Why Fiddler on the Roof Is the Opposite of a Jewish Musical

Adam Langer for The Jewish Daily Forward

In “Changing Places,” a terrific academic novel by David Lodge, a professor and his colleagues play a literary parlor game called “Humiliation.” In the game, the players attempt to one-up each other in admissions of ignorance by confessing the most inexcusable examples of books they haven’t read. When Professor Howard Ringbaum admits he never read “Hamlet,” he wins “Humiliation” and promptly gets himself fired.

Therefore, it’s with a bit of trepidation that I confess that until the other night, I had never seen “Fiddler on the Roof.” Not on Broadway, not in a touring production, not in the version that was performed in college my senior year. I never even saw the movie. So, if it turns out that I’m never allowed to write for this publication again, you’ll know why.

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The Rediscovery of a Great Jewish Composer

Simon Wynberg for Mosaic

Jerzy Fitelberg was a favorite of Aaron Copland and Arthur Rubinstein. Then he was lost to history. Now, sixty years after his death, his music is being played again.

Music that survives only in its written form requires an intermediary, sometimes hundreds of intermediaries, in order to bring it to life. This is one way in which music differs from other arts: no performer, interpreter, or outside actor is needed to experience a novel or a poem, a sculpture or a painting. But the fact that we experience musical pieces through hearing them in time is the source not only of their mysterious power over us but—when they have the misfortune to exist only in the complicated and inexact notation used to write them down—of their potential to be overlooked and lost. A major art gallery will have a keen sense of the extent and quality of its holdings whether or not they are on exhibit at any given moment; by contrast, a national music library or archive can possess the entire corpus of a forgotten composer and have absolutely no idea of its artistic worth.

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For Broadway Musicals, Jewish Involvement Proved to Be Just the Ticket

By: Marissa Stern | JE Staff

In Spamalot, the musical based on the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Sir Robin emphatically tells King Arthur that despite having animals from zoos or the finest of reviews, they won’t succeed on Broadway if they “don’t have any Jews.”

And, it appears, he is not the only one to have made this observation.

On Nov. 15, more than 40 people gathered at Temple Beth Zion-Beth Israel to hear Tom Stretton, a past Cheltenham High School teacher and Cabrini College professor as well as Broadway enthusiast, in a program titled “Do You Hear the Music? — Jews and the Broadway Musical.”

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From ‘Amy Winehouse Sound’ Creators, A Funky Hanukkah Anthem

By Gabe Friedman for The Jewish Week

Aside from “Dreidel, Dreidel” and Adam Sandler’s humorous tune, there are very fewHanukkah songs in the pop culture lexicon.

But a group of modern soul enthusiasts seeks to change that — and make the Festival of Lights a little bit funky, too.

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings — a retro-sounding band that’s celebrated for its authentic Motown sound — kicks off its new holiday album, “Its A Holiday Soul Party,”  with “8 Days of Hanukkah,” a track that’s an upbeat marriage of catchy soul music and Jewish cultural references.

In a testament to the Dap-Kings’ throwback style, the band has also released the track as a 45-revolutions-per-minute record single. The B-side asks, “What does Hanukkah mean to you?” before providing a background track without vocals, allowing listeners to sing in their own lyrics.

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For more great Hanukkah ideas, check out our    page.

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iTunes Hanukkah Music

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

Various Artists

Open iTunes to preview, buy, and download music.

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For more great Hanukkah ideas, check out our    page.

For even more great ideas, visit our Hanukkah Holiday Spotlight Kit

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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Moe Asch, Tight of Fist but Savior of Folk Music

With no Jewish holidays coming up immediately, we bring you profiles of some well known and some not so well known Jews. Enjoy.

WWII savaged culture in Europe, but brought Moe Asch the opportunity to collect rights to folk songs from around the world.

David B. Green for Haaretz

On October 19, 1986, Moe Asch, founder and owner of Folkways Records, one of the world’s great collections of ethnic- and folk-music recordings, died, at the age of 81. The character of Mel Novikoff, the stingy record producer in the Coen Brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis,” offers an unflattering portrait of Moe Asch’s less pleasant side, but no one disputed the fact that his contribution to musical posterity is immeasurably large.

Moses Asch was born in Warsaw on December 2, 1905. His father was the dramatist and writer Sholem Asch, who went on to become of the most well-known, if controversial (because of his flirtation with Christianity), Yiddish writers of the 20th century. His mother was the former Mathilde Shapiro.

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The Jew Behind the Famous Civil War Lament

By Leah Falk for Jewniverse

If you’ve ever had aspirations to play in an old-time string band, you know it: “Ashokan Farewell,” the iconic lament featured over and over in Ken Burns’s Civil War documentary. Like the music of Leadbelly and The Carter Family, it’s a melody that seems to have been unearthed from America’s earliest hard times. You can almost see a Union soldier picking along the road, his clothes tattered, improvising the song on the company fiddle.

