In Demon, ghosts refuse to rest, and those who cross them risk possession— Jewish style.

While tales of demons and vengeful spirits pervade Jewish folklore, it’s the notion of the dybbuk that’s ubiquitous, that the soul of a dead person may invade the body of the living, and won’t leave just because you ask them nicely. Now, the dybbuk takes its next turn onscreen in the Polish-Israeli film premiering in the United States after a year of the festival circuit.

The film, as you can see in the trailer, plays into certain well-worn horror tropes. A young couple is terribly in love. The man is excited to build a new summer home for his bride! And hey— maybe they should tear down that creepy barn on their property. From there, it eventually spirals, as you might expect, into chaos, to the couple’s raucous wedding party that takes a turn when the groom starts exhibiting, well, strange behavior.

Perhaps the most famous cultural representation of this folklore is the S. Ansky 1920 play, The Dybbuk, and its subsequent 1937 film adaptation. Demon clearly dips into Ansky’s well—setting the story at a wedding at all is a reference, but does the ghostly bride in the trailer look just a bit like Ansky’s tragic Leah?

The film’s stars include lauded Israeli actor Itay Tiran, perhaps best known for his roles in Beaufort and Lebanon. The film is set in Poland, and of course the Polish wedding-goers faced with literal demons of the country’s Jewish past is a chilling, intentional metaphor that modern Jewish audiences will certainly note.

Unfortunately, it bears mentioning that since the film’s completion, its director, Marcin Wrona, committed suicide. While it’s inappropriate to try to create meaning of the connection between onscreen events and behind-the-scenes tragedy (see: the Poltergeist “curse”), it’s certainly significant that this is his final film. So far, it’s been very well received.

The film opens in limited release in the U.S. on September 9th. In the meantime, you can watch the super-creepy trailer below:

Image: Itay Tiran, center, in Demon

The post In ‘Demon,’ the Dybbuk Returns appeared first on Jewcy.

It being the summer, it’s wedding season. I admit, it’s also less than a fortnight to my own wedding, and I’ve tried to avoid doing productive things like find a florist by diving into the coolest wedding traditions I can find, more obscure gems than just breaking a glass. There are lots of amazing ones that you can’t seem to find on the Internet, which seems mostly focused on explaining for the 613th time what a chuppah is. And so, here a few favorites I have gleaned:

Helping your friends find a match

Throwing a bouquet to give luck in finding a match is way too limited. Why leave that up to chance, when your most deserving, most eligible friend has to miss out because they didn’t play sports in High School? Jewish weddings are peppered with chances to distribute matchmaking mazel, and what’s more, the bride has the power to pick the recipients.

For example, in Ashkenazi tradition, women don’t wear jewelry under the chuppah during the ceremony. The sweet explanation is that a couple is marrying for partnership, not material gain, but this may also be because a formal part of the ceremony is the giving of a ring; it may be “legalistically” confusing for the bride to have other jewelry at the time she receives the ring.

But of course you’re going to wear jewelry at your wedding, so what do you do? Right before the ceremony, the bride may remove all of her other jewelry and give it to friends to hold. Those who have the honor of holding this jewelry are said to have extra luck in finding a spouse of their own.

The same applies to Jewish weddings where a plate is broken before the ceremony. If you can get a shard (careful with that!), more good luck.

Another one is that after dinner, the bride and groom share a drink of wine during birkat hamazon (grace after meals). If you can get a sip of that too, you share in their luck (and germs).

Plus, some brides pray the morning of their weddings, and collect names of people who want matches, healing, et cetera. Apparently, her prayers are super potent that day. Get in on that.

Henna Party

In some Sephardic and Mizrahi traditions, before her wedding, a bride is adorned with henna, in a layered and deeply meaningful event. This can include drumming, ululation, and fertility rituals. Also, henna body art is absolutely stunning.

