The Israeli Sisters Whose Music Video is Sweeping Across the Arab World

By Avishay Artsy for Jewniverse

On March 8, a music video uploaded to YouTube flew from the Israeli desert to Yemen and through the Middle East. Its three stars, sisters Tair, Liron and Tagel Haim (not to be confused with L.A.’s three-sister rock band Haim) became immediate celebrities.

Going by the name A-WA (pronounced Ay-wa, Arabic for “yes”), the young women sing in Arabic, wear bright pink dresses and head scarves, and tear through the desert in a Yemeni jeep. Then they dance-battle three guys (potential suitors?) wearing matching blue Adidas tracksuits.

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New York symphony pulls composition with Nazi anthem

Rising composer Jonas Tarm’s ‘March to Oblivion,’ featuring quotation from ‘Horst Wessel,’ was to be performed in Carnegie Hall

By Lazar Berman, The Times of Israel

A composition from a budding young composer set to be performed Sunday at New York’s Carnegie Hall  was pulled because it contained a musical quotation from the Nazi anthem.

Estonian-born composer Jonas Tarm, 21, won a commission to write the piece from the prestigious New York Youth Symphony’s First Music composer’s contest. But Tarm’s nine-minute composition, entitled “Marsh u Nebuttya,” or “March to Oblivion” in Ukrainian, contained a 45-second musical quotation from “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” the Nazi anthem still banned in Germany and Austria.

The composition also featured a 45-second quotation from the anthem of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

NYYS Executive Director Shauna Quill told The New York Times that the move was “highly unusual,” but was undertaken “thoughtfully, but firmly, as soon as we learned the piece incorporated significant portions of music written by others that we determined were problematic for an orchestra such as ours to be asked to perform.”

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The Jewish Songwriter Behind Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”

By Matthue Roth for Jewniverse

The song “Strange Fruit,” one of the most haunting jazz ballads of the past century, was made famous by Billie Holiday. But it was written by a Jewish man named Abel Meeropol, who was inspired to write the story after seeing a photograph of two young black men being lynched.

The lynching occurred over 80 years ago, on August 6, 1930. Three young black men were accused of shooting a white man. A mob came to the town jail, demanding to be let in. The sheriff refused, and people took sledgehammers to the jail doors. They carried away two of the young men, beat them, and hung them from a nearby tree.

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The 1938 Jazz Concert That Changed Black and Jewish History

By Zachary Solomon for Jewniverse


When Benny Goodman, the Jewish clarinetist and so-called “King of Swing” took center stage at Carnegie Hall on January 16, 1938, the audience was in for more than just a rollicking time.

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Jewish Music Quiz

From MyJewishLearning.com

Jewish music today extends well beyond the synagogue, to the concert halls of Israel, the Klezmer revival, and the reggae of Matisyahu. How much do you know about Jewish music?

Question 1 of 7:

Which musician recorded Hava Nagila as "Holiday Mambo"?

 Machito and his Afro-Cuban Orchestra
 Harry Belafonte
 Bruce Springsteen
 Bob Dylan

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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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