Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish music, including klezmer and other traditions.
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Furious Hip-Hop for Comp. Lit. Majors
Courtesy of Yitz Jordan/Shemspeed Records. Photo by Jonathan Hunter. Y-Love, also known as Yitz Jordan, is a black Jewish convert from Baltimore who feels just as comfortable at underground freestyles as he does at the Sabbath table. The son of a Puerto Rican mother and an Ethiopian-American father, Y-Love converted in 2000 at Brooklyn’s Conversion…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Daniel Kahn and the Relevance of Yiddish Protest Songs
Courtesy of Daniel Kahn We all know people who seem to have been born in the wrong decade — or even in the wrong century. Only very few of them, however, attempting to connect their society with that of another world, stretch across eras, and become giants — artists and thinkers like Sun Ra, Walter…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Has Socalled Left the Jewish Scene?
Maybe it was only a matter of time before Socalled, the frizzy-haired, klezmer hip-hop hipster, tried to sidestep his ever-expanding identity as a “Jewish artist.” The arbiters of Jewish cultural identity go to great lengths to rope in the eclectic and the original, and a klezmer hip-hopper is a no-brainer. But no one wants to…
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The Schmooze Mozart in Nature at the Abu Ghosh Vocal Music Festival
Crossposted from Haaretz Twice a year, at Shavuot and Sukkot, there’s a pilgrimage to a hill overlooking the village of Abu Ghosh west of Jerusalem. On the hilltop sits the Kiryat Yearim Church — “a Protestant church in the heart of a Muslim village where Jews sing Catholic music. It is the epitome of tolerance…
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The Schmooze New Beginning in Brandenburg for Composer Joseph Achron
The virtually forgotten Lithuanian-Jewish composer Joseph Achron (1886-1943) is getting a premiere this weekend in the German city of Brandenburg an der Havel. As part of their season-long exploration of music suppressed by the Third Reich, the Brandenburg Symphoniker, conducted by Robin Engelen, will present the first German performance of Achron’s third violin concerto (and…
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The Schmooze Happy Birthday, Bob Dylan!
Seventy does not mean old or young. As Bob Dylan says in Floater: The old men ’round here, sometimes they get On bad terms with the younger men But old, young, age don’t carry weight It doesn’t matter in the end In the imagination of the Jewish sages of Late Antiquity, 70 means quality, not…
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The Schmooze At 70, Bob Dylan Remains the Reluctant Prophet
Bob Dylan turns 70 on May 24. So what? Well, for one, let’s see you continue to perform two-hour concerts 100 nights a year, as you’ve been doing practically nonstop for the past quarter-century or so, all over the world, keeping things new and fresh, while the music industry around you falls apart; your body…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Sadder but Wiser in Berlin
Photo by Kenneth Locke Orit Shimoni is a singer-songwriter in perpetual motion, with little slowing her down as she travels from city to city, gig to gig. But it was a 2008 first-time visit to Berlin that gave her uncharacteristic pause. She had gone to the German capital to check out the music scene, where,…
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