wardrobe is way more interesting than yours.

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The Latest From Our Favorite 11-Piece Afrobeat Jewish Avant-Garde Jazz Band

By Matthue Roth for Jewniverse

Zion80 is a big band with a big sound—a full horn section alongside multiple percussionists, keyboards, and guitars. They’re a combination of Jewish music, Afrobeat, and avant-garde jazz—late last year, during their residency at a jazz club in the Lower East Side, the band had sixteen players, plus a surprise guest sitting in. Their first album featured funky, super-danceable versions of traditional Jewish liturgical tunes by rabbi/songwriter Shlomo Carlebach.

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‘Leonard Bernstein: An American Musician,’ by Allen Shawn

In an excerpt from a new biography, the great showman asks, ‘What does music mean?’

By Yale University Press (Sponsored) by Tablet Magazine

In writing the text for I Hate Music in 1943, Bernstein had not only imagined a child’s impressions of concerts. He had also expressed some of his own impatience with the way classical music was presented and perceived. In his Young People’s Concerts in Carnegie Hall he was able to address children as an idealized father figure or older brother, while also communicating subliminally that he could still identify with them. An electric current of subversiveness ran through these concerts, as Bernstein seemed almost to reach inside the psyches of his listeners and unlock the barriers between them and music. The concerts created a sense of community, but they were also the exact opposite of “mass entertainment.” They addressed the individual, not the collective. Parents who brought their children to Carnegie Hall and later Philharmonic Hall, hoping that their child would receive an injection of “cultivation” and “fineness,” and somehow emerge more civilized as a result, were instead confronted by someone who was trying to communicate with a deeper, more philosophical, more emotional side of their children than perhaps they were.

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Quiet King of Orthodox Music

Yossi Green, the Satmar-raised composer who found inspiration in Roberta Flack, writes Jewish spirituals

By Joseph Winkler for Tablet Magazine

One evening last month, under a ceiling visibly weighed down by a library of over 10,000 books, Yossi Green, one of the most prolific and talented composers in the world of traditional Jewish music, performed a kumzitz. Part VH1 Storytellers episode and part campfire singalong, the performance was for a 40-strong gang of jittery, somewhat inattentive 18- to 21-year-old yeshiva bochurim. Green, who speaks in the style of Don Corleone and dresses in designer shoes and glasses, played with genuine spirituality and, ever the entertainer, molded his reactions and songs to the audience’s desire for a more jaunty experience. They wanted to sing and shout, and Green obliged them.

Though you might not know it, even a cursory look at the contemporary Jewish music scene reveals Green’s comprehensive influence. He is the composer behind the stars of contemporary Orthodox music, with its ecology of popular songs, including those of Mordechai Ben David (“Anavim, Anavim,” “Rashi’s Niggun,” “Da’agah Minayin”), Avraham Fried (“Aderaba,” “Tanya,” “Yerushalayim Oro Shel Olam,” “V’Zakeini”), Yaakov Shwekey (“Ata Shomer,” “Yedid,” “Ki Hatov”), Dudu Fisher (“Akeidat Yitzchak,” “Kaddish”), and Lipa Schmeltzer (“Wake up Leap of Faith,” “Kaveh”). Green also works closely with many of the rising talents of the current generation, including Shloime Daskal, Shimon Craimer, Shloime Gertner, Shloime Taussig, Shragee Gestetner, and Cantor Yitzchok Meir Helfgot. His eighth album was released this summer. Green’s acolytes treat him like a visionary genius, underappreciated in the wider Jewish community.







Yossi Green from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.


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“Lincoln’s Nigun—Yamin U’smol”: The Perfect Song to Usher in the Sabbath Queen

A lush take on the traditional Jewish hymn “Lecha Dodi.”

By Elissa Goldstein for Jewcy

Here’s a blissful way to usher in the Sabbath Queen: give a listen to “Lincoln’s Nigun—Yamin U’smol,” a new song from Brooklyn-based musician and composer Joey Weisenberg, with gorgeous lead vocals by Deborah Sacks. It’s a lovely take on Lecha Dodi, the traditional Sabbath eve hymn. (You’ll get why it’s called “Lincoln’s Nigun” when you start listening.)

This track comes from the recently-released album Brooklyn Spirituals, the fourth in a series of liturgical recordings composed and led by Weisenberg, whose mission is to “reinvigorate Jewish life through song,” according to a 2013 article in Tablet Magazine. The album was recorded in the choir loft of the Kane Street Synagogue in Brooklyn, which until recently was crowded “with what seemed like a century’s worth of accumulated shul accoutrements.” After decluttering the space, an intimate studio and performance space was born. And now we reap its luscious musical fruits!

