Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish music, including klezmer and other traditions.
Music
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The Schmooze Rapping About ‘My Yiddishe Mame’
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here A recently released music video weaves together the classic Yiddish hit “Mein Yiddishe Mame” (“My Jewish Mother”) with a modern hip-hop tribute to a more contemporary Jewish mother. In its first two weeks on You Tube, the video received a whopping 11,000 hits. “Mein Yiddishe Mama,”…
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Culture Terrifying Top 10 (Jewish) Songs for Halloween
Due to Halloween’s pagan origins, Rabbinic law prohibits the Jewish celebration of the popular autumn holiday, which might explain why there’s usually a notable scarcity of “slutty rabbi” costumes at your typical All Hallows’ Eve bacchanal. But the dark allure of haunted houses, jack-o’-lanterns and (let’s be honest here) candy corn is often too powerful…
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The Schmooze Vatican Honors Lou Reed on Twitter
Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican’s 71-year-old culture minister, paid his own tribute on Monday to the late rocker Lou Reed, tweeting one of his best-known songs before clarifying he was not condoning any reference to drugs some have seen in the song. Ravasi, an Italian who is the same age as Reed was when he…
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The Schmooze Mourning Lou Reed — the Man Who Taught Me To Be
I first heard those eerie xylophone notes that open the Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning” when I was 14, sitting on the rug of my friend Mollie’s bedroom. A moment later, I heard Lou Reed’s voice for the first time, and everything changed. That day, we were two Upper West Side Jewish girls who showed up…
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The Schmooze German-Jewish Orchestra With a Twist
Those looking to discover a new, young classical music orchestra with a Jewish twist should keep an eye out for Orchestra Jakobsplatz Munich, which is performing in North America for the first time this month with concerts in Maine, Kansas, New York and Montreal. Conductor Daniel Grossmann founded Orchestra Jakobsplatz Munich in 2005 to bring…
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The Schmooze Choir! Choir! Choir! Brings Pop to the People
Bryan Adams Tweeted about them. Patti Smith shared a stage with them. And pop-star siblings Tegan and Sara number among their famous fans. They’re Choir! Choir! Choir!, and after three years of wildly popular “interactive singing nights” in Toronto, founders Daveed Goldman and Nobu Adilman are bringing their ad-hoc musical community to New York for…
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The Schmooze Peter Rosenberg, Hip-Hop’s Jewish Radio Star
Growing up in a kosher household in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, Peter Rosenberg became enamored with hip-hop listening to tapes by rapper Big Daddy Kane and scratching records on the turntables he saved up to buy at age 14. Today, Rosenberg is a co-host of one of the nation’s most listened to morning shows, on…
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Music A Tale of Two Nights
In late September, a meeting was sponsored by Encounter, a wonderful organization that wants to ensure that all voices in the Israel-Palestine conflict are heard, to listen to Sam Bahour, a very successful Palestinian entrepreneur. Bahour, born to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese-American mother in Youngstown, Ohio, in effect made aliyah to Palestine in…
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