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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We need to talk about sexy Jewish punks.  Why don’t we talk about them more?

After all, this year marks the fortieth anniversary of the Ramones releasing their debut, eponymous, groundbreaking album. But of persisting American-Jewish stereotypes, one of the least-prevalent is that of the grimy, ragamuffin kid causing trouble around town.

Well, let’s call it an archetype; there are others based on fact; we remember the Bugsy Siegels, so-called “Tough Jews,” bad men who did bad things, like, ya know, murder. But too-often we forget the, well, punks, teenage boys in leather jackets who smoked cigarettes that you would never take home to mom but fooled around with under the bleachers whilst skipping class.

(I never experienced anything remotely like this, but with the Ramones it was fun, and easy, to pretend.)

But for Pete’s Sake, who do you think was hitching a ride to Rockaway Beach? It’s fairly common knowledge that two of the original Ramones were Jewish (Tommy was even the son of Holocaust survivors), but their grungy rock personas weren’t created out of thin air. They were an ethnic minority, kids or grand-kids of immigrants, living in New York City and causing trouble.

Jews didn’t stream out of the tenements and onto manicured lawns; there was often in-between. The Ramones’ Forest Hills neighborhood of their youth, for example, was heterogeneous, and even for their more well-to-do peers, it was still somewhat urban.

In “Only the Good Die Young,” Billy Joel is the scruffy Jewish kid from the wrong side of the tracks seducing the nice Catholic girl. But he’s really convinced people that he’s Italian (I hear it all-too-often), because of his time hanging with blue-collar crowds growing up on Long Island. (Remember, the Ramones had the Italian persona, too, with that stage name.)

While this reality isn’t extinct today (blue-collar or lower-class Jews are a thing, people), maybe we started to drift away from it as one wave after another rose socioeconomically. After the Ramones, we got the Beastie Boys, and while they were scruffy and petulant, too, they were a bit more winking, and they tended to hail from more privileged families than the Ramones.

Pouring through Jewcy‘s old “Jews Who Rock Wiki,” it’s really amazing how many punk or rock bands we’ve helped forge.  So why are these groups seen as anomalies, as “Hey, did you know at least one Jew participated in rock and roll?”

“Punk is Jewish,” Steven Lee Beeber says in The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk, “Not Judaic. Jewish, the reflection of a culture that’s three millennia old now. It reeks of humor and irony and preoccupations with Nazism. It’s all about outsiders who are ‘one of us’ in the shtetl of New York.”

So why does Jewish sex appeal today have to be of the quiet, nerdy variety, or the goofy, dorky sort? Andy Samberg’s musical career comes from the humorous juxtaposition of an awkward weirdo-persona making the music associated with being suave or tough. Lou Reed was suave enough on his own, thank you very much.

Listen, there’s nothing wrong with loving a Motel Kamzoil, but don’t forget that Perchik is there, too, and he’s bringing the revolution.

So it’s forty years since the Ramones. And for someone born only five years before they broke up, they’re undeniably retro. But my crush on these old-timey (to me) hooligans is part of my New York Jewish identity. I barely went out to anywhere but school, synagogue, and USY when I was a teenager. But it’s fun to pretend that the bad boys next door (a mixed group of Jewish and not) would sneak me out of the house for a different, equally authentic Jewish experience.

(Except for Johnny. Forget that Nazi-obsessed weirdo.)

Image via Wikimedia

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(All photos by Jesse Untracht-Oakner)

There has always been something special about female drummers. More than the way they don’t cross their legs, and more than the way their long (if they have it) hair flails around at the kit; it’s something more spiritual, almost sacred.

In the Old Testament, after the Hebrew slaves were freed from Egypt, Miriam, the first woman in the Bible to be called a prophet, lead a victory dance with her timbrel, an early tambourine and main percussion instrument of the Israelites. Some even speculate it was her drumming that parted the Red Sea. For 3,000 years in ancient civilization, women were almost exclusively in control of sacred music, using the frame drum to conduct rituals and trances for fortunetelling, ecstatic transformations, and mediating between realms. The rise of the Catholic Church brought an end to the female drummer by banning women from music, and it was not until recent history that women returned to music with a new power and great drive.