Enjoy, and Shabbat shalom.

 

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Rocking The Cello, Fuzz Box Included

George Robinson; Special To The Jewish Week

Maya Beiser calls her eclectic and unpredictable musical career a “wild ride,” and her latest CD, “Uncovered” (Innova), certainly suggests that the brilliant cellist is up for any challenge.

The album, which was released this week, is a collection of rock and blues classics as reimagined for cello and rhythm section, with dense multi-tracking and fuzz-box distortion. Beiser will be performing the material live as well, kicking off a brief tour on Sept. 4 at Le Poisson Rouge (158 Bleecker St., [212] 505-3474, lepoissonrouge.com).

Born in the late-1960s on a kibbutz in the Galilee, Beiser grew up surrounded by classical music and the Latin American music her family brought from Buenos Aires to Israel. But the rock and blues of “Uncovered” also come from the heart.

“Here I was, a 15-year-old classical music geek, growing up in an insular world of Western classical music,” Beiser recalls, her storytelling punctuated by chuckles. “One day I heard Janis Joplin on the radio, I think it was ‘Me and Bobby McGee.’ I was blown away by her approach to singing and performing: that raw, immediate engagement. I remember vowing, ‘This is how I want to play the cello, the way she sings.’”

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Let there be peace on earth; let it begin in me… for love is all we need.

Moved by a summer of pain and suffering in the Middle East, at home and around the world, Neshama Carlebach and Josh Nelson have responded in the form of a prayerful, riveting and emotionally raw music video, produced by Josh Nelson.

Musical artists with a lifelong commitment to Israel, trans-denominational appeal and a message of unity for the Jewish community and the world at large, Neshama Carlebach and Josh Nelson were compelled to record the legendary melody composed by the late, great Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach in the midst of the violence in Israel and Gaza…and in the face of the resurgence of anti-Semitism around the world.

“As a Jew, as a mother and as a human being, I am terrified by the escalating hatred that I see in this world,” stated Neshama Carlebach, daughter of Shlomo Carlebach. “I grew up knowing that my father’s family ran from Nazi-occupied Europe and was aware of my deep blessing; that I was living securely and free of fear. I hear his voice in my head. This song is our prayer.”

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Leonard Bernstein Sculpture Unveiled at Tanglewood

(JTA) — A bronze sculpture of Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), one of the last century’s towering musical figures, was unveiled last week at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO).
Boston Symphony Orchestra/Twitter

The sculpture, by artist Penelope Jencks, is the second in a series planned depicting Tanglewood’s most iconic music figures, according to a statement issued by by the BSO. The first sculpture, also by Jencks, is of Aaron Copland, Bernstein’s teacher and mentor, who in 1940 recommended the young Bernstein for Serge Koussevitzky’s conducting class at Tanglewood.

Over the next 50 years, Bernstein, who went on to lead the New York Philharmonic, and later conducted around the world, frequently in Israel, became a highly-anticipated presence at the renowned music center, known for its pastoral scenery. “Tanglewood has always been, and will continue to be, the spiritual home of Leonard Bernstein,” said composer and Academy Award winner John Williams, whose donation to the BSO is funding the sculpture series. A courtyard at the music center is named after Bernstein.

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How a Hamas Anthem Became a Hit in Israel

Why Israeli kids are singing ‘Up, Do Terror Attacks!’

By Yoram Hazony for Tablet Magazine

A few days ago, I called a young relative who is serving in the Israeli air force and asked him: “Do you know that song—“Kum, Aseh Piguim”?

Without missing a beat, he said: “You mean that song that’s a hit all over Israel? The song that all my friends are singing all the time?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That song. I wanted to know if you can explain to me why they are singing it?”

What I actually meant to ask was: Can you please explain to me why all the young people in Israel are singing a song entitled “Up, Do Terror Attacks”—a song recorded and released by Hamas in Gaza, which repeatedly calls for killing or expelling all the Jews from Israel? But I didn’t have to say all that. He knew why I was asking.

“It’s because it makes us feel good,” he replied.

By then I wasn’t surprised. I had made several other calls, both to my own children and to other young people participating in different branches of the Israeli armed forces, and had gotten versions of this same answer from all of them: All their friends are singing it. It’s basically become the de facto anthem of the Israeli war effort. And they are singing it because it makes them feel good. The question, of course, is why Israeli soldiers, and their brothers and sisters at home, feel good to be singing a song about exterminating them and their families, along with the country they have sworn to defend.

