This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish music, including klezmer and other traditions.
Music
The Latest
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Culture Composer Who Rocked the ‘Cradle’
A brilliantly researched new biography by Howard Pollack, “Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World,” out soon from Oxford University Press, is shining light on how one 20th-century American Jewish composer expressed his identity as a politically active leftist without abandoning Yiddishkeit. Marcus Samuel Blitzstein, who was born in Philadelphia in 1905 and died…
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The Schmooze To Mindy Meyer, With Love
Modern Orthodox punk band The Groggers are known for tangling with controversial issues. From their first viral video hit, “Get,” to one of their latest, “Jewcan Sam (A Nose Job Love Song)” about, well, getting a nose job, the band has drawn equal measures of enthusiasm and scorn. Last May, Groggers front man L.E. Staiman…
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The Schmooze Lipa Schmeltzer in Uniform
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. “Schmeltzer shot footage for the video several days ago in…
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Books Gregg Allman’s Ghost Writer
In a “grizzled, laconic drawl,” wrote Gregory Cowles in The New York Times, Gregg Allman’s recently published autobiography, “My Cross to Bear,” provides a “rambling backstage account of five decades with the Allman Brothers Band.” But it’s Allman’s Jewish co-author, Alan Light, who translated the rock legend’s rough-hewn tall tales of excess into “crisply ironed”…
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The Schmooze Classical Pianist Goes Wild
Two enthralling recordings that pair keyboard music from centuries past with contemporary works have been released this year. The first is Jeremy Denk’s “Ligeti/Beethoven” (Nonesuch), which bookends Beethoven’s otherworldly Sonata Opus 111 with György Ligeti’s astringent and electrifying études. The other is “Baroque Conversations” (Sony Classical) by the Jerusalem-born pianist and conductor “David Greilsammer,” who…
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The Schmooze Verdi in Terezín
The 2013 bicentennial of Giuseppe Verdi’s birth is fast approaching. The great Italian opera composer first won fame with “Nabucco” (1842), based at several removes on the biblical book of Jeremiah. The stateless Italians of the day saw themselves in the opera’s enslaved Israelites, and the chorus “Va, pensiero” (drawn from Psalm 137) threaded itself…
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The Schmooze Bob Dylan Previews New Album With ‘Early Roman Kings’
Strip away the over-the-top visuals and the dialogue in the new trailer for the Cinemax “Strike Back” series and you can hear the first single off Bob Dylan’s forthcoming “Tempest” album. To our ears, the song, “Early Roman Kings,” sounds like a bluesy cross between Muddy Waters’s “Mannish Boy” and “My Wife’s Home Town,” which…
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The Schmooze Musical Migrations From Spain to Norway
In a thoughtful article published last year, memoirist and novelist André Aciman explored the “pathless Odyssey” around the Mediterranean taken by the song “Naci en Alamo.” Musicians of many different languages and ethnicities, including Yasmin Levy, have taken up this so-called “Song of the Gypsies,” whose origins are disputed and elusive. For Aciman, the ballad…
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