“Adoshem, Adoshem, Part I” is not your zayde’s prayer.

A reinvention of this traditional High Holy Day appeal is featured on Further Definitions of the Days of Awe, on which the multicultural musicians of the Afro-Semitic Experience merge Jewish, African and African-American genres.

The words of the prayer say exactly what you’d expect a High Holy Day prayer to express. They address the “gracious and compassionate” deity who forgives sins and grants pardon. “Adoshem” is a term used by pious Jews in place of the unspeakable name of God, combining “Adonai” (Hebrew for “my Lord”) and “shem” (name).

The start of the song sounds like a rehearsal — there are voices, piano riffs and drum beats, but you can’t tell where the song is headed. Then, the musicians gather their strength and begin. At first, the song clings to its Jewish roots, courtesy of the warm-hearted, yearning cantorial voice of Jack Mendelsohn. Yet there’s a different feel to this “Adoshem.” The pianist’s fingers roam restlessly over the keyboard with arpeggios, strike jazz- and blues-inflected chords, and play the stuttering notes of a gospel hymn — a reminder, perhaps, that sinners are stuck in their ways and need to find ways to stop sputtering and push forward.

Then, the song does indeed push forward in ways that synagogue-goers have never heard. Percussionist Baba David Coleman, a Yoruba priest from Cuba, suggested the rhythm of a tango for “Adoshem.” With that seductive beat, underlined by an insistent drummer and the melancholy thrum of a cello, the Afro-Semitic Experience creates a Latin expression of the Jewish habit of swaying, or shuckling, to connect the physical self to a higher power. Is this going too far? “Music, especially sacred music, is not static,” bass player David Chevan says. “We don’t do this in an ironic manner, but rather out of respect and joy.”

As for the “Part I” in the title, that’s a wink to the old-school rhythm-and-blues practice of having two parts of a song — one on each side of a 45 record. The first part of “Adoshem” is a reflective Latin reverie.

Originally published here.

If you meet David Cohn, he won’t tell you he’s a rapper. Should you ask him what he does for a living, he’ll answer that he’s unemployed. He used to drive a Budweiser truck around Chicago, delivering beer to every liquor store south of the Loop. Then he got a job working in a shaman shop owned by a former producer for the Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev. He sold DMT, ayahuasca, salvia and enough esoteric psychedelics to make William Burroughs bug out. But only until 11 a.m. Then he’d go play pingpong.

The downside of working in a hallucinogenic Wonkaland is that there’s always someone with Day-Glo hair and a Kombucha tea addiction willing to work for soy milk and scrip. So two years ago, Cohn was axed and his personal life pinwheeled into tragedy: withering substance-abuse addictions among family members, crippling debt, a severe case of pneumonia that left him temporarily incapacitated and scarred by a pair of minor strokes.

Several months ago, Cohn fled the trauma — and the backbreaking Second City wind — to relocate to L.A., the home of his new label, the appropriately eccentric Anticon. Last week, he released Family & Friends, a bleak, melancholic and wry art-rap record that ranks as the most searing and powerful of his dozen-plus disc catalog. But unless you knew better, you would never know that Cohn was really Serengeti, his primary musical alter ego.

Serengeti emerged more than a dozen years ago, during a year Cohn spent studying abroad in Sweden, watching nature videos and teaching himself how to make music — a predilection that, like depression, runs in his blood. His great-uncle Sonny Cohn was a world-famous trumpeter in Count Basie’s band, but the younger Cohn was raised during the Golden Age and grew transfixed by KMD and MF Doom. So he started rapping, got weirder, turned semipro.

“I’d get offers to headline in Chicago, but as the 10th rapper on a bill of 10. By the time I performed, the only people left were the rappers,” Cohn says, speaking from his small and sparsely furnished apartment in Glassell Park — his furniture having been hocked on Craigslist to help finance the move.

After all, the contemporary indie hip-hop world is a war of attrition, especially for those with obtuse sensibilities. Rap fans prefer their cult artists as cartoons, while Serengeti eschews self-promotion and contrived mythology. The latest trend is to name rap songs after SEO-friendly icons like Donald Trump, Miley Cyrus and Michael Jordan. By contrast, Serengeti’s most popular song is “Dennehy” (from the 2006 album of the same name), a paean to the gruff actor best known to the sub-30 set as Big Tom Callahan in Tommy Boy.

