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Crop tops, kippahs and klezmer: A ‘Jewish rave’ scene takes hold in NYC
(New York Jewish Week) — On a recent Thursday in Ridgewood, the Queens neighborhood that straddles the border of uber-hip Bushwick, Brooklyn, a crowd of music fans filled the room at Trans-Pecos, an all-ages music and events venue.
It’s a scene that’s pretty familiar to anyone who’s been to an outer-borough club in recent years: A homey, DIY kind of space with creaky wood floors and plants as decoration; a limited menu of pricey drinks; a young, casual and queer-leaning crowd, albeit with a smattering of “elders” along the sidelines.
But on this particular July evening, the event was celebrating the unique intersection of klezmer music and rave culture. The room was packed with Jewish ravers, for the third New York installment of “Kleztronica,” a burgeoning Jewish music scene that’s becoming a “movement,” according to its 22-year-old creator, Upper West Side native Kaia Berman-Peters.
A singer and a musician, Berman-Peters performs original Jewish songs over the electronic beats of house music and snippets of klezmer, resulting in something akin to Yiddish hip-hop or Jewish techno. With these mashups, she’s building upon a decades-old crossover tradition pioneered in the 1990s and early 2000s by rapper-producer Josh Dolgin, aka Socalled, who created hip-hop songs from samples of Jewish records.
Berman-Peters, who also goes by Chaia, is aiming for something bigger than a danceable tune or a fun night out. “I see Kleztronica as a movement,” she told the New York Jewish Week ahead of the show. “It represents a certain type of diasporism; of recentering Judaism in the Diaspora. I do see it as a movement, a community, but primarily a set of ideas and ways of practicing those ideas.”
The first of these ideas, she said, is a deeply rooted respect for Yiddish tradition and Jewish ancestry. The second honors “the Black and radical lineage of electronic music: Chicago house music, dub in Jamaica, house in Detroit.”
The third is a commitment to “rave space as safe space,” she said, referring to a welcoming, queer-friendly, non-judgmental environment. And the fourth, she said, is Diaspora, specifically “Diaspora without a desire to return” — reflecting the function that Yiddish can play for Jews who do not want to root their identity or engagement in Israel.
“These little raves are just one part of living an exuberant Jewish life centered in the Diaspora,” Berman-Peters said, “centered in learning and in ancestral respect.”
UWS native Kaia Berman-Peters, the founder of Kleztronica, performs a set at Trans-Pecos on July 20, 2023. (Julian Voloj)
At the Trans-Pecos event last month, the scene was a respectful, haimish one that Berman-Peters lovingly described as “super weird” and “so cool.” The enthusiastic, intimate crowd — some wearing kippahs, others crop tops — seemed up for anything, including Slavic squat dancing, which happened later in the evening.
Berman-Peters — who also sings with with Boston-based klezmer group Mama Liga, and is a vocalist and accordionist for the klezmer-folk trio Levyosn — played a set of original songs over Jewish-inflected electronic beats. Sam Slate and Abbie Goldberg, who as drag performers Diva Nigun and Chava GoodTime, had the crowd roaring during a musical skit that had the former dressed as the captain of a cardboard ship and the latter as a shark. (“There are some things I just don’t understand,” a puzzled onlooker quipped to me.)
A highlight was a set from Eleanore Weill, a France-born Brooklyn musician who plays a hand-cranked string instrument called the hurdy-gurdy. “It’s very raw and intense,” Weill recently told the Forward about her instrument, which was wired for the Kleztronica performance. “It’s like a stringed bagpipe. A lot of people can’t handle it.”
Berman-Peters had organized the evening in partnership with Clear the Floor, a rave collective from Boston that centers Black and Indigenous people and other people of color. “The idea is that electronic dance music and techno and house is Black music,” she said of the collaboration. “And it’s music that was created by people of color and continues to be traditional music of people of color. And that we’re part of that lineage standing in solidarity with them.”
