Dor Yeshorim has disavowed the video, and claims that the girls reached out saying they regret the video’s leak. Since the girls are remaining anonymous, it is unclear if this is true, so as a compromise, we will not post the video here but link to it.  You can also read the full lyrics on Genius.

I decided to reach out to my resident expert on both Yeshiva life and rap music to analyze the girls’ song (#frumcore?) and decide whether or not it lives up to the hype, and examine its rap style and origins:

No disrespect, Beis Yaakov girls, I love what you’re doing, and you know I only say this because I’m truly genuine but someone’s got to say it: your flow is a shtickel wack. As a matter fact, all these frum MCs need to seriously step up. The current state of Orthodox rhyming is a chillul hashem, no question.

OK, OK, am I being too harsh? Aren’t these just kids? Of course I am, of course they are, but stick with me.

When I was in yeshiva a young fellow named Yaakov Shwekey was burning up kumzitzes and keduashas. There was genuine excitement in my high school when he passed through Chicago. I didn’t follow my friends to the concert, something I still regret. I bet Shwekey puts on a great show.

This was 2001, and while pop charts were dominated by Destiny’s Child, a smattering of R&B artists and the last gasps of commercial pop rock, Yaakov Shwekey’s music featured a disco beat. How significantly was Orthodox music behind the times? Disco Demolition Night was 1979, so let’s round it off to a solid thirty-year lag.

(Was Shwekey just disco? Of course not. There’s Carlebach in there, along with chazonus and a lot of other things. But the disco groove is undeniable.)

Back to the frum MCs: Our rap game is in the 1980s. We’ve got to stop rapping like Ronald Reagan is in office. Flow has evolved tremendously since then. In particular, rap no longer sounds like this:

Though, about 30 years ago, it did:

So, yeshiva boys and Beis Yaakov girls, turn off the metronome, loosen up. Some internal rhyme, please. And your rhythms sound like nursery songs. These day, rap sounds like this:

I don’t mean to boast, but damn, if I don’t brag

Them crackers gon’ act like I ain’t on they ass

The Martha Stewart that’s far from Jewish

Far from a Harvard student, just had the balls to do it

Minus the “damn,” “ass” and “balls” I see no reason why frum rap can’t sound more like this.

In conclusion, frum girls, your rhymes are wack. But they need not be. Study up, and start catching up.

Image credit: Pixabay

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When Ari Mandel left his Hasidic upbringing, his atheism was so strong, he tried to sell his spot in heaven on eBay and only kept Shabbos in exchange for $1000 for charity. In the most recent episode of OMGWTFBIBLE, I convinced Ari to do what no rabbi could: read the Torah.

This month, we read some of the more, ahem, sexually explicit passages in Genesis. First, Judah’s family is torn asunder by the apparently irresistible allure of the seductive Tamar. Then, Joseph, house-slave to a man named Potiphar in Egypt, is very definitely sexually harassed by his boss’s wife. Along the way, we shared maybe a little too much about our time in Yeshiva day school.

In an attempt to sum things up, I noticed a parallel between Judah’s sex romp and the fall of Adam and Eve:

The story reminded me of the story of Eden, or Gan Eden, where God, or Yehovah, tells Adam not to eat from the fruit and Chava interprets it as “you must not touch of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Life and Death or you will die.” And the snake uses that additional layer of stricture, or of banning, in order to convince her to actually eat. Because she reaches out, touches the tree, and she doesn’t die. And then she’s like “ok, I guess I can eat now.” And that’s what leads her to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Life and Death.”

What does this have to do with Judah and his sons Onan and Er? Listen and find out.

David Tuchman translated the Tanach as a comedy and called it OMGWTFBIBLE. Each month on his podcast, he calls up a different guest to read as many chapters of OMGWTFBIBLE as they can while they both make fun of it.

Jewcy is the proud (internet) co-host of OMGWTFBIBLE. Read more about the project here.

The post OMGWTFBIBLE Podcast: Joseph, the Irresistible Allure of Tamar, and Stories from Yeshiva Day School appeared first on Jewcy.

“You’re allowed to go right up to him, yeah. You just can’t touch him!” So says one yeshiva student, holding a camera pointed to another, about a guard stationed outside one of London’s royal buildings.

The young man pictured moseys—yes, moseys—toward the soldier, then stand next to him. The difference between the two is obvious, palpable, already comic: a yeshiva bochur in black and white with jaunty payos and a big black yarmulka, pictured next to a becloaked, behelmeted guard, the strap under his chin both infantilizing him and preparing him for battle.

While posing for the camera, the young man starts to weave an entire narrative about his relationship with the soldier, docu-drama style. “We went to school together,” he says, gesturing towards the soldier. “He went his own way.”

At first, the guard seems in charge of himself, quite capable of fulfilling his duty to not laugh. The yeshiva student speaks of their days at school together, choosing the guard’s school as the context for their shared past, where they studied martial arts. He starts out with a questioning kind of tone, as though he isn’t sure whether the soldier is the person he is describing, but as the narrative progresses he grows more confident.

“He was never talkative,” the yeshiva student says, and starts to describe the guard as a youth. At this point, it is clear that the guard is listening, and moreover, struggling to maintain his composure. As the student launches deeper into his fiction, things get worse for the guard, until the final epic breakdown. The student interrupts his own narrative as he alights on the perfect weapon: “His mother always picked him up from school. You know, he was that type of guy, until he was twenty, his mother always picked him up from school.” At this point, the guard breaks. And I mean, breaks. He doesn’t just smile, or grin, but breaks into a full-on giggle, halted as quickly as possible by a shake of his head and a blush. The students dance away, ebullient.

