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A Yiddish rock supergroup will reunite for one Manhattan show on Dec. 25
(New York Jewish Week) — On the evening of Dec. 25 — yes, Christmas — influential aughties Yiddish rock band Yiddish Princess will take the stage in Manhattan for a one-night-only reunion show.
Billing itself “the world’s favorite Yiddish rock band,” Yiddish Princess was founded in New York City circa 2006 by vocalist Sarah Mina Gordon and Michael Winograd, who is best known as a klezmer clarinetist but plays synthesizer in this band. Over the course of a few years, Yiddish Princess played numerous gigs in the city and abroad and released one eponymous EP in 2010 before going on, as Gordon calls it, “a semi-permanent hiatus.”
Now, for the first time in more than a decade, the group — which also features guitarists Avi Fox-Rosen and Yoshie Fruchter and bassist Ari Folman-Cohen — will reunite for a show at Bowery Electric (327 Bowery) as part of the wide-ranging Yiddish New York festival taking place throughout the city from from Saturday, Dec. 23 through Thursday, Dec. 28.
“They’re a supergroup,” said Aaron Bendich, the founder of Borscht Beat, an independent Jewish cultural project focused on Yiddish music, who was instrumental in booking the reunion show. “Each of them, in their own right, and in sub-configurations, are super-active in the Yiddish music scene or klezmer music scene and have their own other albums and projects.”
Gordon, whom Bendich describes as a “major figure” in New York’s Yiddish music scene, is a native New Yorker who grew up steeped in Yiddish culture — her mother, Adrienne Cooper, who died in 2011, was considered “the mother of the Yiddish revival movement.” Gordon appeared on her mother’s albums, and she also collaborates with modern-day klezmer greats like Frank London and Daniel Kahn. But she initially formed Yiddish Princess — with its raucous, ’80s glam-rock style — as a way to forge her own path.
“It was really kind of a playful thing,” Gordon, 44, told the New York Jewish Week about the band’s origins. “I was really trying to find something that was mine. It really came out of a sense of play and fun.”
Co-founder Sarah Gordon playing a Yiddish Princess gig in NYC in 2013. (Tinker Coalescing)
Gordon, who resides in Brooklyn near the “klezmer shtetl” of Midwood and is also a teacher at Brooklyn Friends School, describes Yiddish Princess as having “big rock sounds that are very influenced by the music of our childhoods in the 80s and 90s,” citing personal heroes like Kate Bush, Pat Benatar and Cyndi Lauper.
“Real powerhouses,” she added.
Yiddish Princess’ website, which was last updated in 2013, describes the band’s sound this way: “Double guitar onslaught. Drums beating you into submission. Precious analog synths beckoning. And a voice that can shatter ice and coo you into mellifluous bliss.”
For Gordon, who sings in Yiddish, the band “was a way of inviting people into Yiddish in a different way,” she said. “There was real freedom in being like, ‘This is a rock show, we’re not going to translate.’ It’s unapologetic. If you don’t get this, that’s OK, this is for us.”
Many fans, of course, “get” what Yiddish Princess is doing — and what sets the band apart from other Jewish “fusion” acts out there isn’t just their musicianship.
“You can’t do genre-melding without genuine investment in both genres being melded,” Bendich said. “And it is an all-too-common, particularly in Jewish music, phenomenon where people only really buy into the Jewish half of the puzzle, and then they make a disingenuous rock album or something. But Yiddish Princess is pretty much all-in on both halves. That’s the magic of it.”
The reunion, said Gordon, is intended to be a one-time thing. Though there was no official breakup of the band — nor scandals or huge dramas a la VH1’s “Behind the Music” — its members, while remaining close friends and collaborators, have simply grown up and moved on to other things.
“I feel very honored to continue to be part of that [Yiddish music] tradition,” Gordon said. “I think that there’s a lot of space to play, and I think that Yiddish Princess is an exercise in that. And it’s really nice that it has brought joy to people and continues to.”
As for Monday night’s show, Gordon said the audience can expect to hear all the songs on Yiddish Princess’ EP and more. “I think it’s gonna be a lot of fun,” she said. “And loud.”
Yiddish Princess will play Dec. 25 at 9 p.m. at Bowery Electric (327 Bowery). For additional information on Yiddish New York, click here.
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The post A Yiddish rock supergroup will reunite for one Manhattan show on Dec. 25 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Treasure Trove explores the curious case of a stamp from an imaginary land
This 1 V. postage revenue stamp from West Refaim was postmarked in Virikoso in South Giantsland 100 years ago. Problem is—none of these places ever existed. There is a second […]
The post Treasure Trove explores the curious case of a stamp from an imaginary land appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Israel Has Told ICC It Will Contest Arrest Warrants, Netanyahu Says
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant during a press conference in the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 28, 2023. Photo: ABIR SULTAN POOL/Pool via REUTERS
Israel has informed the International Criminal Court that it will contest arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant over their conduct of the Gaza war, Netanyahu’s office said on Wednesday.
The office also said that US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham had updated Netanyahu “on a series of measures he is promoting in the US Congress against the International Criminal Court and against countries that would cooperate with it.”
The ICC issued arrest warrants last Thursday for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas leader Ibrahim Al-Masri, known as Mohammed Deif, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict.