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A Hasidic Girl Band Gears Up for Its Debut at a Storied Rock Venue

From the Archive: With a women’s-only gig at Arlene’s Grocery in New York this week, Bulletproof Stockings hits the bigger time

By Vox Tablet

In 2011, adventure-seeking rock drummer-turned-Hasidic mother of four Dalia Shusterman became a widow. At about the same time, Perl Wolfe, born and raised in the Lubavitch sect of Hasidism, married and divorced, was living with her parents and beginning to write her own music. A few months later, the two women would meet in Crown Heights, Brooklyn and soon after that begin recording their first EP, titled “Down to the Top.”

Their band name, Bulletproof Stockings—a somewhat derogatory term used to refer to the opaque stockings worn by some Orthodox women—hints at their insider status as Hasidic women and also at a kind of freedom or irreverence they bring to their enterprise.

Bulletproof Stockings, which also includes Elisheva Maistser on cello and Dana Pestun on violin, performs for women only, in keeping with kol isha, the prohibition on men hearing women sing that is adhered to among Orthodox Jews. They also dress modestly, as is customary in the Lubavitch community to which they belong. But when playing music, they are not contained. They can be loud and raucous and sooner find common ground with the likes of Jane’s Addiction or the Throwing Muses than with Keren Ann. For that, they’ve attracted attention well beyond their Crown Heights enclave. This week, they take their show to Arlene’s Grocery—a musical mainstay of Manhattan’s Lower East Side—for the venue’s first-ever women’s-only show.

Last summer, they talked with Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry about their musical backgrounds, about ways their faith gets expressed in their music, and about why it’s so important for women to have opportunities to rock out without any guys around. [Running time: 24:46.]

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'Jews Who Rock' Only Scratches Surface of Fame and Faith

Exhibit Fails To Go Beyond Celebrity 'Jewspotting'

By Laura Hodes for The Jewish Daily Forward

In the gallery of Jewish Museum Milwaukee, sunlight streams in through windows that display colorful floor-to-ceiling banners from a concert shot taken at Milwaukee Summerfest in 1995. Nearby is a display of a redwood and abalone inlay bass guitar loaned to the museum by members of Howie Epstein’s family. Howie, bassist for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, also played on recordings by Bob Dylan, Stevie Nicks, the Village People, Warren Zevon and others, and was born in Milwaukee and attended local Nicolet High School.

Throughout the exhibit “Jews Who Rock: A Musical History Tour,” currently on view at the museum, are artifacts and photos from a variety of Jewish artists — some surprising (Geddy Lee of Rush, Warren Zevon), some not so surprising (Barry Manilow, Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, Paul Simon).

Visitors learn much about the Jewish backgrounds of various rockers. What we don’t learn, however, is how Judaism influenced their music, either as something to inspire or react against. For instance, a plaque informs us that Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman, but we don’t learn about how writers have argued that Dylan rejected his Judaism and became an uber-assimilationist, as David E. Kaufman wrote in “Jewhooing the Sixties.” Others have argued the very opposite — Seth Rogovoy posits that Dylan’s lyrics were actually inspired by his Jewish heritage in “Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet.”

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Lincoln Center Presents an Opera Without Jews, Set in Auschwitz

‘The Passenger’ is a moving Polish Jewish-Catholic Soviet hybrid with a glaring omission. But is it a ‘Holocaust opera’?

By Allan M. Jalon for Tablet Magazine

The Lincoln Center Festival’s publicity for an opera titled The Passenger, aimed at New Yorkers eager for an unusual musical experience, is magnetic: a “forgotten Holocaust opera,” as the copy calls it, adding that Dmitri Shostakovich hailed it “a perfect masterpiece.” Completed by the Polish-Jewish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg in 1968, much of the opera is set in Auschwitz. But beyond a few lines given to a Jewish character, there’s no explicit Jewish presence in this concentration camp. Seeing the work, it’s hard to believe: An opera set in the killing factory known for subtracting Jews from the world, and it subtracts Jews.

The main characters of The Passenger are two Polish gentiles and a German camp officer, surrounded by an international array of women packed into a barracks. They come from Warsaw, Zagreb, and other cities—and then there’s one Greek Jew. Her name is Hannah and she has so little to sing—“This star they pinned on me, this star I have to wear is the fatal mark of my death,” is most of it—that she’s easy to miss.

