The Jewish Songwriters Behind the Elvis Presley Hit Machine

By Zachary Solomon for Jewniverse

Like Rodgers and Hammerstein before them, Leiber and Stoller were a songwriting duo to the stars.

Jerome Leiber and Mike Stoller, both born in 1933 to Jewish families in Baltimore and Long Island respectively, met in Los Angeles as teenagers and bonded over a mutual love of blues and R&B. With Stoller’s compositional acumen and Leiber’s talent as a wordsmith, they quickly found between them a sparkling collaborative energy.

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The Grateful Dead — Now in Hebrew!

By Matthue Roth for Jewniverse

Sagol 59 is the godfather of Israeli hip-hop — it’s not exactly a widely-contested title, but man, he’s good. Sagol has made a career out of doing what you’d least expect him to, releasing an American album at the height of his Hebrew-language popularity, then transitioned into a writer for Israeli newspapers.

Now he’s done what might be the most unexpected move of his career: He sings.

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Israelis Make Ultimate A Capella Bob Marley Tribute

This awesome a capella version of Bob Marley's 'Could You Be Loved' was made by Israeli musicians in honor of what would have been the late Marley's 70th Birthday. An event is being held in Israel on January 31 to celebrate in Tel Aviv.

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Where Star Trek and the Great American Songbook Meet the Jews

By Avishay Artsy for Jewniverse

What happened to the classic songs of the 1930’s and ‘40s? The standards of the Great American Songbook crooned by Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee or Ella Fitzgerald (and later made unforgettable by Star Trek‘s Data)?

“The B-Side” by Ben Yagoda reads like a detective story sniffing out a homicide, and the deceased is Tin Pan Alley, New York’s epicenter of songwriting and music publishing for decades. A surprising number of its authors and composers – George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen – were Jewish. In fact, Yagoda points out, they were almost all the same age, raised in middle-class New York families, and attended Columbia University.

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