The move comes after the ICC prosecutor Karim Khan announced on May 20 that he was seeking arrest warrants for alleged crimes connected to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas and the Israeli military response in Gaza.
Israel has rejected the jurisdiction of the Hague-based court and denies war crimes in Gaza.
“Israel today submitted a notice to the International Criminal Court of its intention to appeal to the court, along with a demand to delay the execution of the arrest warrants,” Netanyahu’s office said.
Court spokesperson Fadi El Abdallah told journalists that if requests for an appeal were submitted it would be up to the judges to decide
The court’s rules allow for the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution that would pause or defer an investigation or a prosecution for a year, with the possibility of renewing that annually.
After a warrant is issued the country involved or a person named in an arrest warrant can also issue a challenge to the jurisdiction of the court or the admissibility of the case.
The post Israel Has Told ICC It Will Contest Arrest Warrants, Netanyahu Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Jewish Girls Attacked in London With Glass Bottles in Antisemitic Outrage
Shomrim officers at the scene of a hate crime in London in which Jewish girls were struck with glass bottles. Photo: Shomrim Stamford Hill/Screenshot
A group of young Jewish girls were the victims of an “abhorrent hate crime” when a man hurled glass bottles at them from a balcony as they were walking through the Stamford Hill section of London on Monday evening.
One of the girls was struck in the head and rushed to the hospital with serious but non-life threatening injuries, according to local law enforcement.
A spokesperson for London’s Metropolitan Police said officers were called to the Woodberry Down Estate in the city’s borough of Hackney following reports of an assault on Monday evening at 7:44 pm local time.
“A group of schoolgirls had been walking through the estate when a bottle was thrown from the upper floor of a building,” the spokesperson said. “A 16-year-old girl was struck on the head and was taken to hospital. Her injuries have since been assessed as non-life changing.”
Police noted they were unable to locate the suspect and an investigation is ongoing before adding, “The incident is being treated as a potential antisemitic hate crime.”
Following the incident, Shomrim, a Jewish organization that monitors antisemitism and serves as a neighborhood watch group, reported that the girls were en route to a rehearsal for an upcoming event. The community, the group added, was “shocked” by the attack on “innocent young Jewish girls,” calling it an “abhorrent hate crime.”
14-year-old girl rushed to Hospital with head & facial injuries following an attack in #StamfordHill.
Young Jewish girls on their way to a rehearsal were pelted with glass bottles by a male on a balcony at Woodberry Down Estate N4.
This… pic.twitter.com/MzHPHusgyX
— Shomrim (London North & East) (@Shomrim) November 26, 2024
Since then, another Jewish girl, age 14, has reported being pelted with a hard object which caused her to be “knocked unconscious, and left feeling dizzy and with a bump on her head,” according to Shomrim.
Monday’s crime was one among many which have targeted London Jews in recent years, an issue The Algemeiner has reported on extensively.
Last December, an Orthodox Jewish man was assaulted by a man riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, two attackers brutally mauled a Jewish woman, and a group of Jewish children was berated by a woman who screamed “I’ll kill all of you Jews. You are murderers!” A similar incident occurred when a man confronted a Jewish shopper and shouted, “You f—king Jew, I will kill you!”
Months prior, a perpetrator stalked and assaulted an Orthodox Jewish woman. He followed her, shouting “dirty Jew” before snatching her shopping bag and “spilling her shopping onto the pavement whilst laughing.” That incident followed a woman wielding a wooden stick approaching a Jewish woman near the Seven Sisters area and declaring “I am doing it because you are Jew,” while striking her over the head and pouring liquid on her. The next day, the same woman — described by an eyewitness as a “serial racist” — chased a mother and her baby with a wooden stick after spraying liquid on the baby. That same week, three people accosted a Jewish teenager and knocked his hat off his head while yelling “f—king Jew.”
According to an Algemeiner review of Metropolitan Police Service data, 2,383 antisemitic hate crimes occurred in London between October 2023 and October 2024, eclipsing the full-year totals of 550 in 2022 and 845 in 2021. The problem is so serious that city officials created a new bus route to help Jewish residents “feel safe” when they travel.
“Jewish Londoners have felt scared to leave their homes,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan told The Jewish Chronicle in a statement about the policy decision earlier this year. “So, this direct bus link between these two significant communities [Stamford Hill in Hackney and Golders Green in Barnet, areas with two of the biggest Jewish communities in London] means you can travel on the 310, not need to change, and be safe and feel safer. I hope that will lead to more Londoners from these communities using public transport safely.”
Khan added that the route “connects communities, connects congregations” and would reassure Jewish Londoners they would be “safe when they travel between these two communities.”
However, it doesn’t solve the problem at hand — an explosion of antisemitism unlike anything seen in the Western world since World War II. Just this week, according to a story by GB News, an unknown group scattered leaflets across the streets of London which threatened that “every Zionist needs to leave Britain or be slaughtered.”
Responding to this latest incident, the director of the Jewish civil rights group StandWithUs UK Isaaz Zarfati told GB News that the comments should be taken “seriously.”
“We are witnessing a troubling trend of red lines being repeatedly crossed,” he said. “This is not just another wave that will pass if we remain passive. We must take those threats and statement seriously because they will one day turn into actions, and decisive steps are needed to combat this alarming phenomenon.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Jewish Girls Attacked in London With Glass Bottles in Antisemitic Outrage first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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