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…
Born in 1975, the British Jewish musician James Rhodes has experienced a fairly dramatic trajectory, which he described in his recent autobiography, “Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication and Music.” As Rhodes revealed in a blog in the Daily Telegraph: “When I was at school I was sexually abused. Let me clarify: I was serially…
The scent of herring; owlish spectacles; dusty, tragedy-laden archives; scratchy vinyl records you wouldn’t want your friends to know about — these are the things one sometimes associates with Yiddish culture. For more than three decades, Michael Alpert has worked hard on preserving and reviving an Eastern European Jewish tradition that is precisely the opposite…
Readers have been calling and emailing us, asking for a podcast version of our playlist so they can listen to it in yet more situations — even on those infrequent occasions when they can’t stream the playlist from here. So we heard you and put together a single podcast with our top five songs and…
(JTA) — You may have never heard of singer-songwriter , but chances are you’ve heard her music. At the moment, McDonald’s is featuring her songs in two commercials — one for frappes, the other for the $2.50 double cheeseburger-and-fries combo. They are the latest in a string of high-profile gigs for Heller, an active member…
In 1981, Zubin Mehta sent shockwaves through Israel by leading the country’s premiere orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic, in a concert encore by Richard Wagner. It was the first time since the establishment of the State that the notoriously anti-Semitic composer’s work had been heard live in Israel. Despite the fighting and shouting in the auditorium,…
If ever there was a time we needed to hear from hip-hop legends Public Enemy, this is it. One might assume that the group that gave voice and sound to the frustrations of African-Americans during the Reagan-Bush years would surely have something powerful to say about America in the age of Ferguson and Baltimore, Eric…
