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Jesse Olsen Bay uses his grandmother’s unpublished prose on ‘Makings,’ by turns a whimsical and melancholy album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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For more great Hanukkah ideas, check out our    page.