Meet the Skirt-Wearing Rock Star Cousin of Moshe Dayan Who Could Be Prime Minister

Touring on a new album, Aviv Geffen talks about Rabin, Mizrahi music, and why the Dayans are no Kennedys

By Adi Gold and Yoav Sivan for Tablet Magazine

Aviv Geffen wasn’t Israel’s first rocker, but he may have been the first to adopt the rocker’s role in an unprecedented totality: The unrelenting struggle for an audience coupled with the refusal to please fans, to whom the wrong things must be said at the wrong time. Indeed, Geffen, one of Israel’s most iconic and enduring rock stars, was, for years, filled with rage. He used to chant, “We’re a f*&#ed-up generation” and sing songs that dealt, not always kindly, with Geffen’s favorite subject matter of the last 20 years: his painful childhood, courtesy of a father who wasn’t available when the son needed him most. (The father is Yonatan Geffen, a songwriter who penned some of Israel’s greatest hits.) His musical influences include the local—notably Shalom Hanoch and Arik Einstein—and the foreign—David Bowie, Bob Dylan, and Supertramp. A dozen of his albums in Hebrew, for which he wrote most of the lyrics and music, reached gold and platinum.

But on “Pain on Top of Pain” (ke’ev al ke’ev), the second single off Geffen’s upcoming album, the singer strikes a different tone. The song begins, “I made a promise that I will not return here. … My childhood is buried in some song which I cannot recall,” and ends with very un-Geffen-like sentiment, “I forgive because there’s no time left.”

A country that extols family life might have needed the son of perhaps its most illustrious family to introduce the notion of unapologetic individualism. Geffen’s uncle was Moshe Dayan, the general-turned-politician; another relative was Ezer Weizman, the general-turned-president. To list all of Geffen’s famous relatives in arts and politics is nearly impossible. Geffen recalls how he, then a young boy, together with his Uncle Moshe (“an amazing uncle”), would piece together ancient shards onto an archaeological artifact in Dayan’s collection. Geffen purports to follow the example of his most famous uncle, but with a twist. “I’m the radical who wants to do the opposite of everything he did. He conquered Jerusalem, I want to give it away. He was macho, I want to be gentle.”

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The secret Jewish history of The Rolling Stones

British band was first to use Yiddish in a top 40 hit.

By The Forward and Seth Rogovoy in Haaretz

The Rolling Stones taking the stage at HaYarkon Park in Tel Aviv on June 4, represented more than just the world’s greatest and longest-running rock band’s first concert in Israel. It also marked one small victory in the war against a rock ’n’ roll boycott of Israel being waged by some English rockers, mostly at the instigation of Roger Waters of Pink Floyd who, despite some very public efforts, couldn’t sway Mick Jagger and Keith Richards against finally making their Holy Land debut.

The Rolling Stones, in fact, have had a long and fruitful collaboration with Jewish artists, friends and associates, and some Jewish themes have even made their way into their music and lyrics.

Like many early British rock bands, The Rolling Stones started out playing American blues. Most of the members of the Stones served their apprenticeship in Blues Incorporated, a band led by blues guitarist Alexis Korner, who was born in Paris to an Austrian Jewish father and a Turkish-Greek mother. Stones founding guitarist Brian Jones, drummer Charlie Watts, and keyboardist Ian Stewart all played with Blues Incorporated, and vocalist Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards jammed with the group on a number of occasions, before the five joined forces and formed The Rolling Stones.

Building on the lessons he learned as a protege of Brian Epstein — the Jewish owner of a record store in Liverpool, who turned that city’s most popular bar band into the international sensation known as The Beatles — Andrew Loog Oldham, also Jewish, soon took over management of The Rolling Stones, reshaped their image, and steered them toward a broader musical palette.

For one, he turned them into the anti-Beatles, giving them a more “dangerous” and rebellious image — longer and unkempt hair, and an overt sense of sexuality and violence. Oldham enlisted the services of photographer Gered Mankowitz — the son of English Jewish screenwriter Wolf Mankowitz — who was responsible for the band’s early album covers and publicity shots. Mankowitz was as responsible as Oldham was for creating the Stones’s bad-boy image, and he was the official tour photographer on the band’s first United States tour in 1965.
 
