11 Great, Modern Hanukkah Songs

Can you name any Hanukkah songs beyond the cutesy "I Have a Little Dreidel" and Adam Sandler's famous (and slightly inappropriate) "Chanukah Song"? In fact, when it comes to Jewish holidays, Hanukkah boasts plenty of great tunes - you just don't know them yet! Here are 11 of our favorite Hanukkah songs, many of them from the new Chanukah Today album available through URJ Books and Music. Listed in no particular order, here's a sampling of the best and brightest new Hanukkah music, videos for most of the songs.

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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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Scott Ian: The Hellish Childhood of a Jewish Metal God

In an excerpt from his new autobiography ‘I’m the Man,’ the guitarist from Anthrax remembers growing up in Bayside, Queens

 By Scott Ian for Tablet Magazine

 

I was born in Jamaica Hospital in Queens at 7 a.m. on New Year’s Eve, 1963. It was an auspicious beginning, sort of. Oddly enough, that’s where the legendary Music Building was located, which is where Anthrax, Metallica, and other bands made history writing and rehearsing some of the earliest and most memorable thrash songs. Metallica even lived at the place for a while. And man, it was a slum. When I went there with Anthrax, I used to think, “God, this neighborhood is such a dive. It must have been so much different when my parents were living here.” But maybe it wasn’t, and that was one of the hardships they had to face. If so, it was one of many.

My parents never had it easy. They were second-generation immigrants, and when I was growing up my father, Herbert Rosenfeld, was working in the jewelry business and my mom, Barbara Haar, was a housewife. I think that was part of why she was so unhappy. She didn’t want to be a happy homemaker. She wasn’t cut out for it and didn’t have the patience. My parents came from working-class families and got married way too young. My dad’s father, Harold Rosenfeld, was born in 1908 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and my grandmother Sylvia was born in 1912 in Manhattan. They met in the south shore of Brooklyn while he was driving a Good Humor truck. They got married in 1938 and he continued to work in the summer. Then in the winter before my aunt and dad were born, my grandparents would drive to Florida every winter in a Model-T Ford and live there with the money he made selling ice cream—like they were on vacation.

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The Lady Gaga of Hasidic Music

by Jenny Levison for Jewniverse


He’s been called the Jewish Elvis; he’s been called the Lady Gaga of Hasidic Music. He’s a rock star, he’s a YouTube sensation, and he’s a Hasidic Jew. He is Lipa Schmeltzer, and his wardrobe is way more interesting than yours.

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