The 2012 Yiddish Farm Summer Program
It’s like this
+ this
Learn more about how you can dig in here.
!!זאָל זיין מיט מזל
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New Music Review: Chana Rothman’s Beautiful Land: A Labour of Love
In today’s popular American culture, expecting celebrities often recede from the limelight while pregnant. In her new EP, Beautiful Land, singer/songwriter Chana Rothman actively embraces the opportunity to channel her creative energy into an unforgettable musical journey, specifically during her pregnancy. The result is a celebration of life, brimming with heartfelt empathy, mesmerising grooves, and earthy splendor.
Photo by Elise Warshavsky
In just six tracks, Rothman creates a universe, transporting the listener to a different realm, one in which emotional honesty and whimsical funkiness reign supreme. Rothman’s music resides somewhere between the intersection of pop, folk, and ethnic, but she transcends all of them. As Rothman’s music demonstrates, we live in a thoroughly cosmopolitan, interconnected time, when such designations are essentially irrelevant labels.
The opening track, Shine, offers a life-affirming message to young people, with its light, breezy groove. The title track, Beautiful Land, showcases Rothman’s impressive stylistic and thematic versatility. Inspired by her travels in Jamaica, Rothman wrote this loving, polyrhythmic reggae-infused piece as a tribute to its people. Accented with hints of a West African groove, Beautiful Land conjures up distant times and lands, while insisting on a temporal and spatial immediacy with its hypnotic rhythms and gentle melody.
Of all the pieces on this EP, Inadequate packs in the most nerve and verve, with its brutally honest lyrics, reflecting on body image. Other reviewers likened Rothman’s lyrically-driven Inadequate to Ani DiFranco—and this was my initial association. One could also compare this track to India Arie’s I’m Not My Hair, but Rothman’s upbeat and bluesy piece has much more flavor, political punch, and lyrical colour.
In Come on Home, Rothman shifts gears again, this time offering a poignantly understated elegiac ballad. A modern-day Psalm of sorts, this piece never names the subject of its mourning, but rather evokes a flood of feeling and taps the core of the experience of loss. The following track again radically departs into an entirely different feeling and space. Listening to Baby Do That Dance for Me, one almost expects Django Reinhardt to surface magically and rip into one of his legendary hot jazz guitar solos. This joyful and jazzily ambient piece certainly makes you want to rise to your feet and dance along.
Remember Your Name, the other ballad on this EP, is the final track and mourns the loss of Michael Jackson, while also reflecting on his legacy and memory. Enlisting Soulfarm guitarist C Lanzbom’s help on the slide guitar, this track serves as an apt coda to an album which amply attests to the restorative power of music. Beautiful Land, which is available in stores starting today (and will be available digitally beginning Thursday, December 8), would make a gloriously soulful Hanukkah gift for the music lovers on your list.
'Beautiful Land' cover art: Graphic design by Michelle Nichols; Artwork by Michele Kishita
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The Global Jewish Voice: Home of the international Jewish student conversation
Above, the Chilean Federation of Jewish Students protests discrimination.
Over at New Voices Magazine (my day job), we launched a new blog this week that Jewschoolers might be interested in. It’s called the Global Jewish Voice and it’s a way to jump-start a wider conversation that we normally have at New Voices. While New Voices is normally American or Israeli (and occasionally Canadian) in scope, the Global Jewish Voice is a fully international conversation about the lives of Jewish students and young adults.
The blog is staffed by 10 writers reporting on their lives on campus, in the workplace and at home. They are writing in from every corner of the globe, including Israel, the US, Chile, Spain, China, Canada, the UK and–no joke–Serbia. The blog’s student editor is based in Portland, Ore. There’s also an open submission policy.
A few highlights so far:
Reporting from the West Bank, Liran Shamriz describes the constant dilemma of being an army soldier and same-time sociology student:
This could quickly turn to riots – we need to get the hell out of here. We don’t even have bulletproof vests – any jerk in the street can knife me and disappear. I started to walk toward the trucks and my phone blinks again, this time from a Facebook message: “Shlomo gave us grades! I got a 91! I think he is good after all, he probably didn’t even check that well… how much did you get?”
