This Is Jewish Music, Too

The art music of Israel is performed at the Kennedy Center in the Pro Musica Hebraica series, recently featuring the Ariel Quartet.

By Barrymore Laurence Scherer for The Wall Street Journal
Some years ago, Charles and Robyn Krauthammer were discussing a conundrum: To many who knew about Jewish or Hebraic music, their conception was limited to three things: Klezmer (the infectious Yiddish dance-band music with its weeping clarinet skirls); Israeli folk music typified by “Hava Nagila,” the ubiquitous wedding dance tune; and synagogue music for cantor, choir or congregation. Yet the rich repertoire of Jewish classical music was generally unknown. By “Jewish classical music,” the Krauthammers were thinking of concert music—art music composed by Jews (or even non-Jews) that shares a common inspiration in the ancient modes, melodies and sometimes Hebrew and Yiddish texts of traditional Jewish culture in Europe, the eastern Mediterranean region and beyond.

Mr. Krauthammer is the Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist with a former psychiatric practice in his back pocket. Ms. Krauthammer is a sculptor and painter with a former international law practice in hers. In 2008 they founded Pro Musica Hebraica, an annual concert series at the Kennedy Center consecrated, according to its mission statement, to exposing its audience “to the magnificent range of Jewish music” and “reintegrat[ing] the Jewish musical past and present into the mainstream repertoire of chamber and symphonic musical performance.”

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Five Repentance/Atonement Songs For Yom Kippur

Return to your emo, 90s self.

By Jon Reiss

Yom Kippur is about denying yourself pleasure for a day in order to be properly submerged into the despair you’ve cast out into the word with your bad deeds. You wake up, go to shul, stand, sit, stand, sit, stand, sit and then go home and wait for shul again. If your mom is anything like mine, you mustn’t watch TV, play hide-and-seek, or do anything pleasurable as you wait to return to services.

However, if you’re going to watch TV, maybe watch something appropriate, something with that Yom Kippur malaise, like Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark. As far as music’s concerned, it shouldn’t be too hard to find appropriate tunes to help you ruminate over your bad behavior. Certain genres of music are especially heavy on repentance/atonement-centric songs, while others are almost entirely devoid of them.  One is not likely to find many Yom Kippur-appropriate songs in the discography of Brittney Spears. But jump back 20 years and the most popular music of the time was full of atonement. Alternative rock is a treasure trove of sad, sappy music for hungry, weary Jews on Yom Kippur. Emo—old emo—specifically, is also pretty packed with sad, repentant lyrics.  (Though modern emo is much too self-obsessed and glammy to dwell on any wrongdoing.) Here are five Yom Kippur-appropriate songs to listen to in between services.

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The High Holidays are upon us, check out our High Holidays Spotlight Kit

 

Meet Bin Laden’s Favorite Jewish Musician

By Zachary Solomon for Jewniverse

Here’s who you might not have expected to have an extensive audiotape collection: Osama Bin Laden. Here’s who you definitely wouldn’t expect to be found in it: an Algerian Jew.

The BBC just reported on the findings of Williams College professor Flagg Williams’ forthcoming book, The Audacious Ascetic, on Bin Laden’s private music collection which yes, included an album by Enrico Macias, a celebrated Algerian musician. If his name doesn’t ring a bell, here’s why it should:

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Music of the High Holy Days

In leading up the the High Holidays that begin this Sunday evening at sunset, enjoy some of the music of B'nai Jeshurun in NYC to get you in the HHD mood.

While you're at it, check out our High Holiday Spotlight Kit and our Pinterest page.

Israel’s Happiness Revolution

What my preschooler’s taste in Mizrahi pop says about where the country is at

By Matti Friedman for Tablet Magazine
The Israeli culture wars arrived in my kitchen a few months ago when I discovered that the cure for my daughter’s grumpy preschooler moods was a Hebrew dance hit called “Happiness Revolution.” The song is of the genre known loosely as Mizrahi, a blend of Middle Eastern, Greek, and Western influences associated with Israelis who have roots in the Islamic world. In the country’s early decades Mizrahi music was deemed primitive and generally kept off radio and TV, shunted instead into an underground of small clubs, cheap wedding halls, and cassette stores clustered around the grimy bus station in Tel Aviv.

It turned out that my daughter not only knew the words (“A happiness revolution / Because we’re all family! We’ll dance like crazy / Because it’s time to fly!”) but also dance moves that she performed while watching her reflection in the oven door. She had learned the song at her Jerusalem kindergarten from the music teacher, a young ultra-Orthodox woman with no Middle Eastern roots that I can discern. When I attended the year-end party at the kindergarten, the kind of affair where the customary soundtrack has always been Naomi Shemer, the kids put on a performance involving a dozen songs, more than half of which were Mizrahi.

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