But Serengeti isn’t rapping as himself on “Dennehy.” Instead, the song is performed by one of his alter egos, Kenny Dennis, a 48-year-old white guy besotted with bratwurst, Buicks, onions, softball, Richard Daley, actors Dennehy and Tom Berenger, and his wife, Jueles — not to mention the Bulls, White Sox, Blackhawks and da Bears. Kenny has a mustache the size of Mike Ditka’s forehead and an affinity for O’Doul’s — not because he’s a recovering alcoholic but because he finds it delicious.

Why would a black/Jewish rapper adopt the pug-nosed Polish slang of a Bill Swerski Super Fan? It all started when Cohn was watching the Little League World Series on TV one year, and the announcers were asking the kids about their favorite actors and athletes. “I wondered what it would be like if someone’s favorite actor was Brian Dennehy,” Cohn says, sipping coffee and wearing pajama pants at 5 p.m.

But Kenny Dennis is neither SNL sketch nor satire. Cohn’s genius lies in his three-dimensional commitment to his creations — a worldview bounded by regional chains, Windy City intonation and tribal loyalty. Nagged by the willful suspension of belief required to accept a middle-aged, blue-collar man rapping, Cohn cultivated the elaborate backstory.

“Serengeti explores the medium’s potential as art. Not in the self-indulgent or abstract-for-the-sake-of sense, but in the sense of a real person exploring the range of their experiences, emotional and otherwise,” says Mike Eagle, a friend of Cohn’s since their days at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and a gifted art rapper in his own right. “Serengeti is vulnerable, and makes his work valuable in a way that economics or popularity can’t define.”

Serengeti is the rap Sam Beckett, quantum leaping into different spirits, including a different, 1993 iteration of Kenny — who was, in this telling, then known as KD, Tha Killa Deacon.

“It’s fun for me to be Kenny because he’s just a simple guy who’s happy all the time. All he wants is his wife, Jueles, sports, and some brats and chops,” Cohn says. “I’m usually depressed. When I’m not Kenny, everything I write draws back to my real life, which has often been really fucked up.” To wit: His first girlfriend, of a decade, died in a car accident, folks close to him have had drug problems, and he still has to deal with the spatial problems caused by his strokes.

When Pierre Bensusan sat down to write and record his latest album, Vividly, the project needed to come to him organically. Taking his time, Bensusan says, he’d spent five years fighting the music in his head before making his 10th studio album.

“It was not a project I was aware of beforehand,” he tells Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon. “All the tunes were saying, ‘Play me! Play me! No, me first! Me first!’ And I said, ‘Wait a minute. I hear you, but I’m going to take my time.’ ”

Born in Oran, Algeria, before he and his parents fled to Paris during the Algerian revolution, Bensusan taught himself guitar at the age of 4 and has been called “the acoustic Jimi Hendrix” for his experimentation with alternative tunings. Bensusan says he considers his background instrumental to the creation of his music.

“It’s going to reflect in the music,” he says. “In the music, I feel like I’m a sponge. I had to adapt myself and it’s good to feel home anywhere — to belong anywhere.”

You can hear the full interview and performance here.

Jewish Exponent

In the third floor beit midrash at the University of Pennsylvania Hillel, Emery “Eliezer” Williams gazed straight ahead while the students around him bowed over prayerbooks, swaying back and forth to the rhythm of their silent worship.

His stance was not the only thing that set him apart. At 47 years of age, Williams has a distinct seniority in this crowd — as long as university administrators or clergy aren’t around.

Oh, and he’s black. And blind.

“It’s not every day that you see an African-American with a yarmulke and a blind walking stick walking through the Penn campus,” said Jeremy Goldman, 35, a healthcare attorney in Baltimore who befriended Williams after starting law school at Penn in 1998. “You couldn’t help but notice him.”

To the Orthodox students, Williams has been a fixture in their community for as long as they can remember. He’s been coming here for more than 20 years — longer than most of the current undergraduates have been alive.

Read the full story here.