The opera, coming to the Park Avenue Armory in New York for three performances starting July 10, reflects convolutions of Holocaust memory through the middle of the 20th century—years when the monumental term did not yet exist, when the word was the less imposing atrocities. In the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, separate political realities suggested different memories on the war years. And yet this minimally Jewish Auschwitz comes with acridly soaring music that weaves visceral terror with pathos. Weinberg fled to the Soviet Union as Hitler’s forces invaded Poland in 1939 but lost his family to the Nazis. Some people hear that history in his music, finding traces of a Jewish sensibility. To me, it sounds less Jewish and more like a secular Modernist cry of human suffering under Hitler and Stalin.

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The Righteous Gentile With The $4 Million Violin

Founder of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, rescuer of over 1,000 Jews from Nazi persecution, world-renowned virtuoso violinist. This is a guy we can get behind.

Born in Poland in 1882, Bronisław Huberman had an ear for the harrowing trends of Nazi ascension. After writing an open letter in 1933 calling upon German intellectuals to denounce Nazism, Huberman recruited Jewish musicians from across Europe to join him in Palestine.

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- Zachary Solomon for Jewniverse

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Jewish Music in Berlin

From Yiddish Pop to Unkosher Parties

More than just klezmer: in Berlin's vibrant music scene, young artists combine Jewish traditions with modern styles.

Anyone who associates Jewish music exclusively with klezmer will be in for a surprise in Berlin. Increasingly, young artists are combining Jewish musical traditions with elements of modern styles. The range covers the entire gambit of genres. While events across the city have looked back on the capital's cultural diversity in the 1920s as part of Berlin’s current theme of the year, "Diversity Destroyed", a vibrant and forward-looking development can also be seen on the stages of today.

This is because Jewish Berlin is much more than just a past phenomenon to be remembered and commemorated; it is an active part of the present-day identity of the city. It's exciting to discover the diverse ways Berlin artists are mixing their own styles with Jewish traditions and experiences to create something entirely new. We've put together a small selection for you here below.
Yiddish Evergreens in a New Guise

Classics such as "Bei mir bist du sheyn" are anything but old-fashioned or pure nostalgia for singer Sharon Brauner. Brauner, who grew up in West Berlin, combines the songs of her childhood with elements from jazz and pop, Balkan polka, Arabic music, and even South American rhythms on her album Jewels.

Yiddish Way of Life in the 21st Century

On her album Jewdyssee, German-Israeli artist Maya Saban celebrates the "Yiddish way of life in the 21st century" by taking us on a musical odyssey through tradition, present and future, in a mixture of electro beats, trumpets and clarinets. The musician has been recently working for Lena Meyer-Landrut’s team on the German TV show The Voice Kids, but also appears regularly on Berlin concert stages.

Jewish Avant-Garde with Tradition

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The Secret Jewish History of Tupac Shakur

Was Bad Boy Rapper Just a Nice Jewish Son?

By Seth Rogovoy for The Jewish Daily Forward

Tupac Shakur, the notorious rapper whose career was cut short when he died in a hail of bullets at the age of 25 in 1996, may seem an unlikely candidate for memorialization in the form of a Broadway musical. Yet sure enough, “Holler if Ya Hear Me,” an $8 million production “inspired by” the work of the gangsta rapper which includes 21 of his songs, is currently playing the Palace Theatre in New York.

This is not some off-the-wall, crass attempt to cash in on the controversial legend of Shakur. Among the musical’s producers is Afeni Shakur, Tupac Shakur’s mother, a former member of the Black Panthers. Afeni Shakur is nothing if not protective of her son’s creative legacy; his brief but astounding career on the rap charts made him one of the best-selling recording artists of his time. In other words, she’s not doing it for the money.

There’s something else going on here, and it just may be that finally the stars have aligned to present Tupac Shakur — the man whose music former Vice President Dan Quayle said “has no place in our society”; a convicted felon who in a few years was in and out of prison and court for a variety of violent crimes; a man accused of being the perpetrator of several shootings who was himself gunned down in an infamous drive-by that has never been solved — as what he may really have been: a nice Jewish boy who loved his mother.

Tupac Amaru Shakur was born in East Harlem on June 16, 1971, to parents who preached a violent form of black nationalism. Despite chronic poverty, Shakur’s mother made sure he always had access to a well-rounded education, especially in the performing arts.