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The Meanest Genius in Portland, Maine

Outsider jazz great Allen Lowe scorns his neighbors, argues endlessly with himself

By Theodore Ross for Tablet Magazine
It was a bleak January morning in Portland, Maine. Clouds heavy with foul weather and wet snow enshrouded the city’s stern Victorian houses and dormant factories. Casco Bay, white-capped and gray and dotted with mournful tankers, blew an icy gale. In the lobby of the Holiday Inn, where I was staying, wildly cheerful out-of-towners, members of a booster club for a visiting minor-league hockey team, milled about, looking beefy and hungover. Stacks of complimentary USA Today gathered dust at strategic locations. A Mainer—I swear he was wearing a flannel shirt and one of those plaid hunting caps with the earflaps—was drunk at 8 a.m. and arguing with a receptionist that he’d accused of stealing his medications.

Allen Lowe—late-blooming jazzman, self-taught music-historian, and 20-year disgruntled Portland resident—looked downright merry. Lowe, 60, a lopsided and harrumphing grin half-hidden behind his profusion of graying hair and beard and the Brezhnev-ian shrubbery of his eyebrows, had plenty about which to be cheerful. In 2013, he published two deeply researched histories of the blues and rock ’n’ roll, Really the Blues?: A Horizontal Chronicle of the Vertical Blues, 1893–1959 and God Didn’t Like It: Electric Hillbillies, Singing Preachers, and the Beginning of Rock and Roll, 1950–1970. Critic Greil Marcus called Really the Blues? a “crucial contribution to American culture,” adding that “all those who want to see our musical history whole are in [Lowe’s] debt.” Matt Glaser, the artistic director of the American Music Roots Program at the Berklee College of Music, has also said that “Lowe knows more about early American music—the development of it, the relations between rural and urban music, white and black music, white and black repertoires—than anyone in the field, including myself.”

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Is It OK To Dance After the Holocaust? Absolutely, Says the Band Golem

The klezmer punk rockers cover lots of ground on their rollicking new album, ‘Tanz.’ They want you to get crazy to all of it.

By Vox Tablet

Known for frenzied takes on Yiddish and Eastern European music, the members of Golem bring the party with them wherever the band plays and no matter what they’re singing about. Their new album, Tanz, which means dance in Yiddish, covers religious rites, anti-Semitism in the former Soviet Union, dark children’s poems, and more, in a mix of rollicking interpretations of classic songs and original numbers.

Golem’s founder and accordionist, Annette Ezekiel Kogan, and its violinist, Jeremy Brown, join Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about the band’s surprising Mexican fan-base, how painful it is to sing the song “Odessa” now that Ukraine is in the throes of Russian occupation, and their ambivalence (now overcome) about singing about religious topics when the band members themselves are not particularly devout.

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Orthodox Singers Find Creative Voice by Performing for Other Women Only

Cultivating Female Musicians Within Constraints of Halacha

By Leeor Bronis for The Jewish Daily Forward

Talia Lakritz, 20, a Modern Orthodox Jewish sophomore at Barnard College, and her two girlfriends got off a very crowded No. 3 train at Kingston Avenue in a fevered hurry of glee, as they headed to an open-mic night for women at the gallery at The Creative Soul, an organization in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.

Inside the gallery, new mothers cradled their crying babies, and teenage girls clutched their guitars, waiting for a turn to try out new material.

One by one, the women shuffled onstage. Most performances were about the Jewish faith and God. One woman read a short story on the struggles of motherhood and marriage. Another performed a traditional Hebrew song and urged the crowd to join in, creating a sometimes patchy but mostly harmonious choir of soft melodies.

“This is so cool!” said Tova Kamioner, 20, one of Lakritz’s friends. “Who knew this existed?”

The women only open-mic night provides a creative outlet for women who observe kol isha, the halachic prohibition that prevents women from singing in front of men who aren’t their husbands.

