Scott Ian: The Hellish Childhood of a Jewish Metal God

In an excerpt from his new autobiography ‘I’m the Man,’ the guitarist from Anthrax remembers growing up in Bayside, Queens

 By Scott Ian for Tablet Magazine

 

I was born in Jamaica Hospital in Queens at 7 a.m. on New Year’s Eve, 1963. It was an auspicious beginning, sort of. Oddly enough, that’s where the legendary Music Building was located, which is where Anthrax, Metallica, and other bands made history writing and rehearsing some of the earliest and most memorable thrash songs. Metallica even lived at the place for a while. And man, it was a slum. When I went there with Anthrax, I used to think, “God, this neighborhood is such a dive. It must have been so much different when my parents were living here.” But maybe it wasn’t, and that was one of the hardships they had to face. If so, it was one of many.

My parents never had it easy. They were second-generation immigrants, and when I was growing up my father, Herbert Rosenfeld, was working in the jewelry business and my mom, Barbara Haar, was a housewife. I think that was part of why she was so unhappy. She didn’t want to be a happy homemaker. She wasn’t cut out for it and didn’t have the patience. My parents came from working-class families and got married way too young. My dad’s father, Harold Rosenfeld, was born in 1908 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and my grandmother Sylvia was born in 1912 in Manhattan. They met in the south shore of Brooklyn while he was driving a Good Humor truck. They got married in 1938 and he continued to work in the summer. Then in the winter before my aunt and dad were born, my grandparents would drive to Florida every winter in a Model-T Ford and live there with the money he made selling ice cream—like they were on vacation.

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The Lady Gaga of Hasidic Music

by Jenny Levison for Jewniverse


He’s been called the Jewish Elvis; he’s been called the Lady Gaga of Hasidic Music. He’s a rock star, he’s a YouTube sensation, and he’s a Hasidic Jew. He is Lipa Schmeltzer, and his wardrobe is way more interesting than yours.

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The Latest From Our Favorite 11-Piece Afrobeat Jewish Avant-Garde Jazz Band

By Matthue Roth for Jewniverse

Zion80 is a big band with a big sound—a full horn section alongside multiple percussionists, keyboards, and guitars. They’re a combination of Jewish music, Afrobeat, and avant-garde jazz—late last year, during their residency at a jazz club in the Lower East Side, the band had sixteen players, plus a surprise guest sitting in. Their first album featured funky, super-danceable versions of traditional Jewish liturgical tunes by rabbi/songwriter Shlomo Carlebach.

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‘Leonard Bernstein: An American Musician,’ by Allen Shawn

In an excerpt from a new biography, the great showman asks, ‘What does music mean?’

By Yale University Press (Sponsored) by Tablet Magazine

In writing the text for I Hate Music in 1943, Bernstein had not only imagined a child’s impressions of concerts. He had also expressed some of his own impatience with the way classical music was presented and perceived. In his Young People’s Concerts in Carnegie Hall he was able to address children as an idealized father figure or older brother, while also communicating subliminally that he could still identify with them. An electric current of subversiveness ran through these concerts, as Bernstein seemed almost to reach inside the psyches of his listeners and unlock the barriers between them and music. The concerts created a sense of community, but they were also the exact opposite of “mass entertainment.” They addressed the individual, not the collective. Parents who brought their children to Carnegie Hall and later Philharmonic Hall, hoping that their child would receive an injection of “cultivation” and “fineness,” and somehow emerge more civilized as a result, were instead confronted by someone who was trying to communicate with a deeper, more philosophical, more emotional side of their children than perhaps they were.

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