Jill Sobule was as much a Jewish icon as a queer one
The late singer-songwriter’s music broached antisemitism, Nazi-fighting and Jesus’ dreidel-spinning
Jill Sobule performs at City Winery, where she a regular at their Downtown Seders. Photo by Debra L Rothenberg/Getty Images
Singer-songwriter Jill Sobule died in a house fire at age 66 at her home in Woodbury, Minnesota, on May 1. A self-described “two-hit wonder,” Sobule is best known for her songs “I Kissed a Girl” and “Supermodel.”
At the time of her death, Sobule was booked on a cross-country tour of the U.S., including gigs at such venerable venues as Club Passim in Cambridge, Mass., and Joe’s Pub in New York City.
While most obituaries and appreciations have noted that Sobule’s song topics were often autobiographical, including depression, eating disorders and queerness – not the typical fare of pop songs, especially when Sobule was starting out in the early-to-mid 1990s – Sobule also often wrote about her Jewish background and concerns. In this manner, she was a serious Jewish artist as much as she was a queer icon who described herself as bisexual.
Sobule’s 1997 song, “Attic,” asked the essential question: “Would you have hidden me in your attic … or packed me on that awful train?” The song appeared at number 11 on the Forward’s 2022 list of the Top 150 Jewish Pop Songs. In her 2000 song “Heroes,” about celebrities and historic figures with stains in their private lives, Sobule noted that “T.S. Eliot hated Jews, FDR didn’t save the Jews…. All the French joined the resistance after the war.”
Sobule’s “Resistance Song” was written from the point of view of a cocktail waitress who dreamed about fighting the Nazis in the French underground. And “Jesus Was a Dreidel Spinner,” a punk-klezmer number, includes the lyric, “Jesus was a dreidel spinner and this we can’t forget / Paul was Saul before he was Paul and the Last Supper was a seder.” More recently, Sobule wrote “Commie Dyke Jew” in response to a hateful social media post calling her that.
Sobule also covered “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof for her 2004 album The Folk Years 2003-2003. In 2007, she performed in a revue of songs from Fiddler at a Jewish music festival in New York, alongside the Klezmatics and Theodore Bikel, who played the lead character, Tevye.
Sobule’s talent also extended to the stage and film as an actor and musician.
In 2022, she played a cantor married to a rabbi in A Wicked Soul in Cherry Hill, a staging in Los Angeles of the true story of a New Jersey rabbi convicted of arranging the murder of his wife. Her film roles included 2004’s Mind the Gap (with Alan King and Vera Farmiga), and she appeared alongside her frequent tour-mate and sometime collaborator Richard Barone (as Mr. and Mrs. Sobule) in the underground film Next Year in Jerusalem, which featured their composition, “Everybody’s Queer.”
In a post on social media, Barone paid tribute to the late Sobule, writing, “We were like brother and sister. We met, we wrote, we laughed. I can’t believe she’s gone. R.I.P. @jillsobule … one of the smartest, quickest, funniest, and best musicians I have ever been blessed to know. Thank you, Jill, for all those amazing years.”
According to an obituary by the JTA, Sobule’s stage debut occurred in first grade, when she portrayed “Miss Hanukkah and Queen Esther.” Sobule was also a frequent participant in the Downtown Seder, based at Manhattan’s City Winery music venue.
In the 2010s, Sobule composed the music for a new staging of Yentl, the Isaac Bashevis Singer story about a gender-bending yeshiva student, the story originally made famous by the 1986 movie of the same name starring Barbra Streisand. Sobule’s latest stage project was F–k 7th Grade, an autobiographical musical about being queer in middle school that was well reviewed during its off-Broadway run in New York City.
In a 2023 interview with Lilith Magazine, Sobule described herself as a “Denver Jew, third generation from the Old Country.” She described her family’s secular Judaism with humor and self-awareness: “We were to Judaism what Olive Garden was to Italian restaurants.” In fact, as the sole and self-described “token Jew” at St. Mary’s Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school, she was excused from theology class but elected to attend anyway, even choosing to play guitar at mass. “I’ve always been, and still am, interested in everything from world religions to weirdo cults,” she explained.
Always known for her wry, sardonic wit – she was often compared to Warren Zevon, with whom she toured and collaborated — Sobule wrote on Instagram a few years ago, “Stop asking Jews when Hanukkah is. We don’t know.”