Unfortunately, a series of travel snafus meant that only one Clear the Floor rep made it to Ridgewood that evening. It didn’t seem to matter: Most of the tight-knit crowd were entwined in New York’s klezmer scene and were there to see Berman-Peters and company. The audience included klezmer luminaries like Lorin Sklamberg and Frank London — who, as founders of the Klezmatics, kicked off the klezmer revival in the 1980s — as well as representatives of the next generation, like clarinetist Michael Winograd and his Yiddish Princess cofounder, vocalist Sarah Gordon.
Performers at the Kleztronica event included a P1no, left, a DJ from Clear the Floor, a Boston-based BIPOC rave collective, and a drag performance from Diva Nigun. (Jess O’Donoghue)
But don’t mistake Kleztronica as Yiddish Revival 3.0. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say this is what klezmer is becoming, or that this is the new mainstream of klezmer, because of the diversity of genre expression within the scene,” said Aaron Bendich, the founder of Jewish music label Borscht Beat. “I think it would be misconstruing what’s going on there.”
Bendich, who has attended every New York Kleztronica event thus far, noted that past Kleztronica performers included more traditional klezmer musicians who have used their sets to experiment with new forms.
“Kaia is definitely of the new generation of klezmer performers, there’s no doubt in my mind about that,” said Bendich, who released Levyosn’s album in May. “But Kleztronica is its own thing. I don’t think it’s the son of what Michael Winograd is doing, or the grandchild of the Klezmatics.”
“It’s really exciting,” said musician Slate about this new shoot on the klezmer family tree, who was cooling off in Trans-Pecos’ expansive backyard ahead of his set. (Slate uses he/they pronouns in day-to-day life and she/her as Diva Nigun.) “There’s such a cultural shift among young Jews to explore, to reinvigorate, for Ashkenazi Jews, Yiddish culture and yiddishkeit.”
Slate and Berman-Peters met about a year ago at an anarchist havdalah in Prospect Par. Incredibly, it turned out that they both lived in Boston and made electronic Jewish music but had never crossed paths before.
Since then, Slate has collaborated with Berman-Peters on Kleztronica events in both cities. “It was only a matter of time because the music is so rich, and has so much to offer,” Slate said. “I grew up secular but it’s so deep in my bones still.”
“We wanted to make electronic music that wasn’t just kitschy — it wasn’t just a joke or a punchline,” he said of Kleztronica’s evolution. “There are very few artists who have been able to balance that, and it felt really exciting that there were a bunch of us [doing this] at the same time.”
Revelers get down to the sounds of Kleztronica at Trans-Pecos on July 20, 2023. (Jessica O’Donoghue)
Berman-Peters grew up in an academic, Jewish and musical home in Manhattan. Her mother, Julie Stone Peters, is a professor of literature and theater at Columbia University; her father, Nathaniel Berman, is a professor at Brown University specializing in Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism. Not only did she “grow up on campus” at Columbia, “I grew up sort of with a stream of rabbis, cantors and Jewish musicians sort of coming in and out of our house to hear my dad teach,” she said. “And that was really cool.”
One of her father’s students was Basya Schecter, founder of the Jewish world music/folk band Pharaoh’s Daughter, who became a close family friend and “a mentor to me, musically,” Berman-Peters said. Her interest in klezmer began in high school when she took up the accordion and joined the Columbia Klezmer Ensemble — which was open to anyone, not just Columbia students — led by renowned klezmer musician, cantor and educator Jeff Warschauer.
At Warschauer’s urging, as she was set to graduate from the Heschel School, Berman-Peters applied to the New England Conservatory of Music, which is nicknamed the “Klezmer Conservatory” because it is home to the Klezmer Conservatory Band, led by Hankus Netsky.
“I didn’t have that rigorous of a musical background; I didn’t really think I could get in,” she said. But “get in” she did, and Berman-Peters began a joint bachelor’s and master’s degree program in partnership with Harvard University in 2019.
