But to place the Jewish Music Stream (JMS) on the same psychic or spiritual level as comfort food or television bingeing is to trivialize its higher significance and, indeed, its sheer awesomeness. The Stream plays solid, 24-hour blocks of contemporary Jewish religious music in stunning digital quality, and without the glitches or gaps in connectivity that are so common to small-cap internet radio stations. The website, which was created in 2009, has somewhere between 250 and 400 listeners at any given time, although that figure likely shortchanges the station’s actual reach through the Intersect World app.

After all, we’re Jews: Klezmer is our jazz, the Banai clan is something like our Rolling Stones (or maybe The Killers), and the Pro Musica Hebraica series, organized by the columnist Charles Krauthammer, even attempts to give us our own place in classical European art music. The music the JMS plays is our gospel; our soul music, even. As I’ve discovered, much modern-day yeshivish music comes from a place of emotional or spiritual jouissance. The semi-orchestral religious music played on the JMS reaches epic heights; it soars, tapers, and then soars even higher still. Musical cultures often have genres or modes of expression reserved for feelings, ideas or experiences that are too vast and too immediate for any other artistic form to contain (Robert Johnson and Brett Michaels both belong in this category). We Jews are no exception. Yeshivisha music is melodramatic and emotionally overstuffed, but even in its textures it is fundamentally, recognizably ours. It’s our people’s attempt at achieving something that, through pure feeling and sheer earnestness, aspires to a kind of musical transcendence.

So what does the Jewish Music Stream play, exactly? Female voices are regrettably assur, or prohibited, so a good amount of airtime is devoted to various boys choirs. The Yeshiva Boys Choir likes adding techno beats to traditional zmirot, although purists are sure to thrill to the Kol Noar or Shir Hadasha Boys Choirs, both of whom are in the JMS rotation. And then there’s the grandaddy of them all, the Miami Boys Choir. I’ve been somewhat disheartened but nevertheless fascinated to learn that AutoTune has made its way into even the most established choir-based acts in yeshivish music—as if the angelic counter-tenor of a nine-year-old cheder student can possibly be improved upon.

The JMS is delightfully Ashkenazi. There’s the occasional Sephardi tune but for the most part there is no Torah on the JMS. There is the Toyrah. Today is not hayom, it’s hayoim; this morning is haboyker. Melachto? Puh-leeze: Our King is Melachtoi. And so on. I don’t mean to mock—indeed, this antediluvianism (I’m a hard-tav pronouncing, largely assimilated American Jew, thank you very much) explains much of the JMS’s power over me. This is the music of a mythical and most-likely imaginary before-time; a time when dybbuks existed and Chelm was best known as a real place, and when Warsaw (or possibly Baghdad) was the center of the Jewish world. Some of the music the JMS plays is actually in Yiddish!

At the same time, it is the JMS’s modernity—its connection to a real and thriving and even Yiddish-speaking now-time—that makes it so consistently surprising. The studio version of Yoely Greenfeld’s “Zemer” ends in a New Orleans jazz breakdown; Dovid Gabay’s “Berum Olam” begins with a pretty mind-wrecking (although obviously synthetic) blast of bagpipes. Ya’akov Shweky’s infectious “Ten Lo” has a slow-building, almost dub-like lead-in, complete with a meandering and virtuosic oud solo. Even in the famously internet-averse ultra-Orthodox community, Yisroel Werdyger has won over 1,000 Twitter followers. And why shouldn’t he, considering the presence, the subtlety of feeling—the kavana, for lack of a superior English equivalent—with which he sings?

The JMS showcases musical eclecticism, and, the heck with it, cultural modernity within an ultra-orthodox Jewish context. My intrigue at such a harmony of apparent opposites might simply be the result of false preconceptions. I can’t say that my pre-JMS world allowed for the possibility of zmirot capped with power ballad-worthy electric guitar solos.

When I reached out to the man responsible for the JMS—an IT professional and sometimes computer-programmer who runs the site anonymously and asked not to be named—he was somewhere between winding down from work and preparing for a night at the Beit Midrash. He created the site, he said, because “I saw what was out there in terms of Jewish music streams and saw that I would be able to build a better system.”

“I’ve met a lot of these artists,” he continued. “They’re regular people who happen to be blessed with these talents and are happy to have others enjoy it.”

The clash between the ultra-Orthodox and modern technology has been in the news lately, and the mere existence of the JMS suggested to me that this relationship is more complicated than many have given it credit for. The JMS founder and proprietor actually attended the recent Ichud HaKehillos asifa against the Internet, which packed Citi Field and nearby Arthur Ashe Stadium with nearly 50,000 ultra-orthodox Jewish men, who had come to hear their teachers’ concerns over the web’s effects on religious practice and communal life. After the speech, more than a few attendees took to the web to share their reactions. Some argued that the Internet could be helpful so long as it could be controlled. Others insisted that the technology itself was irredeemably evil.

