Be warned, though. This is not your usual holiday playlist. No, no. This playlist is not for the faint of heart, nor for those who lack a knack for adventure. Of course you’ll have some classics. There are quite a few versions of both “Ocho Kandelikas” and “Hanukkah, Oh Hanukkah” because I am an Ashkephardi melech. But I have no “Hava Nagila” and no Adam Sandler’s very overrated “Hanukkah Song” for you. Sorry. We’re doing this right.

My dear frumsters, seculars, and all those in-between, you’re here to be challenged, to elevate your taste, to diversify your Hanukkah repertoire, and trust me, you won’t ever look back.

And yes, I’m exaggerating. And correct. They can both be true, okay? Anyways, make sure to follow our Spotify for future music reccs, and to give A Jewcy, Jewcy Hanukkah a like so you can find it again later.

Chag Sameach, rock (of ages) on, and listen below.

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For our first addition, we have curated a Rosh Hashanah playlist for you to prep and revel in this new year. It’s a mess and there’s way too many versions of ‘Avinu Malkeinu’ and I think you’ll love it.

Shana tova u’metuka, enjoy, and don’t forget to hit the follow button!

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Some stretches in the Jewish calendar are filled with widely observed holidays. The summer months of Tammuz and Av might not be as popular as, say, Tishrei. But the holidays and occasions in Tammuz and Av still warrant a Jewish punk playlist!

Today is the first day of Tammuz, which means Gimel Tammuz is tomorrow night. Here is a playlist to prepare you for Gimel Tammuz, the 17th of Tammuz, Tisha B’Av, and Tu B’Av.

While all four are not typically discussed together, there are connections. They all use the date as a name. The first two descriptions below focus on deceased rabbis who maintain myriad Orthodox followers. The 17th of Tammuz and Tisha B’Av bookend the Three Weeks, a period of mourning for historic tragedies. Tu B’Av is sometimes seen in contrast to Tisha B’Av, given that the two have different focuses and moods and occur six days apart.

Gimel Tammuz

The 3rd of Tammuz is the yahrzeit (death anniversary) of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. To celebrate the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Chabad encourages learning, prayer, and charity. It is common to have a farbrengen, a joyous gathering that includes alcohol.

The Groggers’ “Farbrengiton” combines farbrengen and “Bring it on!” It’s a fun pop-punk song about drinking and partying—at a Gimel Tammuz farbrengen. “Break out the bottles ’cause it’s the Rebbe’s yahrzeit,” sings Groggers front man L.E. Doug Staiman. He explained, “[Farbrengen] is so innocuous and it is part of Chabad tradition, but at the same time, you just go and you get shit-faced.”

17th of Tammuz

This fast day commences the Three Weeks mourning period, which ends with Tisha B’Av. In 1922, Rabbi Yisroel Dov Ber Odesser felt weak and broke his 17th of Tammuz fast. Days later, he found a note (petek) acknowledging that he had done so. Rabbi Odesser understood that the petek was sent by Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, more than a century after his death, and followers of Rebbe Nachman believe this as well.

In “The Petek,” Moshiach Oi! recite the petek verbatim in Hebrew and English. The lyrics conclude with “The sign will be that the Seventeenth of Tammuz/They will say that you were not fasting.” Moshiach Oi! singer Yishai Romanoff explained this part was a “sign to [Rabbi Odesser] that this was indeed a miracle, as nobody else knew that he had broken his fast.”

Tisha B’Av

Tisha B’Av concludes the Three Weeks with another fast day. It’s the saddest day of the Jewish calendar, commemorating the destruction of the First and Second Temples and other tragedies. The Book of Lamentations (Eikhah) is chanted in synagogue.

While walking home from Tisha B’Av services in the band’s early days, Shondes singer Louisa Solomon and drummer Temim Fruchter were singing Eikhah. Solomon explained that they were inspired to “take this melody from Eikhah—it’s so beautiful and all about loss and destruction and mourning.” She recalled thinking, “We have to take the Jewish liturgy about destruction and loss… and apply it to this great irony and horror that’s being done in our name.” The Shondes used the melody and message of Tisha B’Av for “I Watched the Temple Fall,” a controversial song about Israel/Palestine that says, “No heart could really beat love for this state.”