In college, while studying accordion and klezmer music, Berman-Peters began to get serious about DJing and electronic music. “I started feeling really inspired by a lot of different artists who make electronic music that expresses their cultural roots,” she said, pointing to artists like Sofia Kourtesis, whose music draws upon Peruvian culture and protest tradition. “And I thought I could do that, too.”
At the moment, Berman-Peters is taking time off from completing her degree to pursue Kleztronica full-time. She just completed recording her first Kleztronica album — her dream, she said, is to release it on London-based indie label Ninja Tune — and the next Kleztronica events in New York are slated for October and December.
Currently living with her parents on the Upper West Side, she expresses wonder at how rapidly her burgeoning vision is catching on, considering that the first-ever Kleztronica event happened just this past December, when she proposed the idea to Pete Rushefsky, a founder of the Yiddish New York festival, who was enthusiastically all-in.
“I expected it to just be people from the klezmer scene that I knew, and maybe people interested in music, but it’s all people from all walks of Jewish life that I totally didn’t expect,” she said of her fans, pointing specifically to Jewish hippies and ex-haredi party people.
She said that while attendees have mostly been Jews so far, she doesn’t think the audience ends there.
“I hope that more non-Jews start coming because I really think being culturally rooted and making dance music is what dance music was all about in the first place,” she said. “So I really hope that more people who are not Jewish come to this, and see our version of it, and our version of what Judaism looks like, too.”
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Anti-Israel protesters demonstrated outside a Thornhill synagogue, despite a bylaw protecting houses of worship
A raucous anti-Israel protest outside a synagogue in Thornhill, Ont., which was hosting an Israeli real estate event, is being called a failed test of a bylaw that was intended to keep demonstrations at a distance from religious institutions.
The protest in front of the Beth Avraham Yoseph of Toronto synagogue (BAYT) on Dec. 9 saw chaotic swarms of counter-protesters and police officers following demonstrators along residential sidewalks while the event took place inside the synagogue. York Regional Police (YRP) had closed a number of streets in advance of the event.
In June, Vaughan city council passed a bylaw preventing “nuisance demonstrations” within 100 metres of synagogues and other vulnerable infrastructure, in direct response to previous demonstrations over Israeli real estate events at synagogues.
Yet on Monday night, demonstrators assembled across from the synagogue, on the south side of Clark Avenue, well within 100 meters of BAYT, for the majority of the hours-long event.
Vaughan’s Protecting Vulnerable Social Infrastructure bylaw prohibits “anyone from organizing or participating in any and all nuisance demonstrations within 100 metres of the property line” of places of worship, schools, childcare centres, hospitals and group-care facilities.
“Nuisance demonstrations,” according to the bylaw, “includes one or more people publicly protesting or expressing views on an issue in any manner—whether intended or not—that causes a reasonable person, on an objective standard, to be intimidated meaning that they are either concerned for their safety or security, or unable to access vulnerable social infrastructure.”
The bylaw cites examples of potentially intimidating behaviour; however, enforcement of the bylaw appears to be subject to interpretation by YRP officers and city bylaw enforcement officers onsite to determine if protests are deemed “peaceful gatherings, protests or demonstrations” as opposed to “nuisance demonstrations.”
“When deciding whether a reasonable person would be intimidated by a demonstration, enforcement staff will make a case-by-case assessment having regard to the objective facts and also what prior court decisions have said about what a ‘reasonable person’ is,” the bylaw read. “Not all instances of individuals stating they are intimidated will necessarily lead to by-law enforcement. Enforcement staff will use best efforts to enforce the by-law and minimally impair individuals’ Charter rights.”
At one point, police—responding to complaints reportedly coming from the demonstrators, whose loud noises such as drums and PA systems police had prohibited—investigated noise from a nearby home blasting Israeli music, and residents were asked to lower the volume while protesters walked nearby streets.
