Shlomo Katz to Release New Album “Likrat Shabbat” 11 Unreleased Songs of R’ Shlomo Carlebach

During the Hebrew month of Cheshvan, or MarCheshvan, [Bitter Cheshvan] there are no Jewish holidays. Jvillage Network, therefore, will be printing articles relating to Jewish Arts.

As we are approaching the 20th yarzeit of this century’s most influential composer in the Jewish world – I am thrilled to announce the release of ‘Likrat Shabbat’. This album is something I’ve wanted to do for years, but couldn’t find a more appropriate time to share this with the world than now. Recorded in the holy city Yerushalayim, ‘Likrat Shabbat’ consists of eleven original compositions of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach ob’m, songs he never recorded.

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Another Window on Joni Mitchell From Her Jewish BFF, Malka Marom

Why the Israeli child of Holocaust survivors was the right person to hear the reclusive artist out and tell her tale

By David Yaffe for Tablet Magazine

“I think Joni is Jewish,” said Malka Marom, the author of Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words. We were speaking mischievously about a story that Joni Mitchell had, on separate occasions, told to both of us. Some years before the death of her parents, she learned that her father had his name changed at Ellis Island. She had already learned that he also had Native American blood. So she asked her mother, “What’s it like to be married to a Jewish Indian?” But Mitchell, who turns 71 today, is not about to have Henry Louis Gates, Jr. find her roots on PBS, and Marom was speaking figuratively. Marom is definitely Jewish—she is Israeli—and because she feels intimately connected to Joni Mitchell, she feels that Joni is of the tribe, at least in spirit. (Joni’s second husband was Jewish, but their wedding was Buddhist.) “In her soul she is Jewish, even if not in her blood,” Malka said with a laugh.

Joni Mitchell does not like to be limited to any religion, musical genre, or any other pop culture archetype that may be applied to lesser figures. She is, when she feels like it, a marathon talker (Full disclosure: I am writing a book about Joni Mitchell. Our first conversation, which lasted 12 hours and could have gone longer if I didn’t have a plane to catch, ranged from her work on a ballet based on her music, to her new album—her first of new material in 10 years, to her on-and-off admiration of Bob Dylan, her former lover Leonard Cohen, alternate guitar tunings, a memorable night with Miles Davis during his silent period, the stupidity of the music business, and the imminent destruction of our planet, which she, like an environmental Cassandra, sees coming.)

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The Folk Band Named After a Hasidic Rabbi

Zusha’s wordless melodies captivate fans. Just don’t call them a Jewish act.

By Hillel Broder for Tablet Magazine

Selling out an early Sunday night show at the Mercury Lounge on Bowery is nearly unheard of. But on this past Sunday night, standing before a sold-out crowd, Elisha Mlotek told a sobering and existential tale of the Hasidic Rabbi Zusha of Anipoli, his band’s namesake. Zusha, Mlotek explained, bemoaned his life on his deathbed with the self-admonition, “Zusha, when I pass from this world to the next, I will be asked, ‘Zusha, why weren’t you Zusha?’”

On one hand, the wordless original niggunim, or religious melodies, chanted by Shlomo Gaisin, the band’s towering, bearded, and frocked frontman, a forceful and far-ranging vocalist, struck me immediately as a tribute to Zusha’s Hasidic heritage. He offered at once crescendos of musical mastery and nuanced arpeggios of exploratory, religious incantation. He was at once the band’s main instrument and vocalist, offering a ceaseless melody and solo above the backing band, vocals, and harmonies. His voice’s range and character conjured a mix of Chris Martin and Regina Spektor, though he also channeled musical instrumentation—saxophone, guitar—in his wordless and practiced improvisations. During a vocal interlude, he suggested that the wordless form offers audience members the space to insert their own language into the melody—inspired by, perhaps, a Hasidic theology founded on a theory of experimental poetry.


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How Time’s Arrow and the Phrygian Half-Step Make Jewish Music Holy

For centuries, Western classical music propelled listeners toward Christian salvation. Then Jewish music changed everything.

By David P. Goldman for Tablet Magazine

In his 1944 essay The Halakhic Mind, Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik makes a striking assertion about the directionality of time:

The reversibility of time and of the causal order is fundamental in religion, for otherwise the principle of conversion would be sheer nonsense. The act of reconstructing past psychical life, of changing the arrow of time from a forward to a retrospective direction, is the main premise of penitence. One must admit with Kierkegaard that repetition is a basic religious category. The homo religiosus, oscillating between sin and remorse, flight from and return to God, frequently explores not only the traces of a bygone past retained in memory, but a living “past” which is consummated in his emergent time-consciousness. It is irrelevant whether reversibility is a transcendental act bordering on the miraculous, as Kierkegaard wants us to believe, or a natural phenomenon that has its roots in the unique structure of the religious act. The paradox of a directed yet reversible time concept remains.

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