Tu B’Av

Traditionally, Tu B’Av was a time for women wearing white to dance in vineyards and attract suitors. In modern times, it’s a Jewish love holiday. For the last couple years, Jewcy has put a new spin on Tu B’Av with “Love Bites” parties!

Yidcore masterfully modernized an old bastion of romance with Fiddlin on Ya Roof, their punk rock rendition of Fiddler on the Roof. “Matchmaker (An Ode to Natalie Portman)” captures a longing for love like never before. Romance abounds when Tevye screams “Do you love me?” to his wife, Golda. Matters of the heart reach their zenith with Motel in “Miracle of Miracles.”

For more information about these Jewish punk bands, read Oy Oy Oy Gevalt! Jews and Punk by Michael Croland.

Album covers courtesy their respective artists.

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Punk chefs advise that if you want to ground up matzoh to make matzoh ball soup, you can have the punk rock band in your living room do it for you.

If you don’t have a punk rock band in your living room, this playlist should rev you up for all eight days of Passover. If it still isn’t enough (dayenu?), check out last year’s Passover punk playlist.

Yidcore: Bashana Haba’ah

A key theme of Passover is that while we might face problems now, things will be better next year. The chorus of this traditional song says, “You will yet see how good it will be next year.” In Yidcore’s cover, this rallying cry is more of a scream the last time it’s uttered.

The Shondes: True North

The chorus of “True North” connects the seder-ending slogan “Next year in Jerusalem” with social justice activism. Shondes singer Louisa Solomon said the song is about “utopian ideals” in “revolutionary movements—and the related Jewish tradition of actively imagining a better world.” The band included “Next year in Jerusalem” to “connect with our ancestors’ aspirations toward justice,” Solomon explained.

Gefilte Fuck: Why Don’t We Do It in the Shoul?

The song is modeled after the Beatles’ “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” and starts off by suggesting sex in a synagogue. There are four questions in total, and two of them are from the Four Questions: “Why do we eat unleavened bread?” “Why do we dip our parsley twice?” Click here to listen.

Schmekel: The Mohel Song

“The Mohel Song” addresses whether a transgender Jew should get circumcised. Toward the end of the song, singer/guitarist Lucian Kahn sings the chorus of “Chad Gadya.” Kahn associated “Chad Gadya” with his family’s inebriated renditions following four cups of wine at Passover seders. He saw in “Chad Gadya” the “drunken revelry of the liberation moment of the seder.” As Kahn put it, incorporating the song fit into Schmekel’s approach of taking liturgical melodies and other familiar elements of Judaism, “commenting on it,” “re-contextualizing it,” and “making it [their] own.”

G-d Is My Co-Pilot: Dayenu

G-d Is My Co-Pilot was part of No Wave, an avant-garde offshoot of punk rock. The band originally spelled out the first word of their name, but when they played overtly Jewish songs, they used a hyphen instead. Their 1994 album Mir Shlufn Nisht (Yiddish for “We Don’t Sleep”) included “Dayenu,” plus a hora, a Chanukah song, and “Hatikvah.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nphRFZg4zQE

Total Passover: Get Kosher

Total Passover qualifies for this playlist because of their awesome name. Their slogan, “Shalom Motherfucker,” wasn’t well received in their home state of Iowa in the early ’90s. In “Get Kosher,” the Jewish narrator tells a non-Jewish woman that he’ll only date her if she keeps kosher. The chorus includes the hilarious line “Lips that touch swine will never touch mine.”

Moshiach Oi!: Eliyahu HaNavi

This Hebrew song calls for Elijah the prophet to come to us soon with Moshiach. Moshiach Oi! have plenty of punk rock in their rendition, but there are also heaping servings of reggae. In addition, Moshiach Oi! discuss the Exodus from Egypt in songs “Yetzias Mitzrayim” and “This Is My God.”

Gangsta Rabbi: 1st Diaspora Egypt

“1st Diaspora Egypt” appeared on Steve “Gangsta Rabbi” Lieberman’s 69th album last year, and now he’s released three more since. The lyrics discuss how Joseph wound up in Egypt, Pharaoh’s order to build pyramids, the splitting of the sea, and wandering in the desert for 40 years en route to Israel.

…You might need to read the lyrics to get all that.

For more information about all these artists, check out Michael Croland’s book, Oy Oy Oy Gevalt! Jews and Punk.