What’s amazing is that the thing that finally breaks the guard is a shared experience which totally dissolves the distance between them: they both can relate to making fun of the guy whose mother picks him up from school, “until he was twenty.” While it is possible to find two people more different than these two, they are different enough that their shared experience—and the humor that derives from it—is touching, as well as hilarious.

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Mesivta Shaarei Arazim, an Ultra-Orthodox yeshiva high school in Monsey, NY, boasts a full-piece marching band. Consisting of approximately thirty students in full uniform (side-locks tucked up and under their hats), the band has been performing regularly at community events since 2006—including a wedding I attended last weekend.

The school prides itself on taking an unconventional approach to Orthodox Jewish learning: “We can’t focus only on a bochur’s brain and his ability to learn,” says principle Zev Freundlich. Students also build their own desks, provide catering, and learn acrobatics.

The band members—many of whom had never picked up an instrument before joining—have been trained by one of the school’s secular teachers, who runs a professional marching band.

They certainly add an unexpected splash of color to an otherwise black and white background:

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An editor once told me that divorce “fractures the narrative of childhood,” a phrase which has stuck with me ever since. But does growing up in a broken family or single parent household similarly impact the way a person experiences religion?

A recent study suggests that it does. Researchers studying Christian children found that a child of divorce is less likely to be religiously engaged than a kid who hails from a two-parent household. “Youth who experience parental divorce,” the researchers conclude, “report lower religious involvement and identity than their peers from intact families.”

Over at Slate, Amanda Marcotte took issue with the study—not with the findings, however, but with how the researchers interpreted their results. “I find it simultaneously amusing and disturbing how assured the researchers are that people like myself—I’m both a ‘child of divorce’ and an outright atheist—are a problem to be fixed,” she writes.

Like Marcotte, I am a child of divorce who experienced marked declines in religiosity as I grew older. And though I’m not an atheist, I don’t take kindly to the presumptions of the researchers that the possible fallout from a divorce—decreased religious engagement—is necessarily cause for alarm. (I am far more concerned with other measures of psychological well-being post-divorce.)

Perhaps I’m particularly sensitive to this sort of assumption because when I was growing up, I consistently heard it repeated by teachers who faulted divorce for all sorts of things—general misbehavior, rebellion (you know how I feel about that word), and of course, religious transgression.

‘I’m sitting right here,’ I’d want to shout as yet another teacher, seemingly oblivious to the diversity of her students, described my family situation as though it was the root of all evil.

Unlike the families described in the study who became less likely to attend religious services after a divorce, my family’s religious practice wasn’t drastically altered after my parents’ split. My mother, my sole caregiver, remained steadfastly Orthodox. We attended synagogue just as much as we had before, which is to say every week. My sister and I continued going to yeshiva. We still kept kosher.

If the researchers had been studying my family’s religious engagement after the divorce, they probably would’ve found nothing to support their conclusions. Yet upon closer examination, they may have been able to detect small fissures in our observance, minor shifts that might have predicted my future choices.

At our Shabbat table, ritual functions my father had previously performed now trickled down to us, three females. Though we blessed the wine and challah in his stead, we did so with the full awareness that we weren’t observing in an optimal fashion, which made us feel uncomfortable.

At school, we had learned that ideally a man should say these blessings, and in my friends’ homes, that was exactly what happened. When these same friends came to our house for lunch, I felt embarrassed as my mom stumbled over the liturgy. They, too, looked uncomfortable.

I noticed other things. I saw how as a single woman, my mother had no counterpart on the other side of the mechitzah, which meant she had no true say in synagogue affairs, and no one to say kaddish for her on behalf of my maternal grandmother.

My mother would complain about this—not angrily or in a way that suggested she thought things should be different. While she identified as a feminist (and was the reason I was pro-choice before I knew what that meant), her feminism was the type that stopped at Orthodox Judaism’s door. She never expressed a real desire to see her status and role changed.

Through my parents divorce, I was getting a glimpse of how truly unequal women were in the observant community. My friends, whose childhood narrative hadn’t been fractured as mine had, weren’t noticing these inequities.

It was as though my family’s “untraditional” structure conferred on me a sort of superpower (honed by many trips to the therapist), allowing me to notice what was wrong with the community. I felt like the kid in The Sixth Sense, who can see dead people when no one else around him can. (Spoiler alert: Bruce Willis is dead in that movie.)

I think of divorce as a storm that not only causes its own damage but also reveals other problems lurking beneath the surface. It’s sort of like what happened in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy (and before that, Katrina), when the existing poverty of the hardest hit, most underserved areas is exposed. The storms didn’t cause poverty; they simply highlighted the problem. In Judaism, divorce definitely isn’t the cause of gender inequality—but in my experience, it made its existence all the more glaring.

Divorce, of course, isn’t viewed as some naturally occurring calamity. It’s viewed as a choice—a bad one. Traditional Judaism, like other organized religions, is arrayed around the family unit. The researchers acknowledged this issue, stating, “Many congregations hold traditional family models as the normative ideal and explicitly or implicitly discourage divorce.” Undoubtedly, this will make some kids feel like outsiders.

Given the centrality of the two-parent family in religion, divorce fractures more than just the narrative of childhood. It disrupts religious ideals, too. But the religious response to divorce shouldn’t be to uphold those ideals at the expense of those who fall short. Take it from someone who knows: that approach might do more harm than good.

Previously: Don’t Call Me a Rebel
The Problem With Modesty Blogging

(Art by Margarita Korol)

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