How a Hamas Anthem Became a Hit in Israel

Why Israeli kids are singing ‘Up, Do Terror Attacks!’

By Yoram Hazony for Tablet Magazine

A few days ago, I called a young relative who is serving in the Israeli air force and asked him: “Do you know that song—“Kum, Aseh Piguim”?

Without missing a beat, he said: “You mean that song that’s a hit all over Israel? The song that all my friends are singing all the time?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That song. I wanted to know if you can explain to me why they are singing it?”

What I actually meant to ask was: Can you please explain to me why all the young people in Israel are singing a song entitled “Up, Do Terror Attacks”—a song recorded and released by Hamas in Gaza, which repeatedly calls for killing or expelling all the Jews from Israel? But I didn’t have to say all that. He knew why I was asking.

“It’s because it makes us feel good,” he replied.

By then I wasn’t surprised. I had made several other calls, both to my own children and to other young people participating in different branches of the Israeli armed forces, and had gotten versions of this same answer from all of them: All their friends are singing it. It’s basically become the de facto anthem of the Israeli war effort. And they are singing it because it makes them feel good. The question, of course, is why Israeli soldiers, and their brothers and sisters at home, feel good to be singing a song about exterminating them and their families, along with the country they have sworn to defend.

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A Hasidic Girl Band Gears Up for Its Debut at a Storied Rock Venue

From the Archive: With a women’s-only gig at Arlene’s Grocery in New York this week, Bulletproof Stockings hits the bigger time

By Vox Tablet

In 2011, adventure-seeking rock drummer-turned-Hasidic mother of four Dalia Shusterman became a widow. At about the same time, Perl Wolfe, born and raised in the Lubavitch sect of Hasidism, married and divorced, was living with her parents and beginning to write her own music. A few months later, the two women would meet in Crown Heights, Brooklyn and soon after that begin recording their first EP, titled “Down to the Top.”

Their band name, Bulletproof Stockings—a somewhat derogatory term used to refer to the opaque stockings worn by some Orthodox women—hints at their insider status as Hasidic women and also at a kind of freedom or irreverence they bring to their enterprise.

Bulletproof Stockings, which also includes Elisheva Maistser on cello and Dana Pestun on violin, performs for women only, in keeping with kol isha, the prohibition on men hearing women sing that is adhered to among Orthodox Jews. They also dress modestly, as is customary in the Lubavitch community to which they belong. But when playing music, they are not contained. They can be loud and raucous and sooner find common ground with the likes of Jane’s Addiction or the Throwing Muses than with Keren Ann. For that, they’ve attracted attention well beyond their Crown Heights enclave. This week, they take their show to Arlene’s Grocery—a musical mainstay of Manhattan’s Lower East Side—for the venue’s first-ever women’s-only show.

Last summer, they talked with Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry about their musical backgrounds, about ways their faith gets expressed in their music, and about why it’s so important for women to have opportunities to rock out without any guys around. [Running time: 24:46.]

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'Jews Who Rock' Only Scratches Surface of Fame and Faith

Exhibit Fails To Go Beyond Celebrity 'Jewspotting'

By Laura Hodes for The Jewish Daily Forward

In the gallery of Jewish Museum Milwaukee, sunlight streams in through windows that display colorful floor-to-ceiling banners from a concert shot taken at Milwaukee Summerfest in 1995. Nearby is a display of a redwood and abalone inlay bass guitar loaned to the museum by members of Howie Epstein’s family. Howie, bassist for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, also played on recordings by Bob Dylan, Stevie Nicks, the Village People, Warren Zevon and others, and was born in Milwaukee and attended local Nicolet High School.

Throughout the exhibit “Jews Who Rock: A Musical History Tour,” currently on view at the museum, are artifacts and photos from a variety of Jewish artists — some surprising (Geddy Lee of Rush, Warren Zevon), some not so surprising (Barry Manilow, Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, Paul Simon).

Visitors learn much about the Jewish backgrounds of various rockers. What we don’t learn, however, is how Judaism influenced their music, either as something to inspire or react against. For instance, a plaque informs us that Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman, but we don’t learn about how writers have argued that Dylan rejected his Judaism and became an uber-assimilationist, as David E. Kaufman wrote in “Jewhooing the Sixties.” Others have argued the very opposite — Seth Rogovoy posits that Dylan’s lyrics were actually inspired by his Jewish heritage in “Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet.”

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Lincoln Center Presents an Opera Without Jews, Set in Auschwitz

‘The Passenger’ is a moving Polish Jewish-Catholic Soviet hybrid with a glaring omission. But is it a ‘Holocaust opera’?

By Allan M. Jalon for Tablet Magazine

The Lincoln Center Festival’s publicity for an opera titled The Passenger, aimed at New Yorkers eager for an unusual musical experience, is magnetic: a “forgotten Holocaust opera,” as the copy calls it, adding that Dmitri Shostakovich hailed it “a perfect masterpiece.” Completed by the Polish-Jewish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg in 1968, much of the opera is set in Auschwitz. But beyond a few lines given to a Jewish character, there’s no explicit Jewish presence in this concentration camp. Seeing the work, it’s hard to believe: An opera set in the killing factory known for subtracting Jews from the world, and it subtracts Jews.