Itamar Eichner

Israel Jewish Scene

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New York Times

JERUSALEM — The tall man in the velvet fedora and knee-length black jacket with ritual fringes peeking out takes long, swift strides toward the Western Wall. It’s late in the day, and he does not want to miss afternoon prayers at Judaism’s holiest site.

“We have to get there before the sun goes down,” he says, his stare fixed behind a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses, the first clue that this is no ordinary Jerusalem man of God. It’s the rapper Shyne, the Sean Combs protégé who served almost nine years in New York prisons for opening fire in a nightclub in 1999 during an evening out with Mr. Combs and his girlfriend at the time, Jennifer Lopez.

“My entire life screams that I have a Jewish neshama,” he said, using the Hebrew word for soul.

Read the full story here:

The Interior Ministry’s controversial Oz immigration police unit has been accused of beating and verbally abusing members of an African-American family from Kansas City whose members converted to Judaism several years ago, and are living in Ashkelon pending a decision on their citizenship request.

Kristien Garrett, 24, who is seven months pregnant, was taken by ambulance to Ashkelon’s Barzilai Hospital after the Oz unit operation. During the operation, several officers detained her husband Sean, telling family members that his name did not appear “in the system” of the ministry’s Population Registry.

Witnesses said Kristien Garrett’s one-year-old daughter and Garrett’s mother Trina Woodcox were struck a number of times as the officers moved to detain Garrett’s husband. Sean Garrett was allegedly handcuffed, beaten repeatedly and subjected to racial slurs while in custody; he was later released when ministry officials determined that his visa was valid.

The Oz unit, which spearheads a high-profile Interior Ministry campaign to track and expel foreign nationals who lack valid permits to remain in Israel, admitted to having detained a family member in error, but denied allegations of use of physical force. It countered that family members had attacked them with “cursing and swearing.”

The family had come to Israel at the invitation of the Interior Ministry, which asked to interview them prior to a final decision on their request for immigrant status. Ministry officials held a hearing on their case last month, a step in the process toward receiving citizenship.

When Woodcox, who held the family’s documents, asked to accompany Sean Garrett in the police van, “officers grabbed her by her hair and her head, and pulled her by her leg,” dragging her out of the vehicle, Kristien Garrett told Haaretz Thursday, after her release from the hospital.

The officer with her mother “turned around and started hitting me and my child in the face,” she said. Her husband tried to help her, “but two other officers jumped on him, handcuffed him, and beat him up while the other officer was hitting me and my daughter.”

Neighbors left their houses to come to the family’s aid. “Everything was just a big frenzy,” Garrett said. “One of the neighbors came and took my daughter away from me, so that she wouldn’t be hit any more. The police officer was kicking me and hit me in my stomach, and I hit him back, to get him off of me.”

Another neighbor called an ambulance. Kristien Garrett was taken to Barzilai with cramps, and hospitalized overnight. She has now been discharged on bed rest.
The lawyer for the family, Nicole Maor of the Israel Religious Action Center, said that they had been subjected to racial abuse by the police officers, who reportedly yelled at them: “Afro-Americans, kushim [darkies], we don’t need you here.”

Family members said the officer who had struck Kristien Garrett later returned and apologized to Sean for beating his wife. “He said that he had never hit a woman before, and that he felt bad for the mistake that had been made,” Woodcox said.

Oz unit official Yehuda Ben-Ezra denied that the officers had used physical force against the family, saying that his inspectors had filed a police complaint alleging that the family had attacked them with profanity.

Questioned regarding Garrett’s hospitalization, Ben-Ezra told Army Radio, “The woman is not in the hospital because of violence by inspectors. Really not.” Pressed by news anchor Yael Dan, Ben-Ezra said “I have no idea why she was hospitalized – why she went to the hospital.”

“You mean there was no violence there?” Dan asked.

“Not on the part of my inspectors. On the part of the residents, yes. On the part of my inspectors, truly no.”

The morning after the incident, Trina Woodcox went to the Ashkelon police station to file a complaint against the police, but was rebuffed.

“They called her a liar, and said that they couldn’t accept her complaint,” said Maor.

Wilcox wrote Kansas City Reform Rabbi Arthur Nemitoff, who had converted the family to Judaism, “My heart is breaking right now.

“We have so much love for Israel. But it seems like Israel does not love us back.”

Originally published here.