Meanwhile in Chile, sometimes the struggle is more symbolic of living Jewishly in a non-Jewish world. University student Maxamilliano Grass is on the vanguard of Jewish student activism and pro-Israel work in a country with 75,000 Jews—and over 400,000 Palestinians: More »
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Kickstarting Jewish Culture: August 2011 edition
Today’s insightful New York Times Magazine article about Kickstarter set me browsing again. I used the crowdfunding site to raise the printing costs for The Comic Torah and it always, it provides a glimpse at the cutting edges of numerous cultures. My inner technogeek was intrigued to see projects funding $50 radiation detectors and $60 custom jeans. My Jewish culture maven found some just-as-cool, but less expensive, projects to support.
First, a Kabbalah-themed comic:
The 36 is a graphic novel based on the Kabbalistic belief that there are 36 people in the world upon whom it is saved by their simple existence. In times of need, these people emerge from anonymity and save us, then fade back into their lives.Noam, our hero, is one of those people. Armed with the fabled staff of Moses (used to split the Red Sea), Noam would love nothing more than to fade into anonymity; he just doesn’t know what he has to do to finish his duty as one of the 36.
You can check out the first five pages of the comic here!
Tonally, it borrows from Bill Willingham’s Fables, with the source material being Jewish mysticism. It’s a world of magical realism in which golems exist and 36 humans have God-given abilities and the task to “save” humanity. These abilities range from the mundane, like speaking with animals, to the super, like wielding electricity. At its heart, the story focuses on the relationships between Noam and those he protects, whether fighting with his nebbish brother or fending off the infatuation of a girl he’s protecting. The first two chapters follow Noam as he investigates a murder spree committed by someone using a golem — an ancient creature created from mud.
Second, a 25th anniversary album from the Klezmatics:
To mark its silver anniversary, the band that helped bring klezmer into the 21st century is releasing Live at Town Hall, a sonic souvenir of a remarkable NYC concert. And to help promote this, the Klezmatics’ first self-produced live CD, the Grammy Award-winners are launching their very own Kickstarter campaign. Your generous donation will enable them to cover post-production costs and hire a radio promoter and media publicist to bring the recording not only to those who already love the Klezmatics and klezmer, but also to those who are entirely new to the music.Since 1986, the Yiddish-American roots band the Klezmatics has spearheaded the popular revival of a tradition that once flourished at Jewish weddings and other joyous occasions in the shtetls and cities of Eastern Europe. They have performed in more than twenty countries and have released ten cds – of which Live at Town Hall, made in conjunction with the recent documentary film The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground, is the newest.
The double cd captures the Klezmatics’ milestone sold-out concert at the storied New York venue. The band rips through a career-spanning setlist, assisted by a star-studded roster of special guests including two of the band’s former clarinetists, David Krakauer and Margot Leverett and recent vocal collaborators Susan McKeown and Joshua Nelson. The audience is treated to a musical journey, traveling from the band’s earliest days (“Dzhankoye,” “Fun tashlikh”) through newly-composed songs featuring the lyrics of folk troubadour Woody Guthrie. The event was a real Klezmatics hometown party: a celebration of community, music and love, past, present and future.
With your help we can spread the word and the joy… Lomir ale freylekh zayn!
And then there’s a project about Ben Shahn, the great progressive, Jewish artist of the 20th century Depression.
There has yet to be written a full-lenth, color illustrated book on Shahn’s murals for the gernal public in the context of the New Deal (1933-1942). My work will be the first to explore Shahn’s visual representation of progressive Jewish political ideals and historical events — the importance of the Bill of Rights; Jewish involvement with the labor union movement; support for political radicals; the many contributions by immigrants to the United States; and the pressing need for FDR to open the country’s borders to Europe’s refugee (FDR would not).
Shahn was the only artist who worked for the New Deal who had the daring to include in his public mural scenes of Nazi Germany, the construction of concentration camps, and the plight of Europe’s refugees.
Finally, there’s a project underway to raise money for one of the strangest novels ever to cross my desk.
An Educated, Desperate Young Man chronicles the picaresque exploits of Naftali Herz Imber, the nineteenth century Hebrew poet best known (indeed, only known) for having penned the lyrics to what would become the Israeli national anthem. Spanning forty years and half the globe, it follows Imber from his impoverished youth in modern-day Ukraine through his travels in Romania (where he writes his famous poem), Istanbul (where he becomes enmeshed in a preposterous feud with devotees of Shabbatai Sevi, the seventeenth century false messiah), Ottoman Palestine (where he endeavors to unearth the telephone wires erected by King Solomon), London (where he lectures textile workers on how Moses discovered electricity) and New York’s Lower East Side (where his drunken shenanigans strain the tolerance and generosity of the Philadelphia judge who supports him). Things come to a head at the First Zionist Congress in Switzerland, where Theodore Herzl (a fastidious, failed Viennese playwright) articulates a plan to establish an independent Jewish polity in a sun-scorched backwater of the Ottoman Empire.