While hectic, there were no reports of property damages or physical assaults. Similar protests at Israeli real estate expos in March resulted in arrests and physical altercations.
Rabbi Daniel Korobkin of BAYT said he had been in close contact with Vaughan Mayor Steven Del Duca before, during and after the real estate event and protest on Dec. 9. He said that while Del Duca and other officials, including MPP Laura Smith, are “trying their best to help the Jewish community,” he thinks there’s a disconnect between what the bylaw was supposed to allow police to do and what took place.
“We don’t know where this directive is coming from, where the [police] have interpreted the bylaw in as liberal a way as possible,” Rabbi Korobkin told The CJN in a phone interview. He said he’d met with YRP officers ahead of the event and asked them to specifically uphold trespassing laws and a noise bylaw that he says police did not enforce during the last protests.
“We asked them to uphold the new bylaw, which allegedly prohibits any kind of intimidating protest, or nuisance protest, within 100 metres of the house of worship. We had every reason to believe that the police would prevent protesters from being within 100 metres of our property. But that did not transpire,” he said.
“What instead transpired is that the police told us that anyone who wants to stand within 100 metres is welcome to do so provided that they are not threatening, that they are not chanting hate speech, that they are not saying something that’s inciteful. And so, the police allowed the protesters to be on the other side of Clark Avenue from the synagogue.”
He notes “a very sincere effort to uphold the bylaw on noise” by officers who would shut down loud sounds “any time someone tried a drum or a loudspeaker.”
“We’re grateful for that. But when it came to the shouting of epithets, like to ‘Go back to Europe’ or ‘You’re guilty of genocide,’ which was one of the signs that was held up, the police did not uphold their side of the bargain.”
He says there were different police unit commanders on each side of the road, and that “the police presence that was on our side basically said, ‘I’m not in charge of their side.’”
“The fact is that they were only doing some of their job, they weren’t doing the entire job,” said Rabbi Korobkin.
“There were groups of protesters who were walking private streets… making loud and boisterous comments, intimidating the neighbourhood, and—bylaw or no bylaw—that simply is their right to do so, and the culture that currently persists within the GTA is that you can say whatever you want, even if it’s inciteful, even if it’s hate speech, and no one’s going to stop you.
“While I’m not intimidated, and we’re going to continue doing business as usual, I think there is fear within the Jewish community, and concern that people feel that our authorities don’t really care about the Jewish community.”
The test of the Vaughan bylaw, according to Rabbi Korobkin, shows the need to “go back to the drawing board and start all over again.”
“There needs to be a different strategy, where our society has a zero-tolerance policy for hatred on either side.
“There is fear in the community. People just want a sense of security. We’re right now on a powder keg,” he said, referring to the synagogue in Melbourne, Australia, set on fire the previous Shabbat, while people were inside.
“We’ve experienced Jewish schools being shot at and vandalized. People… want to know that the police care as much about the Jewish community as they do about these violent protesters.
“To give you an illustration…. [as the night was] winding down, the police went first to the Jews on the side of the synagogue telling them to disperse, before they told the protesters to disperse, which to me is just a further indication that there’s a lopsided sense of priority here.”
He says the real estate event inside the synagogue included 22 realtors who came from Israel, and that the synagogue discouraged the inclusion of properties for sale in the West Bank. The CJN did not independently verify details of properties for sale at the event.
“We made it clear to them that we did not want them to showcase any properties on the other side of the Green Line, even though, personally, I have no issue with that,” he says. “We did not want to deliberately be a provocation.”
“In retrospect, that was probably naive, because the opposition, the people who came out and were told to come out in protest, are people who sincerely believe that any square inch that exists in the country called Israel today cannot be legitimately purchased by Jews.”
Mayor Del Duca, who played a substantial role in creating and passing the bylaw, acknowledges that the Dec. 9 protest shows there’s plenty to learn from how recent events played out.
