Jewish music

It started with a teacher.

Sidney Krum, who came to New York from Poland as a child, had passed his bar exam, but he spent most of his professional life in New York City’s high schools. Much of the rest of his time he spent listening to, singing and collecting Yiddish music, eventually donating his collection to YIVO, where it became the core of what is now the Sidney Krum Jewish Music and Yiddish Theater Memorial Collection.

(JTA) – Apple’s iTunes has put some of the most well-known Jewish and chasidic singers in the online music store “Christian & Gospel" section.

The Jerusalem Post reported Sunday that musicians such as Avraham Fried, an Orthodox Jew; Mordechai Ben-David; and Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach all have some albums categorized in iTunes’ “Christian & Gospel” genre section.

Why is this Passover different from all other Passovers? Maybe it’s all those Jewish boys-turned-rappers showing up on YouTube, dressed in matching attire, grinning incessantly, singing Pesach lyrics to the tune of hip, popular songs.

Practicing, practicing, and more practicing. That’s how I’ve spent two hours of my Sunday afternoons this year.

By deciding to join HaZamir, the international Jewish high school choir, mid-year of my sophomore year at Friends Seminary in Manhattan, I knew I had my work cut out for me. I hadn’t been in a choir since sixth grade, but I was in an a cappella group last year. In HaZamir, I found out that memorizing more than a dozen songs in just a few months really is just as hard as it sounds.

For a long time, the composer Judd Greenstein kept a wall between his interest in Judaism and his passion for music. Though he was raised in a secular Greenwich Village home and is still not observant, for at least the past decade he’s cultivated a deep knowledge of Jewish history, literature and law.

“It’s interesting that my music has been divorced from my interest in Jewish texts and Jewish learning,” Greenstein said in an interview last week, sitting in his Brooklyn studio.

Last week I had dinner with Johnny Mathis.

That’s right, Johnny Mathis. The third best-selling recording artist of all time, whose open-hearted, sultry voice animated our car rides to Lake Tahoe when I was 10, the eight-track cassette seemingly invented just so my sister and I could say, yet again, “Go back to ‘Chances Are’!”

(JTA) -- The Reform movement’s cantorial school has been named after the late Debbie Friedman.

Rabbi David Ellenson, president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, made the announcement Jan. 27 in New York at a memorial tribute to Friedman, who died Jan. 9 at 59.

Friends of the late singer-songwriter have made possible an endowment to the school, which will henceforth be known as The Debbie Friedman School of Sacred Music, Ellenson said.

I wish Debbie Friedman had been alive to hear what was said about her at her funeral.

A similar thought occurs to me when I attend other people's funerals but never did I feel it so acutely as I did this past Tuesday as I watched the live-streaming of Debbie's memorial service on-line along with seven thousand other people who, like me, were singing and crying at their desks, on their iPhones, in their living rooms, and sending messages to each other simultaneously of sorrow, comfort, and gratitude for her life.

To a broken generation, Debbie Friedman delivered a mystical truth: You don’t have to be cured to be healed.

She, who suffered for so long from elusive, debilitating neurological illnesses that finally took her life Sunday after 59 years, understood, with humor and faith, that she was singing and writing with one foot in Heaven and the other on a banana peel. It was as if from Heaven, however, that her most ethereal music seemed to come, transforming not only lives but whole denominations.

To the many thousands of words of tribute that have been written about Debbie Friedman this week as the Jewish world mourns her untimely death, I humbly add these few…