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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