iTunes Hanukkah Music

Happy Hanukkah: The Very Best of New and Traditional Jewish Holiday Music

Various Artists

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NJPAC Presents Jazz, Jews, & African Americans

EDITED BY JV STAFF

A free exhibit from Oct 15 - Dec 13 at the Jewish Museum of NJ, tells the story of the relationships that helped grow and develop jazz

The exhibition Jazz, Jews, and African Americans: Cultural Intersections in Newark and Beyond, co-produced by New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC), Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers-Newark, Jewish Museum of New Jersey at Congregation Ahavas Sholom, and WBGO Jazz 88.3FM, and presented in partnership with seven religious, educational and cultural institutions, delves into some of the most fruitful and sometimes contentious relationships in jazz history through photos, documents and text.

On view from October 15 through December 13 in the Jewish Museum of New Jersey at Congregation Ahavas Sholom - Newark's only active synagogue - the exhibit is the centerpiece of a community-wide celebration of jazz. Partners include five diverse congregations, all within a short walk of each other on Broadway in Newark, as well as New Jersey City University in Jersey City and the Newark Arts Council. Those congregations are Ahavas Sholom (145 Broadway), Clinton Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church (151 Broadway), Iglesia El Sembrador (143 Broadway), Mount Zion Baptist Church (208 Broadway), and Project New Life of N.J. (152 Broadway).

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Matisyahu: Leaving Orthodoxy ‘One Of The Hardest Things’

From JTA in The Jewish Week

With his clean-shaven face and hip clothing, it’s easy to forget that Matisyahu was a Hasidic icon before he was just a Jewish one.

But on a segment of HuffPost Live on Tuesday, the Jewish reggae singer called leaving the Hasidic community “one of the hardest things [he] had to go through.”

From 2001 to 2007, Matisyahu (born Matthew Miller) was associated with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement based in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. In 2011, he shaved the bushy beard that had become a signature part of his image.
“I’m aware of who I am and what I represent to different people and that I came out as a Hasidic Orthodox Jewish artist … and when you have such a strong identity, you know, most people are not able to break from that type of thing,” Matisyahu said. “I didn’t really think about what the reaction would be, honestly, how it would affect people.”

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The First Ever Chinese-Yiddish Song

Talya Zax for The Jewish Daily Forward   

While writing her Ph.D. dissertation on Jewish Exile in Shanghai resulting from the Shoah, Yang Meng decided she needed to learn both Yiddish and Hebrew for the sake of her research. A Chinese national already fluent in English and German, once she took on the new languages she found herself fascinated by Yiddish, which she wrote to the Forward “is an indispensible key to understand[ing] Jewish culture.”

As part of her studies she participated in the 2015 Naomi Prawer Kadar International Yiddish Summer Program at Tel Aviv University. For that program’s closing ceremony she performed a song that was entirely unique: a Yiddish rewriting of a classic Chinese song, which she had translated into Yiddish with the assistance of Yuri Vedenyapin, a Yiddish language instructor based at Harvard.

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Hankus Netsky

By Alexandra Lapkin for Hadassah Magazine

With four uncles and a grandfather who were Jewish wedding musicians and a great-grandfather who was a Yiddish theater performer, Hankus Netsky has Jewish music in his blood. Growing up, however, he never thought that he would play and compose Jewish music. The thought that he would someday be part of the klezmer revival was the furthest thing from his mind.

“I was going to be a musician, it was obvious, but there did not seem anything about what my uncles and grandfather were doing that I could be trained for,” said Netsky on a recent Friday afternoon in a coffee shop in Brookline, Massachusetts. “They were playing for older people and did not think there was a future in what they did.”

Netsky, 60, is a composer, scholar and chair of Contemporary Improvisation at the New England Conservatory in Boston. He plays multiple instruments.

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