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‘What is it with Roger Waters and the Jews?’ Radio host attacks rocker over Bon Jovi criticism

From JewishNewsOnline UK

Radio personality Howard Stern has asked if Pink Floyd star Roger Waters wants Jews to “go back to the concentration camp”, after the British musician attacked Jon Bon Jovi for playing in Tel Aviv.

New York disc jockey Stern – who is Jewish – launched the blistering criticism of Waters in a seven-minute rant on his popular radio show this Tuesday.

Waters, an outspoken Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions activist, said in an open letter issued in the run-up to Bon Jovi’s sell-out show last week that the singer would be standing “shoulder to shoulder… with the settler who burned the baby” – a reference to the Jewish extremists who firebombed a Palestinian home in August – should he go ahead with the concert

His letter – the latest in a long-line of anti-Israel missives to artists including Robbie Williams, Dionne Warwick and the Rolling Stones – also said Bon Jovi, 53, had forfeited his chance to “stand on the side of justice”, despite making no reference to attacks perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists.

Blasting 72-year-old Waters in characteristically fiery fashion, Stern said: “He’s gotta shut up, Roger Waters.

“What is with Roger Waters and the Jews? Where do you want the Jews to go Roger?

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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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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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Jorma Kaukonen Finds Somebody To Love

The former Jefferson Airplane guitarist and Hot Tuna lead man comes home to his mother’s faith at his Fur Peace Ranch in Ohio

By Wayne Robins for Tablet Magazine

I. ‘Shalom, Brother’

At Fur Peace Ranch, hidden away on an unpaved road in the Appalachian foothills of southeastern Ohio, one expects to hear the moo of cows, the rustling of corn. But Fur Peace doesn’t raise dairy cattle or crops. Its primary product is guitar players, mentored during numerous weekend retreats each year by owner Jorma Kaukonen. One of the most celebrated and influential rock guitar players of the last 50 years, Kaukonen was a founding member of Jefferson Airplane, the band whose very name represents the base camp of the 1960s counter-culture in all its striations: lysergic visions, political upheavals, feedback-fueled rock ’n’ roll, the San Francisco-born soundtrack to collective hallucinations, urban revolution, and pastoral pleasures.

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African-American Opera Singer Revives The Songs Of The Shtetl

By Kimberly Winston for The Jewish Daily Forward

Berkley, Calif. - Three years ago, when Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell took the stage at a Jewish vaudeville celebration and said he was going to sing in Yiddish, people laughed.

As a 6-foot-plus African-American with one golden earring, he just didn’t look like the typical Jew fluent in the language of the pre-World War II shtetl.

Then he opened his mouth. Out came a rich bass voice in a longing lament to the isolated villages and tiny homes left behind in places like Poland and Russia.

Think “Fiddler on the Roof”‘s “Anatevka” sung by a guy who looks more like Chris Rock than Zero Mostel.

No one is laughing now. Russell performs Yiddish songs from New York to Florida, from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, to full houses and wide acclaim. On Sept. 6, he will sing at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.

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Highway 61 Revisited: 50 years later

Harvey Brooks for The Times of Israel   

It was July 28, 1965. I was playing a gig at the Sniffin Court Inn on East 36th Street in Manhattan. During a break, I went next door to eat at the Burger Heaven, when I got a phone call from Al Kooper.

I’m playing on this album with Bob Dylan and they need a bass player – are you doing anything?

That phone call would change my life.

The next day — 50 years ago — I drove from Queens to Manhattan. After parking my car in a lot on 54th Street, I was soon in an elevator on the way to play for Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited album at Columbia Studio A at 777 Seventh Avenue. I opened the door to the control room, took a deep breath and entered.

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Carmen at Masada

In the heart of the Judean Desert, at the foot of Masada, one of the most familiar and beloved operas of all times is coming to life - Carmen, by French composer Georges Bizet.

Watch the fascinating story of how the opera came to be performed at Masada.

The Amy Winehouse Tracks No One Will Ever Hear

By Avishay Artsy for Jewniverse
The new documentary Amy offers a heartbreaking look at the rise and fall of an extraordinarily gifted young singer. Amy Winehouse was a “Jewish girl from North London” (as she put it) who wanted nothing to do with fame. But life spiraled out of control as she battled drug addiction, eating disorders, paparazzi, a greedy father and boyfriend, and her own self-sabotage. She died in 2011 at the tragically young age of 27 from alcohol poisoning.

She only released two albums (the jazz-inspired Frank and the R&B-heavy Back to Black, which won five Grammys), and there was one posthumous outtakes collection, Lioness: Hidden Treasures. But fans will probably never get to hear a third studio album, because her label boss destroyed the demos.

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Mr. Sinatra Adored Israel, and Israel Adored Him Back

The Chairman of the Board died 17 years ago today. In his centennial year, a tour of his deep-seated Zionism.