The main characters of The Passenger are two Polish gentiles and a German camp officer, surrounded by an international array of women packed into a barracks. They come from Warsaw, Zagreb, and other cities—and then there’s one Greek Jew. Her name is Hannah and she has so little to sing—“This star they pinned on me, this star I have to wear is the fatal mark of my death,” is most of it—that she’s easy to miss.

The opera, coming to the Park Avenue Armory in New York for three performances starting July 10, reflects convolutions of Holocaust memory through the middle of the 20th century—years when the monumental term did not yet exist, when the word was the less imposing atrocities. In the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, separate political realities suggested different memories on the war years. And yet this minimally Jewish Auschwitz comes with acridly soaring music that weaves visceral terror with pathos. Weinberg fled to the Soviet Union as Hitler’s forces invaded Poland in 1939 but lost his family to the Nazis. Some people hear that history in his music, finding traces of a Jewish sensibility. To me, it sounds less Jewish and more like a secular Modernist cry of human suffering under Hitler and Stalin.

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The Righteous Gentile With The $4 Million Violin

Founder of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, rescuer of over 1,000 Jews from Nazi persecution, world-renowned virtuoso violinist. This is a guy we can get behind.

Born in Poland in 1882, Bronisław Huberman had an ear for the harrowing trends of Nazi ascension. After writing an open letter in 1933 calling upon German intellectuals to denounce Nazism, Huberman recruited Jewish musicians from across Europe to join him in Palestine.

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- Zachary Solomon for Jewniverse

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Jewish Music in Berlin

From Yiddish Pop to Unkosher Parties

More than just klezmer: in Berlin's vibrant music scene, young artists combine Jewish traditions with modern styles.

Anyone who associates Jewish music exclusively with klezmer will be in for a surprise in Berlin. Increasingly, young artists are combining Jewish musical traditions with elements of modern styles. The range covers the entire gambit of genres. While events across the city have looked back on the capital's cultural diversity in the 1920s as part of Berlin’s current theme of the year, "Diversity Destroyed", a vibrant and forward-looking development can also be seen on the stages of today.

This is because Jewish Berlin is much more than just a past phenomenon to be remembered and commemorated; it is an active part of the present-day identity of the city. It's exciting to discover the diverse ways Berlin artists are mixing their own styles with Jewish traditions and experiences to create something entirely new. We've put together a small selection for you here below.
Yiddish Evergreens in a New Guise

Classics such as "Bei mir bist du sheyn" are anything but old-fashioned or pure nostalgia for singer Sharon Brauner. Brauner, who grew up in West Berlin, combines the songs of her childhood with elements from jazz and pop, Balkan polka, Arabic music, and even South American rhythms on her album Jewels.

Yiddish Way of Life in the 21st Century

On her album Jewdyssee, German-Israeli artist Maya Saban celebrates the "Yiddish way of life in the 21st century" by taking us on a musical odyssey through tradition, present and future, in a mixture of electro beats, trumpets and clarinets. The musician has been recently working for Lena Meyer-Landrut’s team on the German TV show The Voice Kids, but also appears regularly on Berlin concert stages.

Jewish Avant-Garde with Tradition

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The Secret Jewish History of Tupac Shakur

Was Bad Boy Rapper Just a Nice Jewish Son?

By Seth Rogovoy for The Jewish Daily Forward

Tupac Shakur, the notorious rapper whose career was cut short when he died in a hail of bullets at the age of 25 in 1996, may seem an unlikely candidate for memorialization in the form of a Broadway musical. Yet sure enough, “Holler if Ya Hear Me,” an $8 million production “inspired by” the work of the gangsta rapper which includes 21 of his songs, is currently playing the Palace Theatre in New York.

This is not some off-the-wall, crass attempt to cash in on the controversial legend of Shakur. Among the musical’s producers is Afeni Shakur, Tupac Shakur’s mother, a former member of the Black Panthers. Afeni Shakur is nothing if not protective of her son’s creative legacy; his brief but astounding career on the rap charts made him one of the best-selling recording artists of his time. In other words, she’s not doing it for the money.

There’s something else going on here, and it just may be that finally the stars have aligned to present Tupac Shakur — the man whose music former Vice President Dan Quayle said “has no place in our society”; a convicted felon who in a few years was in and out of prison and court for a variety of violent crimes; a man accused of being the perpetrator of several shootings who was himself gunned down in an infamous drive-by that has never been solved — as what he may really have been: a nice Jewish boy who loved his mother.

Tupac Amaru Shakur was born in East Harlem on June 16, 1971, to parents who preached a violent form of black nationalism. Despite chronic poverty, Shakur’s mother made sure he always had access to a well-rounded education, especially in the performing arts.

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