DEMONS DEMONS DEMONS

It is absolutely amazing how much of Jewish wedding traditions involve fear of demons. Of course, the famous play The Dybbuk involves a bride suffering demonic possession, but her position as newlywed was not only chosen to create high drama. Demons in Judaism famously love ruining happy moments (babies pre-bris are also vulnerable), so you have to be ON GUARD for about a week up to the big day, or something terrible and demonic (e.g. possession) will occur.

A lot of the Jewish rituals you do know have alternate explanations based in demonology. Carrying candles (like in Fiddler on the Roof)? Demons hate light. Marrying under a canopy? Protect the couple from demons. Breaking a glass? Demons hate that sort of thing, apparently. Circling your spouse-to-be at the start of the ceremony? Creating an anti-demonic force-field. The above-mentioned henna party? It also protects against demons!

But maybe my absolute favorite has been the role of bridesmaids in the wedding. I’ve heard a lot of variations on this custom, but the gist is that you can’t leave a bride alone, and therefore vulnerable to dybbuks or other nasties. Some say that for a week before the wedding, the bride needs constant surveillance, perhaps by a friend or family member serving as a bridesmaid. At the very least, the night before her wedding, a bride should not sleep alone (one friend had to share her sister’s bed to protect her for this very reason).

Imagine the movie Bridesmaids crossed with Ghostbusters— Kristen Wiig is in both after all, and has a Jewish boyfriend. She should definitely star in a movie about a friend asked to serve as maid of honor for her Jewish friend’s wedding, only to find out that fighting demons comes with the job description.

Hollywood, call me.

If you have other great Jewish wedding traditions, please comment below, or tweet us @Jewcymag!

Images: Still from film The Dybbuk. Henna image via Pixabay.

The post Bring Back These Jewish Wedding Customs appeared first on Jewcy.

Breaking news, young Jews: In a recent interview with New York Magazine, Matisyahu maintains that he is still more Jewish than Drake, even after the public release of his freshly shorn face in December 2011. Although Drake, the Canadian television star-turned-rapper, has a Jewish mother and is therefore halachically Jewish, Matisyahu upholds his claim that he reps the tribe better than the Canadian rapper. This, of course, despite Drake’s rambunctious and outrageously lavish Bar Mitzvah-themed music video.

Of course, biologically speaking, it is impossible for one Jew to be ‘more Jewish’ than another. But let’s run with it: although Matisyahu has ditched the scruff, he seems to identify with a more modern stream of Judaism. Unlike in a previous stage of life, during which he refused to walk outside with his glasses on so as to not be tempted by posters of scantily-clad women (there are women-obscuring glasses for that, it turns out), Matisyahu now has a broader and more open-minded perspective. Speaking of the character he plays in the new Jewish-themed dybbuk horror movie, The Possession, he says, “He saw that humanity was bigger than one race or religion, and I kind of feel like that’s what I do. People really ripped me apart for going out in the world and playing music for non-Jews, but that’s not the issue for me.”

Let’s not get too excited, though, about Matisyahu’s newly discovered secularism: he still keeps kosher, doesn’t hold concerts on Saturdays, and knows a lot about dybbuks from his new film. And let’s be real—his beard was shaved in a Supercuts on the Upper West Side, a place not-quite-devoid of Jewish brethren.

As Matisyahu said himself: “It grows back!”

Related: Matisyahu Shaves Beard, Is No Longer Hasidic [The Scroll]

The post Matisyahu Says He’s More Jewish Than Drake, Even Without His Beard appeared first on Jewcy.

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.

The post Streaming Jewish Music on My iPhone appeared first on Jewcy.

• A Jewish argument for meditation.

• Roman Polanski is everywhere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and his controversial past is being addressing with a new documentary about his life and a screening of his 1979 film, Tess.

• A man was charged with stalking Mila Kunis and violating a previously issued restraining order.

• Is The Possession the creepiest-looking Jewish horror movie you’ve ever seen? Is it the only Jewish horror movie you’ve ever seen?

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