Starting a DIY Klezmer Group with the Hava Nagila Principle
Klezmer is all the rage. The New Voices Disorientation Guide is here to show you how to start the Jewish band of your dreams.
Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
Klezmer is all the rage. The New Voices Disorientation Guide is here to show you how to start the Jewish band of your dreams.
The Jewish songwriter’s lifelong struggle with depression led him to become a public mental health advocate, even in the face of media-wide ableism.
In a day and age of DIY Judaism and Jewish innovation, Syd’s Queer Jewish music is modern revelation: a Jewish practice that draws from tradition and is refreshed with new melodies and media. New Voices has a conversation with Syd to talk about composition, spirituality, queer identity, and creativity in a time of quarantine.
“Still, the images—Portland tweens and Seattle teens and Polish and British and American and Israeli and Hungarian and Canadian staff singing their hearts out in languages familiar and foreign, skipping around with friends and strangers turned best friends, busting moves in sync or at random without blinking an eye—remains starkly etched in the crevices of my mind. Finding my place in this global network of people and identities reminds me just how much room there is under the umbrella of Judaism.”
Have you ever wondered how Tu B’Av became marketed in Israel as an Israeli Valentine’s Day? When I went to Israel to visit my cousins, I was surprised to see Tu B’Av being celebrated as such a commercial holiday. Being the yenta that I am, I set out on a journey to find out why….
As apart of the 2015 Washington Jewish Music Festival, the Gypsy, Yiddish, klezmer, funk, fusion band, Golem, will grace Sixth and I Historic Synagogue on May 14th. I talked with the founder of Golem, Annette Ezekiel Kogan, to kibbitz about everything from the dance club vibe of their upcoming set at Sixth and I performance…
Every year, even if I celebrate it differently and even as my perceptions of Zionism and the Jewish State become evermore complicated, Yom HaAtzmaut always evokes in me a certain special nostalgia. It was only once I was no longer forced to celebrate the holiday like I did in elementary and high school—with Israeli dancing,…
Although my favorite holiday, Tu B’Shevat, passed in February, Jewish tree lovers like me can still find joy in another holiday celebrating the beauty of earth’s many bountiful blessings: Earth Day and the week-long Broccoli City Festival. Starting in Washington, D.C. on April 25 and finishing up in Los Angeles May 3, the Broccoli City Festival…
As I sat in Sixth & I Historic Synagogue the night before the start of Passover, I was surrounded by a sea of hipsters swagging SovJew, or Soviet Jewish. They were clamoring around, speaking in fast- paced Russian, to hear the self-proclaimed “ethno-chaos” of the Ukrainian folk fusion band DahkaBrahka. All around me, I heard…
I’ve wanted to write about Kendrick Lamar for a while. Mostly because listening to Kendrick seems to be what I turn to when I’m supposed to be writing, so integrating the two activities felt ideal. But what angle could possibly be found to write about hip-hop for a Jewish student website? Well, I’m not sure….
I’m a member of that niche demographic who is really excited by the idea of a dance performance inspired by Jewish text study, and luckily for me, this is essentially the premise behind Sydney Schiff Dance Project’s signature work Dry Bones: Resurrection of the Living. Sydney Schiff graduated from Princeton University in 2010 with a…
The Israeli band Shmemel recently released a controversial, tongue-in-cheek video single entitled Berlin(English translation and annotation here, courtesy of The Forward). In the song, the band sings a ballad of Israelis leaving the country – for economic opportunity, for the madness of living in a state of constant war, or for a better and more…
I turned 25 this year. Something about that looming birthday made me evaluate who I was, who I am, and who I want to be. I asked myself if I was happy, if I was fulfilled and doing what I pictured for myself in my mid-twenties. It didn’t take long to realize that the answer was no. I…
Here’s why I usually hate Twitter: We will never get to the bottom of the big issues facing humanity—poverty, disease, warfare, Israel on campus—without a long dialogue held in good faith between dissenting viewpoints. In other words, getting to the bottom of the world’s ills will take more than volleying 140-character spitballs with a…