Spotlight On: Israeli Cellist Maya Beiser

The renowned musician and feminist pioneer performs at New York’s Jewish Museum.

By Rachel Delia Benaim for Jewcy.com

“Where are we? What the hell is going on?”

These lyrics filled the 180-person hall at New York’s Jewish Museum on Thursday evening, as Israeli cellist Maya Beiser launched into the fourth piece of her performance—an original interpretation of Imogen Heap’s chart topper Hide and Seek.

It was an unorthodox choice for a classically trained cellist, but Maya Beiser has always been bold: that’s why she plays the cello, and why she took to the stage for the museum’s Bang on a Can series, which is dedicated to promoting innovative music.

On the small kibbutz in northern Israel where she was raised, every child was given an instrument to play at the age of six. Most kids asked for violins, Beiser remembers, but “being the rebel that I am, I asked for a cello.” She wanted an instrument that no one else on the kibbutz played.

This choice set her on her path towards becoming the world-renowned cellist that she is today. Beiser, educated at Yale University, trained on the classical masters—Brahm, Bach—but then she started to listen to rock and roll.

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A Proud Songstress

by Rachel Makary for FreshInkForTeens.com

Regina Spektor’s music reflects pride in her Russian and Jewish background.

“Is it possible that all this magic went unnoticed?” sings Regina Spektor in “Reading Time with Pickle.” This lyric describes Spektor’s music — it’s pure magic because her melodies bring people together.

Spektor was born in 1980 in Moscow to a musical, Jewish family. She quickly learned to play piano at age 6, and it soon became a passion of hers. When she was 9 her family left the former Soviet Union. They landed in Austria, then Italy and finally, the Spektor family entered the United States with the help of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS).

She moved to New York and continued to play piano, practicing on her synagogue’s instrument. She didn’t give up on her music or her culture and made a successful career out of her talents.

Spektor lived in the Bronx and graduated eighth grade from SAR Academy, a Jewish day school in Riverdale, then moved to New Jersey to continue her high school studies. For two years she studied at Frisch School, a yeshiva in New Jersey, before transferring to Fair Lawn High School, a public school where she got her high school diploma.

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An interview with singer, actor, activist Theodore Bikel

‘I don’t know any right-wing songs; I don’t know that there are any.’

By Lisa Traiger for Washington Jewish Week

Singer, musician, actor and humanitarian Theodore Bikel has been fighting the good fight for more than 60 years. He has given voice to the speechless, raised up the downtrodden and served his fellow human beings, not only as an artist but as a man.

On Sunday, November 16 at Washington Hebrew Congregation in the District, Bikel received the Moment magazine International Humanitarian Award for his longstanding career, built on a commitment to promoting justice and equality for all. You may know Bikel from his stage and screen roles. He created the role of Baron von Trapp in “The Sound of Music” on Broadway and he took a number of turns as Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.”

On screen he has more than 35 films to his credit, including “The African Queen,” “My Fair Lady,” and “The Defiant Ones,” among others. His career as a folk musician and singer spans decades and he shared the stage with Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Pete Seeger and many, many more on the folk music circuit.

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“Going Under” in Europe

By Terry Teachout in Mosaic Magazine

Wagner’s totalizing anti-Judaism is still alive. It just has a new face, fully revealed in this month’s attacks in Paris.

In one of those grisly juxtapositions that are so characteristic of life under the aspect of postmodernity, my first reading of “Wagner and the Jews” was interrupted by the breaking news of the Charlie Hebdo massacre and its aftermath, a second massacre in a Paris kosher supermarket. The smoke had hardly cleared before a prominent British newspaper was publishing a story that started off like this: “More than half of British Jewish people fear Jews have no future in the UK, according to a new study which also reveals that anti-Semitic sentiments are more prevalent than widely believed.” Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle, had already informed the world that “every French Jew I know has either already left or is working out how to leave.” Europe, it would seem, is well on the way to becoming—to use a term favored by Richard Wagner’s most prominent admirer—Judenfrei.

Hence the uncanny timeliness of “Wagner and the Jews,” in which Nathan Shields takes a searching and persuasive look at the ways in which Wagner’s operas embody his anti-Semitic obsessions. The human capacity for self-deception is and will always be infinite, but I cannot imagine that any lover of Wagner’s music who reads Shields’ essay with an open mind will thereafter find it possible to erect a cordon sanitaire separating the composer’s operas from his ideas. They are consubstantial, as he meant them to be, and those who think otherwise are ignoring the self-evident assertions of their creator, who believed his work to be the New Testament of a religion of art, a “counter-creation” (as Shields explains it) that contained no place for “the Jews or their God”:

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