‘I really like Ezra Furman. I think the guy’s got something. He’s got a lot of wit and nerve.” That wasn’t a stray Facebook comment or online review. It was punk godfather Iggy Pop raving over newly minted indie-rock royalty on a BBC Music broadcast last month. The object of Pop’s adoration is a bisexual,…
Ziv Yehezkel is a man full of contradictions. He is at once a deeply religious Jewish man, but also a zealous lover of Arabic music. The soloist of Arab Orchestra of Nazareth, the 31 year-old was born in Kiryat Ono, a town in central of Israel, in an area called “Little Baghdad.” But Yehezkel did…
The death of rock singer Glenn Frey, a cofounder and leader of the Eagles, marks an end to one of the longest running and most successful bands of the rock era. Critics have always noted the somewhat acerbic, downright cynical attitude running through many of the group’s best-known songs. But perhaps overlooked has been a…
During a week in which one can attend a revival of a Yiddish language musical from the golden era of Second Avenue (“The Golden Bride” by the National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene, at the Museum of Jewish Heritage through January 3); or enjoy a critically acclaimed updated Broadway staging of “Fiddler on the Roof,” the musical that…
In a poem Evgeny Kissin wrote in Yiddish, he looks forward to the Jewish program he’s set to perform on December 16 at Carnegie Hall: In Kenedi-Tsenter af yidish hob ikh shoyn geshalt, / un opgeshatst hobm es hoykh i a yid, i a goy / Kh’vel es ton in kumendikn yor oykh in Karnegi…
Bob Dylan has a funny history with the Grammy Awards. He didn’t win a single Grammy for any of his truly groundbreaking and most amazing work in the 1960s – the songs that everyone thinks of when you say “Bob Dylan” – nor for his mid-1970s triumph, his comeback album “Blood on the Tracks.” It…
On the cover of Riff Cohen’s 2012 album, “A Paris,” there is a picture of her grandmother at age 14, wearing braids and a scowl. A teenage bride, her grandmother had taken the passport photo for her move from Djerba, Tunisia, to Israel. The image holds sentimental value for Cohen, but she also chose it…
As I walked into Mendy’s on 34th Street on a recent Friday night to attend a Shabbat dinner for the Broadway cast of “Fiddler on the Roof,” I felt relieved that I’d successfully avoided a run-in with my ex-boyfriend, who lives in the neighborhood. He ended our three-and-a-half-year relationship this past summer and began seeing…
Ever since the beginning of the klezmer revival in the 1970s, music critics and musicians have wondered just how close to its European roots the music they were performing is. The musicians of the 1970s had access to only two sources from which to learn: the few still-living musicians, such as clarinetist Dave Tarras, and…
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…
The first words ever uttered by Patti Smith on a recording were “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine,” the opening line of “Gloria” on her debut album, “Horses,” released 40 years ago this December. That line pretty much set the tone for what was to come over the next four decades. Much of…
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