Jewish Hip Hop Goes Global
Jewish Journal, News Report, Loolwa Khazzoom, Posted: Dec 18, 2004
Growing up in the Oakland public school system, MC Hyim began freestyling when he was eight years old. “Judaism is a religion of the Word, of the Book,” he said, “so it makes sense a lot of Jews would get into rap and hip hop. Our culture is about literacy — about verbal and written and oral communication.”
As a white Jew of Ashkenazi heritage, however, Hyim navigates through tensions regarding his participation in hip hop culture: “There is always the question whether we are co-opting, recycling, participating in culture vulturism. I think the answer really depends on what your intention is. My intention is to celebrate the positive aspects of communication and a long history of storytelling — both of hip hop music and Jewish heritage.”
In fact, Jewish hip hop is not a new phenomenon.
“Jews have been part of hip hop since its beginning,” said Josh Noreck of the Hip Hop Hoodios, a Latino Jewish rap group based out of Los Angeles and New York. “Rick Rubin founded Def Jam records. Lyor Cohen started working for it right after. The Beastie Boys and 3rd Bass were huge old-school rappers. Way before Eminem, pretty much the only white rappers were Jewish. When I was growing up, I was conscious of that.”
And yet, hip hop video producer Jeremy Goldscheider said, “Nobody realizes there is a Jewish hip hop scene spread out in different parts of the world.” Eager to educate hip hop fans about international Jewish rappers, Goldscheider recently joined forces with local Jewish singer, songwriter and music producer Craig Taubman, co-producing a new album, “Celebrate Hip Hop: Jewish Artists From Around the Globe.”
From Israeli MC Sagol 59 to American MC Remedy, and from British group Antithesis to Russian group iSQUAD, the CD brings together mainstream and underground artists with diverse approaches to hip hop. Canadian group Solomon & Socalled rap in Yiddish to a classic sthetl groove; Israeli artist Mook E raps in Jamaican-style dancehall; and American group Blood of Abraham raps in classic inner-city style.
Goldscheider’s ultimate goal is to provide youth a new avenue for expressing Jewish identity: “I’m interested in how young people connect to Judaism. I don’t think there are a lot of interesting, unique, cool ways of doing it. This is about being part of a larger hip hop community, being proud of a Jewish voice in it.”
“Jewish hip hop is really important to Jewish identity today,” said Noreck, whose group is on the album singing “Ocho Kandelikas” — a rock/salsa/rap version of the traditional Ladino Chanukah song (see box). “Music like klezmer is for an older generation. You have to bring Jewish music up to date, and the most youth-driven genre today is hip hop.”
For some, however, hip hop and Jewish music seem as far removed from each other as can be. “The opposition is only within the Jewish community,” said Los Angeles rapper Etan G. “With the exception of the Beastie Boys, there has never been a prominent Jewish hip hop act that wasn’t about bagels and lox and dreidels and shmaltz and gelt and every other idiotic Yiddish word you can throw into a song.”
“A lot of Jewish rap up to now has been about parody,” Noreck said. “I can’t stand it. If Jewish rap music wants a place of its own and wants to be taken seriously, it can’t be parody all the time.”
Through songs like “Remember Ben” by Israeli rappers Sagol 59 and A7, the album addresses significant and timely topics: “I’ve seen many rappers come and go/I’ve seen many DJs with inflated egos/But I’ve never seen anyone quite like you/One hand on the turntables/One hand flipping through the Torah/You didn’t care if it was in a small club in front of three people/Or if in a huge festival in front of three thousand/You played Cube and Snoop, Common and Cyprus/I remember you always said, ‘I don’t spin on Shabbos’/But now you’re not here/You’ve fallen victim to the stupid war of small-minded people.”
“DJ Benny the B was an Orthodox Jewish guy from Pennsylvania,” said Sagol 59, who raps in Hebrew. “He came to study Torah in Jerusalem. He was a hip hop DJ by night, with his kippah and tzitzit and four earrings in each ear, spinning Snoop Doggy Dog. The day before he was supposed to go back to America, he went to say goodbye to some friends at Hebrew University. He actually had the plane ticket in his pocket when he was blown up by a suicide bomber in the school cafeteria. He was one of nine people killed. It was really difficult to record this song, and I still get choked up when I perform it.”
Growing up in the inner city of Baltimore, immersed in East Coast hip hop, A7 began freestyling in first grade — going on to rap with Baltimore’s local group Triad and local crew Testament. At 21, however, he left his fellow musicians, family and friends, in pursuit of a new spiritual path — Judaism. “I started to read the Torah,” he said, “and it spoke to me. I decided these are my beliefs, and I’m really serious about it. So there was only one place for me to be: here in Israel.”
Israeli hip hop artists, A7 asserts, have something to teach hip hop artists in America: “Because hip hop is so international right now, rappers need to pay attention to the messages they are putting out there. As black rappers in America, we can get rich making albums about killing white people. For this reason, American rappers are not cognizant of the image we portray globally. But it’s more than our block now, more than our neighborhood, our side of town, our state, America. It goes around the world. So we have to be cognizant not to look like fools.
“One thing that the rest of the world has an understanding of, which American musicians don’t, is that what you say affects other people. Here in Israel, you have to be cognizant of the words coming out of your mouth, because they can incite something negative. And you don’t want to do that in a place like this, where things are extremely sensitive and tense. Only one message needs to come out in Israel — and that is peace.”
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