Art courtesy of Tom Meehan/Total Passover

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1. The Schleps: “Adir Hu”

Joshua Sherer handles vocals, guitar, bass, drums, and recording for the Schleps. Sherer said that while Passover has some of his “favorite holiday songs,” he covered “Adir Hu” “simply because it was the easiest and quickest song to record.” One could debate whether this metalcore song is more metal than hardcore/punk, but the guitar sound has a great, heavy crunch, whatever you want to call it.

2. Gefilte Fuck: “Diyanu”

Multiple Jewish punk bands covered “Diyanu,” but Gefilte Fuck was unique in adding “Fuck you!” to the chorus. “I thought the Passover song ‘Dayenu’ that I remembered so vividly from Sunday school needed to be screamed and played fast,” wrote guitarist Adam Bregman in the zine Mazel-Tov Cocktail. The band didn’t limit its Passover celebration to music, throwing matzoh and gefilte fish at fans during live shows.

3. NOFX: “The Brews”

The number-one Jewish punk anthem of all time is “The Brews” by NOFX. The song hailed the Brews (short for “Hebrews”) as an Orthodox street gang that celebrated Shabbat by drinking Manischewitz wine and beating up non-Jews. The Brews were described as skinheads with “anti-swastika tattoos.” The song ends by chanting the chorus of “Dayenu.” 

4. Yidcore: “Ma Nishtana”

Yidcore’s “Ma Nishtana” begins with a young boy reciting “Why is this night different from all others?” and making fart noises with his mouth. Yidcore then plunges headfirst into a screaming, full-throttle rendition of “The Four Questions” that’d make your zayde scream too (from being appalled, that is). It was hard to pick just one Passover song by Yidcore, seeing as how they’ve also covered “Dayenu” and “Vehi She’amda.” Yidcore front man Bram Presser noted, “The running gag for a long while was that Yidcore was started with the express primary purpose of speeding up the interminably long and boring seder. Anything beyond that was just a bonus.” 

5. The Shondes: “At the Water”

“At the Water,” from the Shondes’ The Red Sea, tells the story of Nashon from Exodus. Nashon led the way by walking into the Red Sea until it parted. Shondes violinist Elijah Oberman explained, “It was specifically inspired by Passover and that moment when Nashon goes into the Red Sea—and the idea that you have to go as far as you can on your own before G-d comes in and makes a miracle.” The band members found the story inspirational for social justice advocacy, as it suggests that people have to take risks in the pursuit of doing the right thing.

6. Schmekel: “Pharaoh/Moses Slash” 

The transgender Jewish punk band Schmekel wrote songs about most Jewish holidays, including Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Simchat Torah, and Purim. “Pharaoh/Moses Slash” addressed “the part of the Exodus that the haggadah leaves out”: a sexual relationship between Pharaoh and Moses. The chorus celebrates, “Shtupping is a mitzvah, and I’m a matzoh man.” Schmekel also played with “Chad Gadya” in one of their best songs, “The Mohel Song.”

7. Electric Menorah: “Let My People Go”

As the name suggests, the one-man band Electric Menorah started out with Chanukah songs in 2003. In 2008, singer/guitarist Brett Singer released Passocore. The EP featured punk covers of traditional Passover songs, including “Let My People Go.” Whereas the 2003 songs required his friend’s assistance with a drum machine and Pro Tools, Singer recorded the new songs on his Mac using GarageBand. This time around, Singer was truly a DIY one-man band.

8. Gangsta Rabbi: “Shout in Mizra’im”

In January (while he was in a medically induced coma, no less), Steve “Gangsta Rabbi” Lieberman released The King of Jewish Punk, his 30th album (68th if you count his prior cassette recordings). In 2003, his song “Shout in Mizr’aim” topped the Jewish/Israeli chart on MP3.com for eight days. The lyrics recall how the Hebrews built the pyramids and Moses told Pharaoh, “Hey, let my people go!”

You can learn more about all eight artists in my book, Oy Oy Oy Gevalt! Jews and Punk.

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Since it’s a Jewish love holiday, why not songs about love (and sex, and relationships) by Jewish artists?  The rule was that at least one songwriter and the vocalist have to be Jewish, (So, Joey Ramone leading the Ramones covering “Baby, I Love You,” by three Jewish songwriters, qualifies).

The result is sort of… bizarre. Jews hold (and have held) a diverse presence in popular music over the last several decades, in pretty much every genre there is.