That premise, which is spelled out in the otherwise excellent liner notes—as artful a combination of marketing savvy and musical scholarship as I’ve encountered—is that while much has been made of Jewish interest in black music, the converse has remained a little-known trade secret.

There is, in turn, just one thing wrong with this premise: It simply isn’t true.

Yes, much has been made of the many Jews who have played a role in black music and culture. For recent examples, look no further than the films Cadillac Records and Who Do You Love; and David Lehman’s A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, one of several books the Society recommends for further reading.

But should the performance of Jewish-themed material by black musicians really come as such a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention for the past 100 years?

“To me,” says Lehman, who teaches in the graduate writing program at the New School, “this is not news.” (When we spoke by phone, Lehman had not yet seen the disc.)

That Black Sabbath was inspired by the random discovery of an old vinyl recording of Johnny Mathis singing “Kol Nidre” suggests that the collectors behind the Society may suffer from Christopher Columbus syndrome: Having tripped over a continent, they assumed that they were the first to have discovered it. By that logic, every 13-year-old boy on earth could claim to have “discovered” the miracle of onanism.

The evidence for black investment in music that bears some relation to Jews and Judaism is all around us and has been for some time–even longer, I would guess, than all of those early 20th-century recordings of black baritones belting out Negro spirituals. And is it any wonder? Five thousand years of exile, oppression, and slavery virtually guaranteed that Jews would serve as allegorical stand-ins for African-Americans. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that “Go Down Moses” made a conveniently coded song of protest.

If this long-standing musical relationship seems at all surprising from a contemporary vantage point, that’s “only because we’ve been conditioned to imagine that Jews and blacks are in conflict with one another politically and culturally,” says Lehman—conditioning that has much to do with the rift that opened between the two groups toward the end of the civil rights era, a black-Jewish love-in the likes of which we’ll probably never see again.

One can’t deny the distance that now separates black Americans from American Jews, or the emphasis that contemporary observers tend to place on the appropriation (read: theft) of black culture by Jews and other white folk. But it seems silly to suggest, as if by extension, that any part of their long, two-way history of cultural exchange remains undiscovered country.

It’s also silly to read too much into the musical tea leaves. Is it really significant that Jimmy Scott covered the theme to Exodus in 1969–the same year that the Temptations unleashed their groovy “Fiddler on the Roof Medley”—when both Exodus and Fiddler were such huge hits that few didn’t try them on for size? Or that Mathis gave forth with “Kol Nidre” in 1958, when he already had available for study Perry Como’s 1953 version? Perry Como, ladies and gentlemen.

Josh Kun, who wrote those otherwise excellent liner notes, attributes much of this to the sense of solidarity that many blacks felt with Jews after the birth of Israel, when they saw reflected in the successful push for a Jewish homeland their own yearning for freedom. And he may have a point, at least when it comes to a tune like Lena Horne’s “Now!,” a sock-it-to-’em protest song from 1963 set to the tune of “Hava Nagila.”

But much of the music included in the compilation was simply in the air at the time–a time that was both closer to the golden era of Jewish jive exemplified by Slim Gaillard’s “Dunkin’ Bagel,” from 1945, and Cab Calloway’s “Utt Da Zay,” from 1939; and to the golden era of Jewish folk song, which owed as much to the larger folk revival of the 1950s as it did to Israeli independence. Popular entertainers draw their material from popular culture, and these Jewish-themed tunes qualified as such at the time.

This might all sound like pointy-headed quibbling, especially given how entertaining the music on Black Sabbath is (the album has justly made it onto the Billboard chart) and how poor our collective memory tends to be. Lehman contends that any reminder of the long history of positive collaboration between blacks and Jews is both welcome and salutary, and I won’t argue with him. Nor will I deny that Billie Holiday’s home recording of “My Yiddishe Momme,” from 1956—a genuine find that’s almost painful to hear, given how battle-scarred Holiday’s voice was then—“makes the point in a way that’s impossible to miss.”

But this isn’t just any old compilation CD. It’s a compilation CD with a message and a mission. And both seem needlessly muddled.

In contrast, there was nothing at all muddled about the presentation that the Bronx-born, Budapest-based fiddler and food blogger Bob Cohen recently gave on his 30 years of research into Jewish and Gypsy music in Romania.

