The old sailor work songs are repetitive and catchy. So are the Jewish devotional tunes.
Nissim Baruch Black’s religious path has been winding. He was raised a non-practicing Sunni Muslim, converted to Christianity at age 14, embraced Messianic Christianity as an adult — and ultimately converted to Orthodox Judaism between 2010 and 2012. Seattle-born, he immigrated to Israel last year.
A version of this article first appeared in Yiddish in the Forverts
You’ve never heard the Aleph Bet like this. A new music video released by Israeli artist Victoria Hanna flies through the sounds of the Hebrew alphabet with an energy you couldn’t imagine.
What do you do if you’re “a Yid who thinks he’s a Goy”?
The other week we reported on a shoot of Lipa Schmeltzer’s latest music video, in which the popular Hasidic singer dressed up in an Israel Defense Forces uniform, along with members of the Nahal Hareidi, or ultra-Orthodox division of the IDF. That video, titled “Mizrach,” has now been released.
Lipa Schmeltzer, the Hasidic superstar we can’t stop talking about, keeps pushing buttons. Yesterday the Orthodox news site Vos Iz Neias picked up reports from the Israeli newspaper Maariv that Schmeltzer is shooting a new music video with Israeli soldiers, dressed as a soldier himself.
The noted “second generation” author Thane Rosenbaum has rejected the label “Holocaust writer,” saying that Holocaust narratives can only be written by those who personally lived through its horrors. He’d probably say the same about Holocaust music videos — that is, if he could even wrap his head around the notion of such a thing.
The new single and music video titled “The Japan Song,” released March 29 and featuring prominent Hasidic singers Avraham Fried and Shloimy Daskal, is not what you might expect. Although its purpose is fundraising for relief efforts, and the video includes some footage of the tsunami, it is not a fundraiser for Japan at all. Rather, it is the latest in a new trend of Haredi musical activism on behalf of Jewish prisoners.
The latest effort to rally supporters for jailed Agriprocessors executive Sholom Rubashkin comes in the form of a six-minute music video posted online yesterday, featuring a who’s who of Hasidic music stars.