And so, this playlist has Drake. And Carole King. And Peaches. And Vanessa Carlton. And Neil Diamond. And P!nk. And Lesley Gore. And Matisyahu. And Paula Abdul. And Haim. And Tom Lehrer. And Amy Winehouse. And more.

You can listen below, but just put it on shuffle.  There’s no way to make the order make any sense.

If any of you are bold enough to smooch a partner to this playlist, let us know how that works out for you.

And if you want to hear a bit of this in a room full of other people, we hope to see you at the party tonight!

We give you, AHAVA:

Image credit: Wikimedia

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Yom Kippur is about denying yourself pleasure for a day in order to be properly submerged into the despair you’ve cast out into the word with your bad deeds. You wake up, go to shul, stand, sit, stand, sit, stand, sit and then go home and wait for shul again. If your mom is anything like mine, you mustn’t watch TV, play hide-and-seek, or do anything pleasurable as you wait to return to services.

However, if you’re going to watch TV, maybe watch something appropriate, something with that Yom Kippur malaise, like Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark. As far as music’s concerned, it shouldn’t be too hard to find appropriate tunes to help you ruminate over your bad behavior. Certain genres of music are especially heavy on repentance/atonement-centric songs, while others are almost entirely devoid of them.  One is not likely to find many Yom Kippur-appropriate songs in the discography of Brittney Spears. But jump back 20 years and the most popular music of the time was full of atonement. Alternative rock is a treasure trove of sad, sappy music for hungry, weary Jews on Yom Kippur. Emo—old emo—specifically, is also pretty packed with sad, repentant lyrics.  (Though modern emo is much too self-obsessed and glammy to dwell on any wrongdoing.) Here are five Yom Kippur-appropriate songs to listen to in between services.

Don’t Hate Me by The Get Up Kids

What better song to listen to on Yom Kippur than one that begins with a sad sounding screechy voice shouting, “Forgive me!”  This song is a tad poppy for Yom Kippur, but it’s properly in the spirit of the day, just pretend that god is named “Amy.”

All Apologies by Nirvana

Pretty self-explanatory. I don’t think Kurt wrote this one for Yom Kippur, but Jewish Gen-Xers can probably attest that it makes for a good atonement song.

Unforgiven by Metallica

This list is starting to look suspiciously like the playlist I listened to in the 8^th grade when I was being punished for something and angry at my parents. Back then, the notion of atoning for anything I did was totally beyond my understanding. For Metallica fans, this is the perfect song to listen to you’re when feeling guilty about all the illegal music you’ve downloaded. It’s also the perfect Yom Kippur song for the more mature, introspective listener.

http://youtu.be/TUHFfR8hWcA

Dear Mama by 2Pac

Before you call b.s on this one, take a look at the lyrics to this song.  Yes, it’s about Tupac showing appreciation for his mother Afeni Shakur, but at the same time, it’s him asking forgiveness for all the years he spent taking her love and support for granted, and for being such a delinquent youngster in the first place.  For those of us returning to our parents’ homes for the high holidays, sleeping in our childhood rooms, and reliving the memories that come along with that, this song should ignite all kinds of issues. Tell yo’ momma you love on her on Yom Kippah.

Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen

Bohemain Rhapsody is the ultimate rock song, but it’s also the ultimate repentance song.  The whole thing is sung form the point of view of a man who’s made a mistake and is begging for forgiveness. In the end, he’s not so lucky, so it’s kind of a cautionary tale.  If you happen to miss temple this Yom Kippur, try going to karaoke and belting out Bohemian Rhapsody with a friend, then make up for it come Passover.

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Sukkot is a shelter-centered holiday. Everyone remembers sitting in their little temporary structure, freezing their ass off, wondering just how many courses they have to stay for until it’s kosher to return to central heat. In honor of those timeless memories, we proudly present our top 10 songs about shelter.

1) Bob Dylan—”Shelter from the Storm”

2) Rolling Stones—”Gimme Shelter”

3) Madness—”Our House”

4) Simon and Garfunkel—”Homeward Bound”

5) Love—”A House is Not a Motel” 

http://youtu.be/urU2PmucP0o

6) Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young—”Our House”

7) The Animals—”The House of the Rising Sun”

8) Blur—”Country House”

9) Al Stewart—”Bedsitter Images”

10) The xx—”Shelter”

(Image by Rachel, via Flickr)

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