Speaking at the Center for Jewish History as part of the New York World Festival: Music Around the Black Sea, Cohen traced the complex musical connections between the Roma and the Jews–connections that really do qualify as “secret,” if only because many of the people who once played traditional Central European Jewish and Gypsy music are now dead and the audience for such sounds has largely disappeared.

Any effort to unearth those connections, and the history of positive cultural collaboration between the Roma and the Jews–especially at a time when many European countries seem intent on subjecting the Roma to the same treatment that African-Americans received only two or three generations ago–seems both welcome and salutary, as well.

Originally published here.

NVR: On Monday, October 11, you will be performing “The Colors of Water,” an original theatrical piece that tells the story of the four generations of your African-American Jewish family, as part of Mayyim Hayyim’s Living Waters International Mikveh Conference in Newton, Massachusetts. What inspired you to create this piece? What can the audience expect?

I have been an educator and activist within the Jewish professional community for close to twelve years now, and am constantly compelled and inspired by the potential for transformative change that diversity and inclusion work propels forward when it is done with grace, intention, forethought and an eye toward practical applicability. In writing this script with Anita Diamant and Janet Buchwald, I found an opportunity to share the unique experience of a multi-generational African-American Jewish family, and the faith and challenges that four different women experienced in regard to their Jewish communal participation and inclusion. This happens to be the story of the women in my matriarchal line, but the truth is that this could be the story of any Jewish family navigating the margins of community, and looking for an entry point that values both their diversity, history and their hope for a  new Jewish future. The audience can expect an exciting evening of edutainment, with moments that will make them laugh, cry, and sit at the edge of their seats wondering where the journey will take us next.

NVR: Can you tell us a little about  “Ayecha,” the organization you founded? What needs does Ayecha address within the Jewish community ? Have those needs changed since you first started the organization?

Ayecha was an educational consultancy and advocacy organization that I founded and ran for eight years in service of Jewish communal needs for diversity education and resources to support Jews of Color.  In my role as the Executive Director of Ayecha, I helped Jewish organizations to do vision planning around diversity strategies and I facilitated educational workshops and programs that increased awareness of the multicultural fabric that binds our national and global Jewish community.

In support of Jews of Color, I organized a leadership resource group call the Jewish Leaders of Color Roundtable and delivered annual conferences, programs, and workshops to this group.

I did this as a young Jewish professional, but three years ago, when my husband matched for residency in Boston, I worked with my board to close the organization and transfer its work to others and I took on leadership of another educational consultancy, The Curriculum Initiative, whose mission is to provide leadership and Jewish cultural identity resources to Independent (private) schools across the nation.  My work in Boston now involves working with students and faculty at independent schools in our area to expand awareness of Jewish identity and culture and empower students to contextualize their Jewish journeys within the framework of leadership, citizenship, and pursuit of excellence in education.

NVR: For readers who may not be familiar with you or your story, can you give us a brief overview of your background and what inspired you to work in the Jewish community?

I was raised in an Orthodox Black Jewish family and was continually compelled to explore issues of Jewish Diversity as I navigated my yeshivah day school education, post-graduate education in Israel, and later work as an educational professional in the Jewish communal sphere.  I’ve always felt that the Diaspora journeys of the Jewish people, were leading them to some deep and transformative knowledge of what it means to be a human being on this earth, and it has always been my hope that our community would both cherish the diversity of our global journeys and listen long enough, and with enough love to hear them.

NVR: What do you think are some of the major challenges facing the Jewish community today ?

One challenge that I will address in the show is racism.  By virtue of the valuable strides that Jews in America have made since our initial immigration to these shores, we and our children are not as deeply connected to the issues of race and class that our history in this country ought to make us vested change agents against.  We do a great job of celebrating the heroes among our ranks who marched in the Civil Rights movement and worked to make equal rights a constitutional reality, but in many cases, we have neglected the every-day work of not taking privilege and societal access for granted and doing what we can in our personal lives to stay connected to the issues of oppression that still plague so many other identity groups in our country.  My Judaism fuels my connection to these issues, and it is my hope that through this show I can share some of the ways that my African-American family has been inspired to work for change through the Torah and Jewish tradition.

Originally published here.