Finally it was Lakritz’s turn. She perched herself on a stool in front of a keyboard and belted out an original song she calls “Superhero,” an upbeat pop melody with lyrics that read, “They say all the good ones are taken or gay.”

“I guess it’s not typical of what other religious women are writing,” Lakritz said after her performance. “But I never have a problem when I sing it.”

Lakritz, a native of Milwaukee, is considered a star among the crowd of amateurs. As a member of The Jewish Women’s Talent Agency, a not-for-profit organization known as JeWTA that was created last year to foster Orthodox female artists, she’s made a name for herself in Crown Heights and beyond, setting up her own blog and YouTube page and performing whenever she can. In order to dissuade men from watching her, each online video begins with a disclaimer suggested by her rabbi: “For Women’s Eyes Only.”

“From time to time, I get some creepy messages from guys, saying, ‘Please, can I see your videos?’” Lakritz said with a laugh.

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The Jew Who Fell in Love With Wagner

By Judy Maltz for The Jewish Daily Forward

(Haaretz) — The music of German composer Richard Wagner was never played in his parents’ home: Too many bad associations with Hitler and the Nazis, explains filmmaker Hilan Warshaw.

So it wasn’t until he began playing violin in a New York City youth orchestra that Warshaw was first introduced to the work of the notoriously anti-Semitic 19th-century German opera composer. And rather embarrassingly, he found himself smitten.

“I just loved the music. But, at the same time, it was something that my conscious mind told me was anathema,” he recalls.

Over the years, Warshaw – whose family lost many relatives during the Holocaust – developed what he describes as a “push-pull relationship” with Hitler’s favorite composer. And it made him curious about the other Jews in Wagner’s life.

So curious, in fact, that he decided to devote the past several years to making a film on the subject. The fruit of that effort, “Wagner’s Jews,” is playing in Tel Aviv at the Docaviv festival, Israel’s premier event for documentary film.

Produced, directed and written by Warshaw, the feature-length film focuses on the Jews who were some of Wagner’s closest associates, among them the gifted young pianist Carl Tausig, who was almost like a son to him; the conductor Hermann Levi, who happened to be the son of a rabbi; and the pianist Joseph Rubinstein, who lived in Wagner’s home for many years and killed himself when the composer died.

The film also explores the complicated relationship of post-Holocaust Jews, both in Israel and abroad, with Wagner’s music.

Although it is not well known that Wagner had many Jewish supporters and friends, notes Warshaw, neither should it be all that surprising.

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Jewish Folk Songs for Shavuot

Shavuot [Pentecost], a festival tucked away in the middle of the year and likely to be forgotten by secular Jews if not for the abundant assortment of cheesecake and blintse recipes, is actually a rich source of folklore and folksongs reflecting agricultural festivity and the mysticism of revelation. The different names highlight various aspects of the festival.

1. The names Festival of the First Fruits [Chag habikurim] and Harvest Festival [Chag hakatsir] reflect the fact that Shavuot was originally an agricultural festival - "You shall observe the festival of the harvest, the first fruits of your labors, which you will sow in the field…" (Shemot [Exodus] 23:16). The Mishnah (Bikurim, C.2-4) gives a detailed account of the procession of people bearing their first fruits to the Temple: "The inhabitants of the district assembled in a city of the district and spent the night in the town square. Early in the morning, their leader said: 'Let us rise and go up to Zion, to the house of the Lord our God.' Those who lived near Jerusalem brought fresh figs and grapes, and those who lived far away brought dried figs and raisins. . . . The sounds of the flute announced the pilgrims’ coming until they neared Jerusalem, when they sent messengers ahead and arranged their first fruits for presentation. The children's song Saleinu al k'tefeinu [Our baskets on our shoulders] by Levin Kipnis and Yedidya Admon (1929) harks back to this ancient Biblical festival. It is this agricultural aspect of Shavuot that was highlighted in the early days of modern Israel, especially in kibbutz-inspired celebrations. Here are two sites with lyrics of the many agriculturally-based folk songs, one in Hebrew and the other with English transcriptions.

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