This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish music, including klezmer and other traditions.
Music
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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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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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