This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish music, including klezmer and other traditions.
Music
The Latest
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The Schmooze Reggae’s Jewish Connection
In 1997, writer, producer and performer Michael Goldwasser founded reggae collective Easy Star All-Stars, and has since then released half a dozen albums with names like “Dub Side of the Moon,” “Radiodread,” and “Easy Star’s Lonely Hearts Dub Band.” Their latest album, a reggae-homage to Michael Jackson, “Thrillah,” slows down singles like “Beat It” and…
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Music Lisa Loeb’s Kids’ Jew-ish Names
Back in her ‘90s heyday, Lisa Loeb was responsible for the tortoiseshell-cateye-glasses trend, and of course for being the first-ever unsigned artist to have a No. 1 single. (That would be the super-addictive “Stay” from the “Reality Bites” soundtrack.) Now that Loeb is a semi-retired wife and mom, she’s setting a different kind of trend….
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The Schmooze Big Bands Are Back, Baby!
Big bands have been making some of the most interesting and pleasurable music in jazz today. If you haven’t heard of them already, these groups are worth your attention: John Hollenbeck’s Large Ensemble, Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Orrin Evans’s Captain Black Big Band and Maria Schneider’s Jazz Orchestra. There is also a new big…
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Culture The Sacred and the Profane
In a 1935 review of “Porgy and Bess,” Virgil Thomson, one of America’s most distinguished music critics, famously dismissed George Gershwin’s music as a form of “gefilte fish orchestration,” harshly consigning it to the ghetto of Jewish music rather than situating it within the broad expanse of American culture. Lazare Saminsky, Thomson’s contemporary and a…
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The Schmooze The Many Outfits of Lipa Schmeltzer
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. The army uniform is just one…
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The Schmooze Israeli Pianist Seeks Missed Connections
Out of curiosity, especially after reading the restless intelligence and enticing spin he recently gave his work on this blog, I went on August 14 to hear young Israeli pianist David Greilsammer make his debut at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival with a late-night, hour-long performance of wide-ranging repertoire. What I experienced was interesting and…
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The Schmooze And Haydn Said, ‘Let There Be Light’
“On the Sublime” is a treatise from early in the Common Era by an unknown author, conventionally styled Longinus. Some scholars suspect that Longinus was a Hellenized Jew because he or she paraphrased Genesis, praising Moses for telling of Divinity’s power “in the opening words of his ‘Laws’: ‘God said’ — what? — ‘let there…
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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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In Case You Missed It
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Yiddish נײַע איבערזעצונג: דאָס לעבן און טויט פֿון אַ שטעטל בעת דער רוסישער בירגערקריגNew translation: The life and death of a shtetl during the Russian Civil Wars
אָן רחל פֿײַגנבערגס בוך פֿון 1926 וואָלט מען אפֿשר אַפֿילו נישט געוווּסט אַז דאָס שטעטל דובאָווע האָט אַ מאָל עקזיסטירט.
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Books Esteemed by Oscar Wilde, England’s ‘greatest Jewess’ may finally be getting her due
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Yiddish בײַ די פֿרומע קרײַזן אין אַמאָליקן טשערנאָוויץThe Orthodox community in pre-war Czernowitz
הרבֿ מאיר מאָסקאָוויץ, וואָס איז די וואָך ניפֿטר געוואָרן, איז געווען דער זון פֿונעם שאָצער רבין אין טשערנאָוויץ
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Film & TV The cheesy way to do teshuvah
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