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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