An Educated, Desperate Young Man is a bawdy, irreverent tour through fin de siècle Jewish history, a rollicking counter-narrative of early Zionism and a tender, merciless, hilarious tale of art and madness.
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Go the Fuck to Shul
Tablet Magazine and Marc Tracy did well with this parody of the instant classic Go the Fuck to Sleep.
It’s Yom Kippur, and you’re far away,
The last thing I want’s to be cruel.
I’m your mother, son, you know I adore you,
But please go the fuck to shul.…
We don’t observe the birth of Christ, son,
This isn’t some lame fucking Yule.
It’s the Day of Atonement, a big deal:
Go the fuck to shul.Go ahead, eat something beforehand.
Gay gezunt, no reason to drool.
I’m not asking you to believe in it,
Only to go to fucking shul.It’s a depressing observance, I know.
Could make you want to hit the barstool.
It’s the day that you say you’ve been shitty,
Which is why it’s in fucking shul.…
Cast me as some kind of tyrant,
Your very own lord of misrule.
Jesus, is it really so fucking horrible
For you to go the fuck to shul?And yes I’m a big stereotype,
Or worse, just a big Jewish tool.
It doesn’t matter what you think of me, though.
Go. The fuck. To shul.…
Tons of missing verses so you have good reason to visit the original post.
h/t BoingBoing
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Changes at Zeek
Zeek, the journal of Jewish culture and thought, a source of insightful articles and art from the emerging generation of Jewish thinkers, has announced that it is going through some transitions. (Read on after the jump) More »
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Return of the Jew Moneylender 2011
Meet Les Gold. Mr. Gold is the patriarch of American Jewelry and Loan in Detroit. His family business is the subject of Hardcore Pawn, a new reality television show on the TruTV channel. The show is a window onto the type of Jew we’ve come to associate with the Rhineland in the 17th century more than the American Midwest in 2011. The family that runs the shop is Jewish, not only in the plain meaning of the word, but also in the symbolic, nasty sense of the idea – The Golds are sometimes benevolent, sometimes nasty moneylenders serving a predominantly impoverished, black clientele in the middle of Detroit.
With over two million viewers, Hardcore Pawn is often compared to Pawn Stars, a History Channel reality TV show that, like a blue-collar Antiques Roadshow, presents a gang of Vegas hacks appraising antique soda machines and the Civil War currency. Yet, in reality, Hardcore Pawn isn’t really interested in appraising anything but the fraught relationship that one Jewish family has to the black ghetto in America in our own times. It’s ethnic and racial antagonism presented in documentary style, where the Jews try to pay as little as they can for gold and electronics from a population mired in stress and aggression, with a little bit of tenderness if the need arises.
The show demonstrates a few scenarios. An angry black woman arrives to pay off her interest, only to find out that after waiting 45 minutes in line, she doesn’t have enough money to retrieve her child’s video game console. In another, a poor, elderly black man brings in a ring so he can pay his rent, only to be told that his last valuable possession is worth about ten dollars to Les Gold’s son, Seth. In another, an aryan-looking white woman brings in what she says is Eva Braun’s swastika-bedazzled bracelet. Les Gold says he’ll buy it if its authentic, stating that he’ll use it to teach his grandkids what the Gold family endured during the Holocaust. (Nevermind the bracelet is a fake.)
What an embarrassment.
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“Editor-in-chief emeritus” – and still no better at fact-checking
Check out this gem in Marty Peretz’s most recent TNR editorial:
…it is not Islam per sebut the very restraints on print and the idolization of language, among other factors, that are responsible for the benighted state of intellectual achievement in that orbit.
Peretz has mastered the art of turning a seemingly highly culturally-aware observation into a complete non-fact uninformed by, well, anything (and certainly lacking any understanding of basic cultural relativism). Perhaps he’s forgotten that the Islamic world gave us, you know, the foundations of algebra and chemistry. Those are kind of important.
The rest of the article is similar. Peretz says lots of things I agree with, lots I don’t, and still manages to come off sounding like a pretentious Western intellectual supremacist.
