The JCC of Manhattan will broadcast a live memorial service at 5pm PST tonight. Friedman, a popular singer and songwriter who is widely credited with reinvigorating synagogue music, died Sunday after being hospitalized in Orange County for several days with pneumonia. She was in her late 50s.
Debbie Friedman, a popular singer and songwriter who is widely credited with reinvigorating synagogue music, has died. Friedman died Sunday after being hospitalized in Orange County for several days with pneumonia. She was in her late 50s.
It was early on during his difficult, isolated years in prison that the former gangsta rapper known as Shyne decided to formally take on the laws of Judaism as his own. Shyne, who legally changed his name in prison from Jamaal Barrows to Moses Levi — Moses is one of his favorite biblical heroes, and Levi is for the Levites who were musicians during Temple times — remembers the initial skepticism he encountered from prison rabbis at New York’s Rikers Island, where he was first incarcerated, and the other prison rabbis that would follow. \”In prison culture, everyone is trying to make a scam, everyone is a con artist, so who is this dark-skinned guy they wondered? Does he just want the Jewish food?\” asks Levi, now cloaked in the black garb of a Chasidic Jew and living in Jerusalem.
Bon Jovi will perform in Israel in the coming year, the band\’s lead singer Jon Bon Jovi told Larry King on his talk show.
Leon Wildes sits in a polished conference room on Madison Avenue, where the walls are festooned with news articles and enlarged photographs of John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and…Leon Wildes. He may not be the fifth Beatle, but it was the legal artistry of this HIAS board member that masterfully secured Lennon’s U.S. residency back in 1976.
Last week, Regina Spektor, the Russian-born, Jewish singer-songwriter, released her first live album, “Live in London,” a double-disc CD and DVD, which captures her performance at that city’s Hammersmith Apollo Theatre. On it, Spektor performs 23 songs, exploring her five-album-deep discography and unveiling a few new tunes, including the religiously introspective “Laughing With,” a single off her 2009 album, “Far”; the new, more lighthearted meta number, “Bobbing for Apples”; and “Après Moi,” in which Spektor uses lyrics from poems by the Russian-Jewish writer Boris Pasternak.
It looks ridiculously easy. You pull together a dozen or so of your favorite recordings, put them on a CD and release them to an adoring public. But it took Simon Rutberg a dozen years to bring to fruition a lifelong dream, a compilation album that showcases his favorite Jewish and Yiddish classics, sung by an unlikely group of pop, rock and classical artists. Happily for Rutberg, the album, “Jewish Soul: The Heart and Soul of Jewish Music” is ready for Chanukah.
There’s so many Christmas songs out there, I wanted to give the Jewish kids something to be proud of.
The pianist François Chouchan has nothing against contemporary music, but for the first season of the monthly chamber music series Le Salon de Musiques, he and co-artistic director violinist Phillip Levy have filled all eight concerts with masterpieces of the Western classical canon.
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