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Meet the Skirt-Wearing Rock Star Cousin of Moshe Dayan Who Could Be Prime Minister

Touring on a new album, Aviv Geffen talks about Rabin, Mizrahi music, and why the Dayans are no Kennedys

By Adi Gold and Yoav Sivan for Tablet Magazine

Aviv Geffen wasn’t Israel’s first rocker, but he may have been the first to adopt the rocker’s role in an unprecedented totality: The unrelenting struggle for an audience coupled with the refusal to please fans, to whom the wrong things must be said at the wrong time. Indeed, Geffen, one of Israel’s most iconic and enduring rock stars, was, for years, filled with rage. He used to chant, “We’re a f*&#ed-up generation” and sing songs that dealt, not always kindly, with Geffen’s favorite subject matter of the last 20 years: his painful childhood, courtesy of a father who wasn’t available when the son needed him most. (The father is Yonatan Geffen, a songwriter who penned some of Israel’s greatest hits.) His musical influences include the local—notably Shalom Hanoch and Arik Einstein—and the foreign—David Bowie, Bob Dylan, and Supertramp. A dozen of his albums in Hebrew, for which he wrote most of the lyrics and music, reached gold and platinum.

But on “Pain on Top of Pain” (ke’ev al ke’ev), the second single off Geffen’s upcoming album, the singer strikes a different tone. The song begins, “I made a promise that I will not return here. … My childhood is buried in some song which I cannot recall,” and ends with very un-Geffen-like sentiment, “I forgive because there’s no time left.”

A country that extols family life might have needed the son of perhaps its most illustrious family to introduce the notion of unapologetic individualism. Geffen’s uncle was Moshe Dayan, the general-turned-politician; another relative was Ezer Weizman, the general-turned-president. To list all of Geffen’s famous relatives in arts and politics is nearly impossible. Geffen recalls how he, then a young boy, together with his Uncle Moshe (“an amazing uncle”), would piece together ancient shards onto an archaeological artifact in Dayan’s collection. Geffen purports to follow the example of his most famous uncle, but with a twist. “I’m the radical who wants to do the opposite of everything he did. He conquered Jerusalem, I want to give it away. He was macho, I want to be gentle.”

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The secret Jewish history of The Rolling Stones

British band was first to use Yiddish in a top 40 hit.

By The Forward and Seth Rogovoy in Haaretz

The Rolling Stones taking the stage at HaYarkon Park in Tel Aviv on June 4, represented more than just the world’s greatest and longest-running rock band’s first concert in Israel. It also marked one small victory in the war against a rock ’n’ roll boycott of Israel being waged by some English rockers, mostly at the instigation of Roger Waters of Pink Floyd who, despite some very public efforts, couldn’t sway Mick Jagger and Keith Richards against finally making their Holy Land debut.

The Rolling Stones, in fact, have had a long and fruitful collaboration with Jewish artists, friends and associates, and some Jewish themes have even made their way into their music and lyrics.

Like many early British rock bands, The Rolling Stones started out playing American blues. Most of the members of the Stones served their apprenticeship in Blues Incorporated, a band led by blues guitarist Alexis Korner, who was born in Paris to an Austrian Jewish father and a Turkish-Greek mother. Stones founding guitarist Brian Jones, drummer Charlie Watts, and keyboardist Ian Stewart all played with Blues Incorporated, and vocalist Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards jammed with the group on a number of occasions, before the five joined forces and formed The Rolling Stones.

Building on the lessons he learned as a protege of Brian Epstein — the Jewish owner of a record store in Liverpool, who turned that city’s most popular bar band into the international sensation known as The Beatles — Andrew Loog Oldham, also Jewish, soon took over management of The Rolling Stones, reshaped their image, and steered them toward a broader musical palette.

For one, he turned them into the anti-Beatles, giving them a more “dangerous” and rebellious image — longer and unkempt hair, and an overt sense of sexuality and violence. Oldham enlisted the services of photographer Gered Mankowitz — the son of English Jewish screenwriter Wolf Mankowitz — who was responsible for the band’s early album covers and publicity shots. Mankowitz was as responsible as Oldham was for creating the Stones’s bad-boy image, and he was the official tour photographer on the band’s first United States tour in 1965.
 