“People are, it’s a range of confused and angry, concerned, disappointed… I think mostly looking for answers to the legitimate questions they have about what took place on Monday and the difference between their understanding of the bylaw and then what they saw in real time, or what they’ve heard about in the aftermath,” he said.
“There [are] a lot of lessons I think we do have to learn from Monday night and I am going to work very, very hard along with city staff and YRP and others to make sure that we do learn those lessons so that we can do even better going forward, should the need ever arise,” he said.
Del Duca told The CJN in a phone interview on Dec. 11 that the city and YRP need to work together to “go through real-time potential scenarios” to learn and improve on the response to Monday’s demonstration.
He says in speaking to residents Monday night and since, he’s had to explain what “nuisance” demonstrations mean from a legal standpoint.
“I totally understand where [residents who are upset are] coming from. They think of the concept of a nuisance in somewhat of a conventional way. But there’s also a legal definition of what that’s supposed to mean, and where’s the line between what was and what wasn’t,” he said. “None of what I’m saying is meant to diminish the fears, the concerns, the anger that our residents are [feeling].
“I think the responsibility that I have and we have is, we saw in real time how using the bylaw is a tool played out, or maybe not using it as a tool played out,” he said.
Del Duca says the work ahead involves developing policies and protocols for city and police, including addressing the distinctions between types of demonstrations.
“The notion of the 100 metres is something that’s really important. Obviously, it’s foundational to the bylaw itself, and I know that’s captured a lot of attention through the months since we introduced and passed the bylaw.
“Where it becomes less clear, and we said this throughout this entire process… is that the bylaw doesn’t impact what is peaceful protest,” he said.
“Regardless of the issue or the cause… if a person is standing within 100 metres of a place of worship or a school or a daycare, and they’re engaging in what is legitimately peaceful protest, you know, that that’s not something that would trigger the bylaw in terms of making them move further away.”
He says the key question to determine will be whether a peaceful protest turns to a nuisance demonstration.
“I think we have more work to do in terms of playing out all of those scenarios and then having a strong sense of how to respond in the moment.”
He says that while much work was done in developing the bylaw’s policies or protocols “so that if we ever ended up in a situation like this, that would be a clear understanding of how we would deal with it,” this was also the first time the bylaw was tested.
Vaughan was also the first municipality to pass such a bylaw, he said.
Toronto considered a similar “protest bubble zone” bylaw, but councillors voted against it, instead allowing the City and police to develop plans for managing protests and rapid responses to hateful graffiti.
Del Duca acknowledges there aren’t always immediate, clear distinctions, for example, in the middle of a demonstration.
“It does come down to interpretation. But I’m convinced that with enough collaboration and enough scenario planning that we should be able to come to a good spot. It would have been ideal if that had been in place before Monday, I think some of it was, but there’s always a difference between the theoretical preparedness and the practical realities on the ground in a tense situation like we were dealing with on Monday night,” he said.
He says he understands how community members are feeling, and confirms he’s been speaking with Rabbi Korobkin regularly.
“I would just say to the community, I’m aware of the work that still needs to be done and I am committed to making sure that we do it and that I think will position all of us even more strongly to be even better prepared in the future.”
Gila Martow, the Vaughan Ward 5 councillor who represents BAYT’s district, echoed the call to answer questions about the disconnect between expectations and outcomes on Dec. 9, and address community concerns around protest scenarios outside synagogues in the area.
“I have a lot of questions that I’m trying to get answers to, including why police would tell my residents to turn down Israeli music in their backyards, supposedly at the request of the uninvited visitors,” wrote Martow in a brief email statement.
“While I respect the efforts of York Regional Police to keep everyone safe, we need to come up with strategies to emotionally support the Jewish community in the face of unrelenting hate.”
The CJN contacted York Regional Police, who confirmed the service would provide written responses to questions; however, the statement was not received by publication time.