Updated: light grammatical editing.
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Cee-Lo Age Jews
I’ve been into Cee-Lo for a long time now. I grew up on a steady diet of Goodie Mob cereal, and it wasn’t before long that that mid-90s southern hip hop twisted my brain for good. After devouring Jewish race literature, it was safe to say that ‘being Jewish’ became something like a form of James Weldom Johnson-style race-conciousness. Now, some years later, I see Cee-Lo, a talented wordsmith, is a haute-pop artist wearing peacock feathers in duets with Gwyneth Paltrow. Whither the ikar of Double-Consciousness.
Cee-Lo Green’s recent performance at the Grammys seemed Jewish insofar as its melodies made me think that my mother had once danced to this in the smoky parts of Hell’s Kitchen.
Cee-Lo co-wrote the song, and one of his collaborators is a 25 year old by the name of Ari Levine. Part of a group of songwriters, musicians and producers named The Smeezingtons, Teaneck High School dropout Ari Levine (no word yet on his Hebrew name) also worked with Matisyahu and various other pop outfits currently hot in the land. Born into the Conservative Movement, he seems to stand outside all these current debates about the innovation within. I like that, o ghost of Max Fleischer.
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Let’s make some noise, IJPA
(x-posted to to KFAR) This week, representatives from Jewish cultural institutions from around the world convened in New York for the annual ‘Schmooze Conference” of the International Jewish Presenters Association. Other commitments prevented my attendance, but I was fortunate to speak at the first one a few years back.
Its a wonderful concept, and it seems to have some practical benefits beyond collegiality. As with his other projects and contributions, I applaud Michael Dorf for bringing this idea to fruition. The greater opportunity, however, is for this Association to be more than an Annual Conference for the American Jewish community.
We know all the research and findings over the last decade about the impact of Jewish arts and culture and their role as a portal to Jewish identity. IJPA has an opportunity to be the voice of the providers of these portals and advocate for the artists and member presenters who are expanding notions of Jewish expression. With the arrival of Mp3 players and digital videos and music distribution, there is unprecedented opportunity to engage untold numbers of Jews, young and old. The passing of Debbie Friedman this week, with her innumerable musical contributions to Jewish life, underscores this.
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And So This is Chanukah.
Image of the day:
A Jewish shopper at Balducci’s main location in Greenwich Village noticed this most unlikely display last week (three years ago, but we’re a people of history) and lodged a complaint with the management, who quickly cast the blame on a stock clerk, according to the NY Daily News.
What’s next? A blow-out deal on Manischewitz wine and kashe varnishkes for Christmas?
Attention Balducci shoppers: clean up in aisle nine!
Chanukah ham story epilogue: if you would like this image and others like it immortalized on an apron, mug, calendar, or magnet, said Balducci’s customer Nancy Kay Shapiro wants to make your dreams a reality.
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Limmud NY will make you smarter and more attractive
OK. So maybe the title is a bit of an exaggeration, but Limmud NY is pretty damn great.
It’s an annual gathering of hundreds of Jews of every age (tots to college students to twentysomethings to families to retirees) and background (Orthodox to Renewal to non/post/trans-denominational to Conservative to Reform to secular to whatever the hell else you call yourself).
We’re there to learn, sing, hang out, drink, teach and bask in the glory of the broadest definition of Torah you can conjure up.
This year it’s MLK weekend: Jan. 14-17. And it’s at the Hudson Valley Resort in the Catskills.
At Limmud NY, everything is volunteer-run and everyone is a learner and a teacher.
You can register here. Fees go up after December 16. And there’s always scholarship money available, so don’t be discouraged by prices.
And you can check out some of this year’s confirmed presenters here.
Here’s everything I’ve ever written about Limmud NY.
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As Lithuanian Jews Remember, They Show The Fractures of Exile
Di Mishpokhe Zingeris
The blog Holocaust in the Baltics, edited by the venerated Yiddish linguist and cultural activist Dovid Katz, has an interesting rundown of the recent commemorative ceremony for destroyed Lithuanian Jewish communities massacred in the Paneriai forest. The ceremony, which was attended by government officials, diplomats and a small group of local Jews, provided a peek into an oft-ignored corner of the exile. Fania Kukliansky, a well-known attorney and head of the Vilnius Jewish Community gave a speech in Lithuanian in honor of those murdered, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, a former Jewish partisan who is being investigated by the Lithuanian government for so-called “atrocities,” delivered an address in Yiddish about the need to learn universal lessons from the Holocaust.