Unsurprisingly, the JMS’s founder sits on the more liberal side of this simmering communal debate. “Personally, I do computer work most of the day, and from a general background perspective I use the Internet all the time,” he told me. “But I’m always pushing myself to make sure everything’s filtered.”

For him, having a “Jewish listening experience” is one way the Internet can foster and celebrate Jewish culture. “If you try to take all these types of sites offline, people aren’t going to listen to Jewish music,” he said. And people like me will likely never hear a techno version of Kol Hamispalel.

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We were heading to Kasserine partly because of its outward lack of anything interesting or unique. Coastal Tunisians think of their country’s interior as backward and distant, indistinguishable flecks in the vast Arab desert, rather than a living participant in the country’s distinct, part-French, part-Magrebi hybrid culture. If you drive in from the coast, Kasserine hadly feels like the same country as Tunis’s Parisian-style Avenue Habib Bourguiba, or the self-orientalizing Disneyland of Sidi Bou Said.

But the coast underestimated the interior at its own expense: Kasserine was the second city to experience widespread protests against the quarter-century-old rule of dictator Zine Al Abedine Ben Ali, 10 days after an unlicensed fruit seller named Mohammad Bouazizi publically burned himself (to death, it would turn out) in front of the governorate building in nearby Sidi Bouzid on Dec. 16, 2010. The seemingly-permanent Ben Ali fled the country just one month later. Kasserine and Sidi Bouzid, cultural and historical outsiders worn down over decades of inertia and official neglect, had been in flames long before urbane and liberal-minded Tunis.

As journalists, we were in Kasserine to probe the poignant banality of the places and people that launched the greatest wave of civil protest the modern Arab world has ever seen. The two labor organizers we were scheduled to interview were typical of the kind of activists who had helped the Sidi Bouzid protests go national. Their concerns were local—the regional illiteracy rate hovered at 35%, and unemployment wasn’t much lower than that. But when the protests began, these were the people who had helped flood the streets with discontented union members, breaking Ben Ali’s meticulous illusion of absolute control.

I wanted to like and respect these people. But my colleague and I would find this quite impossible. “Are you a Zionist?” the plumper of the two men asked us, before we could even get a question in. If we were, the interview was off. My journalist friend had interviewed members of Hezbollah—actual terrorists, in other words—and they had never asked him such a question.

Later in the interview, the activists explained that their union encompassed the entire political spectrum in Tunisia, accommodating communists, Islamists, really anyone who stood up for the rights of the country’s workers. I asked if they would tolerate a party that wanted to restore the diplomatic relations that Israel and Tunisia had maintained until 2000.

“We’re not only against normalizing with Israel, “the balder one said. “We’re for criminalizing normalization with Israel…Being with Israel, or even thinking of normalizing with Israel, is almost like holding a Kalishnakov and shooting a Tunisian citizen.”

Now nothing feels more dishonest than mindlessly nodding along to something that I privately consider to be poisonous nonsense, but it’s a position that only the most timid of journalists will never find themselves in. When this happens, you know you’re not in immediate physical danger or anything, but you can feel the tension rise as your conscience bristles, and as your own self-censorship becomes a very real part of the news-gathering process. Will I give anything away? I wondered. Am I about to be angrily expelled from this office—from this town perhaps? The answers to these questions were “no” and “probably not,” but the discomfort was tangible.

As the meeting progressed, I found myself cycling through all the coastal stereotypes about those backwards and uneducated Tunisian country folk, and even guiltily agreeing with a few of them. Except that in Tunis, the prevailing views on Israel—even among members of the educated, liberal establishment—were even worse.

“I always explain,” Zeynab Farhat, the director of Tunisia’s national theatre, told my colleague the day before I arrived in the country, “that even though I am just a citizen without any importance in this world, I say shit for Israel. It doesn’t exist for me.”

“We are not people like Sadat,” Ahmed Ounaies, Foreign Minister for a few chaotic months after Ben Ali’s ouster, told us. “We will not land in occupied Jerusalem and embrace whoever claims to be the leader of Israel while they still occupy Arab territories.” But don’t worry, he said later in the interview. “We have no ideological complex with Israel. None at all.”

On one of our last nights in Tunis, a young Tunisian journalist who seemed to fear the recently elected and avowedly Islamist Ennahda party as much as he had once despised the corrupt and inflexible Ben Ali regime, gave us his opinion on the current situation in Syria. It’s bad, he said. But, he added, the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians is worse. (At that point, Bashar al-Assad’s government had killed over 9,000 civilians in a little under a year.)

Whenever Israel came up, I dutifully continued typing, recording opinions that were ignorant or uninformed, corrosive even, considering that Tunisia’s was the first society to demand and even affect the destruction of a modern Arab autocracy. In such a revolutionary environment it was notable that narrow-mindedness towards Israel was immune from reassessment. It was notable, but also discouraging, particularly in Kasserine. Whatever brief romance I had with rural Tunisia—with the country’s underdogs, the unheralded heroes of the Arab Spring—ended with the question, “Are you a Zionist?”

(photo of the Kasserine marketplace, by the author)

Armin Rosen is a New York-based freelance writer.

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