iTunes Hanukkah Music

Happy Hanukkah: The Very Best of New and Traditional Jewish Holiday Music

Various Artists

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NJPAC Presents Jazz, Jews, & African Americans

EDITED BY JV STAFF

A free exhibit from Oct 15 - Dec 13 at the Jewish Museum of NJ, tells the story of the relationships that helped grow and develop jazz

The exhibition Jazz, Jews, and African Americans: Cultural Intersections in Newark and Beyond, co-produced by New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC), Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers-Newark, Jewish Museum of New Jersey at Congregation Ahavas Sholom, and WBGO Jazz 88.3FM, and presented in partnership with seven religious, educational and cultural institutions, delves into some of the most fruitful and sometimes contentious relationships in jazz history through photos, documents and text.

On view from October 15 through December 13 in the Jewish Museum of New Jersey at Congregation Ahavas Sholom - Newark's only active synagogue - the exhibit is the centerpiece of a community-wide celebration of jazz. Partners include five diverse congregations, all within a short walk of each other on Broadway in Newark, as well as New Jersey City University in Jersey City and the Newark Arts Council. Those congregations are Ahavas Sholom (145 Broadway), Clinton Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church (151 Broadway), Iglesia El Sembrador (143 Broadway), Mount Zion Baptist Church (208 Broadway), and Project New Life of N.J. (152 Broadway).

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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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