When Yitz Y-Love was seven years old, he saw a TV commercial wishing him a happy Passover. He was riveted.
“I started drawing stars of David everywhere,” he recounts. “I told my mother that I wanted to be Jewish.”
Y-Love’s mother, a Catholic, mentioned her son’s curious reaction to a Jewish co-worker, who promptly invited him to his first Seder. She also gave him a yarmulke. “I thought it was like a magic hat,” he said. “I wore it all the time.”
Y-Love now lives in Borough Park, a densely Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn and goes by Y-Love. The community is notoriously insular, and as a Black hip-hop artist from Baltimore, he is hardly typical. But Y-Love, whose childhood attraction to Judaism eventually led to his Orthodox conversion at age 22, feels at home.
“Once I learned to speak Yiddish, and once I got the ins and out of how the welt works, it was no big thing. If you’re willing to live like [a Hasid], it’s all cool.”
Before moving to Borough Park, Y-Love studied Jewish law in Jerusalem. His rigorous curriculum included Gemara, an intricate, partially Aramaic, form of Biblical commentary.
When he and a friend, emcee Cels-1, struggled to decipher a particularly difficult passage about mutual property damage, they decided to take a different approach: “We would flow the Rashi and act out the Meforshim,” he says. In other words, they turned the Gemara into hip-hop.
Many of Y-Love’’s classmates disapproved; however, when the class was quizzed on the material six months later, only he and his study partner recalled the passage in its entirety. “I’m all for alternative teaching techniques,” he said. “Whatever your strength is, use that for learning Torah. The mitzvah is to learn Torah, not to sit and look Yeshivish.”
Y-Love raps in English, Hebrew, Arabic, Yiddish, and Aramaic. “I think in Yeshivish,” he explains, describing the alloy of languages. He is a Bostoner Hasid, a sect which stresses welcoming all Jews in their own languages. Yitz takes this to a new level, reaching out to Jews in the language of hip-hop. His audience is predictably diverse. He reports that non-Jews are typically more inquisitive as to the meaning of his Aramaic lyrics whereas Jewish kids gravitate towards the more accessible English. As long as he’s reaching someone, though, Y-Love is satisfied.
He recounts a story about a fellow musician: “A guy once said, ‘I used to be an atheist, and then I listened to [my colleague’s music], and I rediscovered God.’ If somebody would say something like that [about] me, I would flip out.” Given Y-Love’s combinations of divine inspiration with compelling music and unusual lyrics, such a response would come as no surprise.