Yet the blog details another, much more unusual speech by Emanuel Zingeris, a former Jewish community official turned right-wing Lithuanian nationalist politician. Holocaust in the Baltics writes:
A politically charged speech was given by Emanuelis Zingeris, a member of the Lithuanian parliament and its ruling right-wing faction, who is head of its committee on foreign affairs. Though a prominent Jewish personality, he resigned from the Jewish Community of Lithuania years ago, and has become a leading figure in Baltic nationalist circles. He continued the politicians’ tradition of saying different things to different audiences. He told the assembled crowd that he did not really consider Nazi and Soviet crimes to be equal, and that those who raised ‘suspicions’ about Ghetto escapees were making a ‘mistake’, but made no reference to his own many on-the-record pronouncements over the years in his governmental capacity as point man and ‘court Jew’ for the ‘Double Genocide movement’
Now calling someone a court Jew tells us that Zingeris is a politically powerful man that says one thing to the Jews and one thing to the Goyim. Ah, such a medieval problem!
Not really. The article provides links to Zingeris’ record of spouting “Double Genocide” ideology while sitting in the Lithuanian Parliament. The blog defines as Double Genocide Ideology as:
Attempts to utterly redefine genocide; painfully absurd accusations against aged Holocaust survivors; tacit encouragement of racist and antisemitic moods, particularly victimising today’s remnant Jewish community in this part of the world; attempts to restrict freedom of debate; state financed campaigns to persuade the European Union to accept the revisionist model, via the Prague Declaration, via a Europe-wide mixed Nazi-Soviet commemoration day, and other mechanisms.
In contemporary Lithuania, the land of our ancestors, three Jews are giving three speeches about the Holocaust. And yet, those three Jews, who delivered those speeches in three different languages (none of them Hebrew) hold radically different notions of the Jewish relationship to the Nations. Zingeris, who for a long time was on boards charged with the renovation of Vilnius’ Jewish Quarter, is now counted among those who believe there was little difference between Lithuanian suffering under the Soviets and Jewish suffering under fascist Nazi-Lithuanian collaborators. He also thinks that its appropriate to talk out of both sides of his mouth.
Yet, the Baltic boot that pins Zingeris’ neck in some ways pins us all.
.
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No!
Hebrew University unveils a sarcasm detector.
No way! That is just going to be so useful! I can never tell when people are writing sarcasm.
Still it is kinda cool.
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Haredim and Israel: compatible?
Yossi Sarid at Haaretz has a somewhat fiery condemnation of Haredi attitudes toward the State of Israel.
The ultra-Orthodox public, which has always been cutting down our trees, is now uprooting them. It will destroy basic values, without which a democratic, developed state cannot exist. It will be lost unless it fights back.
He raises some interesting questions: in what ways to Haredim benefit from the existence of the State of Israel as it currently functions? In what ways do they come into conflict with its values? These aren’t questions for which I have anywhere near the requisite authority or experience to give an answer (and I’m not trying to imply one, but they’re worth asking.
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Happy Birthday Allen Ginsberg wherever you are
The Lion For Real by Allen Ginsberg
“Soyez muette pour moi, Idole contemplative…”
I came home and found a lion in my living room
Rushed out on the fire escape screaming Lion! Lion!
Two stenographers pulled their brunnette hair and banged the window shut
I hurried home to Patterson and stayed two days
Called up old Reichian analyst
who’d kicked me out of therapy for smoking marijuana
‘It’s happened’ I panted ‘There’s a Lion in my living room’
‘I’m afraid any discussion would have no value’ he hung up
I went to my old boyfriend we got drunk with his girlfriend
I kissed him and announced I had a lion with a mad gleam in my eye
We wound up fighting on the floor I bit his eyebrow he kicked me out
I ended up masturbating in his jeep parked in the street moaning ‘Lion.’
…
Lion that eats my mind now for a decade knowing only your hunger
Not the bliss of your satisfaction O roar of the universe how am I chosen
In this life I have heard your promise I am ready to die I have served
Your starved and ancient Presence O Lord I wait in my room at your
Mercy.
Paris, March 1958
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New album from BBB falls short
I’m a huge Balkan Beat Box fan, but I’m forced to concede that their new album, Blue Eyed Black Boy, falls just short of awesome. More »
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