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The Meanest Genius in Portland, Maine

Outsider jazz great Allen Lowe scorns his neighbors, argues endlessly with himself

By Theodore Ross for Tablet Magazine
It was a bleak January morning in Portland, Maine. Clouds heavy with foul weather and wet snow enshrouded the city’s stern Victorian houses and dormant factories. Casco Bay, white-capped and gray and dotted with mournful tankers, blew an icy gale. In the lobby of the Holiday Inn, where I was staying, wildly cheerful out-of-towners, members of a booster club for a visiting minor-league hockey team, milled about, looking beefy and hungover. Stacks of complimentary USA Today gathered dust at strategic locations. A Mainer—I swear he was wearing a flannel shirt and one of those plaid hunting caps with the earflaps—was drunk at 8 a.m. and arguing with a receptionist that he’d accused of stealing his medications.

Allen Lowe—late-blooming jazzman, self-taught music-historian, and 20-year disgruntled Portland resident—looked downright merry. Lowe, 60, a lopsided and harrumphing grin half-hidden behind his profusion of graying hair and beard and the Brezhnev-ian shrubbery of his eyebrows, had plenty about which to be cheerful. In 2013, he published two deeply researched histories of the blues and rock ’n’ roll, Really the Blues?: A Horizontal Chronicle of the Vertical Blues, 1893–1959 and God Didn’t Like It: Electric Hillbillies, Singing Preachers, and the Beginning of Rock and Roll, 1950–1970. Critic Greil Marcus called Really the Blues? a “crucial contribution to American culture,” adding that “all those who want to see our musical history whole are in [Lowe’s] debt.” Matt Glaser, the artistic director of the American Music Roots Program at the Berklee College of Music, has also said that “Lowe knows more about early American music—the development of it, the relations between rural and urban music, white and black music, white and black repertoires—than anyone in the field, including myself.”

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Is It OK To Dance After the Holocaust? Absolutely, Says the Band Golem

The klezmer punk rockers cover lots of ground on their rollicking new album, ‘Tanz.’ They want you to get crazy to all of it.

By Vox Tablet

Known for frenzied takes on Yiddish and Eastern European music, the members of Golem bring the party with them wherever the band plays and no matter what they’re singing about. Their new album, Tanz, which means dance in Yiddish, covers religious rites, anti-Semitism in the former Soviet Union, dark children’s poems, and more, in a mix of rollicking interpretations of classic songs and original numbers.

Golem’s founder and accordionist, Annette Ezekiel Kogan, and its violinist, Jeremy Brown, join Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about the band’s surprising Mexican fan-base, how painful it is to sing the song “Odessa” now that Ukraine is in the throes of Russian occupation, and their ambivalence (now overcome) about singing about religious topics when the band members themselves are not particularly devout.

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Orthodox Singers Find Creative Voice by Performing for Other Women Only

Cultivating Female Musicians Within Constraints of Halacha

By Leeor Bronis for The Jewish Daily Forward

Talia Lakritz, 20, a Modern Orthodox Jewish sophomore at Barnard College, and her two girlfriends got off a very crowded No. 3 train at Kingston Avenue in a fevered hurry of glee, as they headed to an open-mic night for women at the gallery at The Creative Soul, an organization in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.

Inside the gallery, new mothers cradled their crying babies, and teenage girls clutched their guitars, waiting for a turn to try out new material.

One by one, the women shuffled onstage. Most performances were about the Jewish faith and God. One woman read a short story on the struggles of motherhood and marriage. Another performed a traditional Hebrew song and urged the crowd to join in, creating a sometimes patchy but mostly harmonious choir of soft melodies.

“This is so cool!” said Tova Kamioner, 20, one of Lakritz’s friends. “Who knew this existed?”

The women only open-mic night provides a creative outlet for women who observe kol isha, the halachic prohibition that prevents women from singing in front of men who aren’t their husbands.

Finally it was Lakritz’s turn. She perched herself on a stool in front of a keyboard and belted out an original song she calls “Superhero,” an upbeat pop melody with lyrics that read, “They say all the good ones are taken or gay.”

“I guess it’s not typical of what other religious women are writing,” Lakritz said after her performance. “But I never have a problem when I sing it.”

Lakritz, a native of Milwaukee, is considered a star among the crowd of amateurs. As a member of The Jewish Women’s Talent Agency, a not-for-profit organization known as JeWTA that was created last year to foster Orthodox female artists, she’s made a name for herself in Crown Heights and beyond, setting up her own blog and YouTube page and performing whenever she can. In order to dissuade men from watching her, each online video begins with a disclaimer suggested by her rabbi: “For Women’s Eyes Only.”

“From time to time, I get some creepy messages from guys, saying, ‘Please, can I see your videos?’” Lakritz said with a laugh.

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