“Drumming is healing and cathartic. You get to bang and make a lot of noise, how can that be bad?” said Mindy Abovitz, who as creator and editor-in-chief of Tom Tom Magazine, the first magazine about female drummers, is forefronting the movement to bring women beat makers to the spotlight. Abovitz is a female drummer herself, for the wild all-female post-punk trio Taigaa, as well as at least eight other mostly female bands, and she was also the featured drummer for Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn’s recent whimsical video “The Forest,” that was filmed at Mirah’s parent’s farm in Vermont last year.

Abovitz, 31, who is self-taught, started playing drums when she was 20, after her friends pooled together to buy her a drum kit. Previously, she had been banging on anything she could find. She moved from Gainsville, Florida to New York where she began teaching at Rock Camp for Girls, working at East Village Radio, at a guitar shop in Williamsburg, and taking Brooklyn’s indie-rock scene by storm.

With long brown hair and eyes as green as leaves, Abovitz has a strong jaw, a button nose, and a consistently raised eyebrow that seems to say, “I get you” with skepticism and empathy. She also has meekness and sass. Like that Israeli cactus cliché, she is prickly, but sweet, giving off a no-bullshit approach, and a confidence that if she can dream it, she can do it, even if it means publishing a magazine in a time where that seems more difficult than parting the sea.

Born to Israeli parents and raised as an Orthodox Jew, her world shifted focus upon entering public high school. “I had to quickly get my bearings and become a normal kid,” she said. It was there that “the world around me came into focus” and she began to embrace anarchist punk culture. Being a self-identifying Israeli-Jew was not easy in the radical scene, whose leanings tend towards Palestinian rights, and when I asked her if she experienced a clash she said, “It wasn’t easy.”

Abovitz is not one to hide her identity or roots. Her family had lived in Israel before it even became a state, which Abovitz commented was “hardcore.”

“I’m Jewish/Israeli. It’s undeniable. I’m part of the Cohen tribe. I’m not going anywhere,” she told me.

Her family is very supportive of her work, even when they don’t exactly understand what she does. When her saba, the Hebrew word for grandfather, asks her if she plays music at Bar-Mitzvahs, she replies, “Saba, I have a magazine. Saba, I don’t play cover songs.”

Coming from a family that she calls “creative and businessy,” Abovitz thanks her parents for teaching her hard work and to “do the best with what you have,” she said. It’s not easy to have very much when working in the magazine publishing business, but instead of being discouraged, Abovitz spends her energy making Tom Tom available to more people in more places worldwide.

As is, the magazine is not sustainable, but she’s rallied the support and help of around 1,000 people, without whom it could not exist. Along with her parent’s insistence on hard work, her radical-anarchist adolescence taught her that if you want to make something happen, you should just D.I.Y (Do It Yourself) or D.I.T (Do It Together) and though Tom Tom’s much sleeker and shinier than a zine and the production value is much higher than staples and a photocopier, Tom Tom Magazine is a punk collaboration at its core.

All things have to start somewhere and Tom Tom started as an online blog after Abovitz became bothered by the lack of legitimate representation of women in the media. “It just dawned on me that we female drummers need a place to connect and communicate and promote ourselves and that’s how Tom Tom emerged,” Abovitz said in an interview with GearPipe last April.

She began raising money from benefit shows until he had enough to print the first issue. “This thing is going to keep going because of all the people who think it should be in existence,” she said, and compared the project to crowd surfing.

With four issues and a fifth one coming out next week, the quarterly magazine offers interviews with female drummers, features, and even though it contains practical technical advice, the magazine is still accessible to those who may not be female or drummers. I had heard the criticism that the magazine is all pictures of pretty hipster drummers, but I don’t think Abovitz is to blame for so many female drummers looking good.

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