Jill Sobule, pop star who also composed songs for a new ‘Yentl,’ dies at 66
Sobule’s biggest hit was ‘I Kissed a Girl,’ released in 1995.
Jill Sobule performs as part of Wesley Stace’s Cabinet of Wonders at City Winery on Oct. 19, 2018, in New York City.(Al Pereira/Getty Images)
(JTA) — Jill Sobule, the Jewish pop singer whose hit “I Kissed A Girl” topped charts in the 1990s, has died at 66.
The cause of death was a fire at her home outside Minneapolis, her publicist announced late Thursday. Sobule had been due to perform in Colorado on Friday.
Sobule, who grew up as the only Jewish student at her Catholic school in Denver, broke new ground when she released “I Kissed A Girl” in 1995. The song chronicled a same-sex flirtation between two women and arrived at a time when queer narratives were rare in pop culture. Sobule, who later came out as bisexual, said it was the kind of song she wished she had been able to hear when she was a teen.
The same year, her song “Supermodel,” satirizing teen culture, found success after it was included in the hit movie “Clueless.” (The movie, focused on a Jewish teenager in Beverly Hills, is getting a new life now with a TV series.)
Sobule grew up as what she told Lilith Magazine was as a “Denver Jew, third generation from the Old Country,” saying that her family practiced a secular and perhaps sanitized version of Judaism. “We were to Judaism,” she told the magazine in 2023, “what Olive Garden was to Italian restaurants.”
She also recalled that her first stage performance was as “Miss Hanukkah and Queen Esther” in a school production when she was in first grade. After her turn atop the pop charts, she would return to Jewish themes in a wide array of musical and stage projects.
She was a repeat participant in the Downtown Seder, a musical Passover performance held annually in New York City.
She performed in a revue of “Fiddler on the Roof” songs at a Jewish music festival in New York in 2007 alongside the Klezmatics and Theodore Bikel, who was synonymous with the lead character Tevye.
And in 2016, she made headlines by composing the music for a new staging of “Yentl,” the Isaac Bashevis Singer story about a gender-bending yeshiva student propelled into the popular consciousness by the 1986 movie of the same name starring Barbra Streisand.
Sobule said she valued “Yentl” as a depiction of transgenderism but had been struck by learning that Singer was unhappy with the movie and sought to address his objections by having the music come from “a Jewish chorus” instead of being sung by the characters.
“I think he would approve of my music,” she told NPR at the time. “I really do, because it keeps the spirit of the play, and it has a sense of humor. I think he actually would like it because it doesn’t feel intrusive.”
And in 2022, she played both a cantor and the rabbi’s wife in “A Wicked Soul in Cherry Hill,” a staging of the true story of the New Jersey rabbi convicted of arranging the murder of his wife. In a play abhorred by the family of the real victim, she delivered the “standout performance,” according to a review in the Los Angeles Times. (The rabbi died last year.)
Sobule’s latest 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. She had been scheduled to perform songs from the musical in Denver on Friday, in a venue that will now host an informal memorial service.