By Shalom Goldman for Tablet

2015 is the year of the Frank Sinatra Centennial, and though the great singer’s 100th birthday won’t be marked until December, it seems only proper to remember the Chairman of the Board’s deep and abiding commitment to Israel, which he saw as an integral part of the chain of liberal causes that he supported throughout his career. His activities on behalf of the Jewish state started with smuggling money to the Haganah under the British Mandate. Starting in the 1950s, his records and films were banned in Arab counties because of his sympathies with Zionism. He performed for IDF troops, and in the 1970s and ’80s he raised millions of dollars for student centers in Nazareth and Jerusalem.

Sinatra’s initial visit to Israel came in 1962, as part of his first world tour. At the height of his popularity, his managers wanted him to embark on a series of concerts that would take him as far as Japan. Sinatra also had personal reasons for touring: His falling out with the recently elected JFK and the rest of the Kennedy clan, due to a combination of Sinatra’s volatile temper and allegations concerning the singer’s links to organized crime, hurt him deeply. Sinatra turned toward reviving his own career and stepped up his charitable work, which his managers hoped would “temper the image of the flip playboy.”

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Berlin Philharmonic Names First Jewish Music Director

Benjamin Ivry for The Jewish Daily Forward

On June 22, it was announced that the musicians of the celebrated Berlin Philharmonic (BPO) have elected their first-ever Jewish music director, the Russian maestro Kirill Petrenko. Not only was this choice ground-breaking, it was an indirect response to another job candidate, the German conductor Christian Thielemann whose right-wing politics and anti-immigrant feelings seemed to grab as many headlines as his music-making of late. Petrenko himself is indubitably an immigrant; he was born in 1972 in Omsk and emigrated to Austria in 1990. He served as general music director at Berlin’s Komische Oper from 2002 to 2007 and has been director of the Bavarian state opera since 2013. His contract there runs until 2018, so he is expected to take over the BPO soon afterwards. The Berlin players already know him well, as he has worked as guest conductor there in 2006, 2009, and 2012. Compared to his immediate predecessors at the BPO, the Englishman Simon Rattle and Italian Claudio Abbado, he may well prove to be less of a fish out of water

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Israeli Rock Music’s Spiritual New Sound

After years of siege, a growing movement of musicians is turning to Judaism for inspiration

By Yossi Klein Halevi for The Wall Street Journal
“Admit me into your inner chamber!” cries a big, bearded man on the stage of the Tel Aviv rock club Zappa. But Shai Tsabari’s longing isn’t focused on some elusive human lover—he’s talking about God. In the audience, secular young men with tattoos and religious young women in modest kerchiefs close their eyes and sway together, as if Zappa were a synagogue.

Mr. Tsabari is part of a growing movement of Israeli rock musicians who are turning to Judaism for inspiration, fusing tradition with contemporary Israel to find a voice that is both Middle Eastern and Jewish.

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Joshua Davis: It Feels Good to Be Home

In exclusive Shalom Life interview, Davis talks 'The Voice,' his love of Paul Simon, and more

By: Daniel Koren for Shalom Life

Joshua Davis is a rising star.

As a member of Michigan's grassroots community, it wasn't entirely expected that the folk singer/songwriter would become a fan favorite during his participation in NBC's most recent season of The Voice.

In fact, in an exclusive interview with Shalom Life, Davis confirms his own surprise at the positive reception he received during the competition, and leading up to the Final episode, where he took home 3rd place, below Meghan Linsey and winner Sawyer Fredericks.

He wouldn't have anticipated how trendy the #DavisNation hashtag became on Twitter, either.

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All Star - Shabbos Melodies 2014 FREE

From MostlyMusic.com

Ok, so it's 2015.  Does Shabbos really change? 

Shabbos Melodies is a FREE album that was compiled in honor of The Shabbos Project to inspire the many thousands of people all over the world who will participate in this historic Shabbos, Oct. 24th and 25th Parshas Noach 2014. We’re keeping it together!

You can either stream the music right from here on this page, or, login & download the album to your device.

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Unknown Musicians of a Wandering Race

A remarkable concert reintroduces three Jewish composers who fled fascist Europe to America, where two of them pioneered a new art form—the symphonic film score.

Edward Rothstein for Mosaic

In his program notes to the Pro Musica Hebraica concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington earlier this month, the historian James Loeffler points out that in 1927—just before the period in which the music on the program was written—a Russian-born musician by the name of Gdal Saleski published a “classic, biographical lexicon” under the title Famous Musicians of a Wandering Race.

At the time, this well-worn description of the Jews as a “wandering race” could still be invoked with pride, or innocence. Not for long, however. Loeffler observes that the post-Holocaust edition of the book would refer instead to composers of “Jewish origin,” and by then the book was more of a memorial volume. Still, that earlier phrase remains strangely resonant, evoking bards doomed to migratory journeys, singing of epic pasts, embodying the age-old fate of the disenfranchised Wandering Jew of Western mythology. And there was a certain element of truth in all of that—as the evening’s program bore out.

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