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Israeli Defense Chief Says ‘Now a Chance’ for Deal to Release All Hostages in Gaza
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz looks on, amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, in Jerusalem, Nov. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz told his US counterpart, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, in a phone call on Wednesday that there was a real chance to reach a deal to release all the remaining hostages held in Gaza.
“There is now a chance for a new deal that will allow the return of all the hostages, including those with American citizenship,” Katz said during the call, according to a readout from his office.
Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists kidnapped over 250 hostages during their invasion of and massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7, dragging the captives into neighboring Gaza. Israel responded to the onslaught with an ongoing military campaign aimed at freeing the hostages and dismantling Hamas’s military and governing capabilities.
For months, the US, Egypt, and Qatar have unsuccessfully tried to broker a ceasefire and hostage-release deal between the two sides. In recent days, however, there have been signs that stalled negotiations might be revived and a breakthrough is possible.
Since Hamas’s invasion last year, 109 of the 251 hostages have been released, mostly during a week-long truce in late November 2023. Eight others have been rescued alive, and the bodies of 38 have been recovered.
Israel believes 100 hostages remain in Gaza, including 96 who were kidnapped last Oct. 7, and at least a third of them have been declared dead by the Israeli military.
During their Wednesday call, Katz and Austin also discussed the situation in Syria following the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, which for years had allowed Iran to use Syrian territory to send weapons to its terrorist proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The two leaders “agreed on the danger posed by Iran and its [weapons] shipments, and agreed to cooperate to prevent attempts to smuggle weapons from Iran to Lebanon via Syria.”
Iran has also been the chief international sponsor of Hamas, providing the Palestinian terrorist group with weapons, funding, and training.
The post Israeli Defense Chief Says ‘Now a Chance’ for Deal to Release All Hostages in Gaza first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Pentagon Rebuffs Allegations Iran Behind Mysterious Drones Flying Over New Jersey
Drones are seen at a site at an undisclosed location in Iran, in this handout image obtained on April 20, 2023. Photo: Iranian Army/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
The Pentagon batted down claims by US Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) on Wednesday that Iran has spy drones flying over the state of New Jersey.
Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters that the US Defense Department does not believe that the drones floating over New Jersey originate from “a foreign entity or adversary.”
“There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States, and there’s no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States,” Singh said.
The Pentagon’s comments came after Van Drew dropped bombshell allegations about the drones during an interview with Fox News host Harris Faulkner earlier on Wednesday. The lawmaker stated that Iran, which US intelligence agencies have for years identified as the world’s chief state sponsor of global terrorism, has used a stealth drone to illegally surveil America from the air for around a month.
Van Drew said that during his time on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, particularly its subcommittee on aviation, he has “gotten to know people, and from very high sources, very qualified sources, very responsible sources.”
“I’m gonna tell you the real deal. Iran launched a mothership probably about a month ago that contains these drones,” Van Drew said. “It’s off the east coast of the United States of America. They’ve launched drones.”
The lawmaker dismissed the notion that the drones are from US agencies, stating that American lawmakers would have been informed. He also stated that the drones are far beyond the technological capabilities of the standard hobbyist, suggesting that an “adversarial country,” such as Iran, was most likely responsible for the drones.
He added that Iran “made a deal with China to purchase drones, motherships, and technology.”
Van Drew asserted that the drones traveling over American airspace should be “shot down” and that the “military is on alert” over the matter.
Faulkner noted that US President-elect Donald Trump possesses a large home in New Jersey, referencing his large estate and golf club in Bedminster, potentially intensifying the national security threat that the drones present.
Van Drew claimed that the drones are “across the country” and that the federal government must “get them down” before they further compromise American security.
New Jersey residents have raised alarm bells over the past few weeks over mysterious drones traversing across their skies. Thus far, the federal government has been unable to determine the exact origin of the drones. An FBI official told Congress on Tuesday that the agency has not pinned responsibility for the drones on any individual party.
Iran has an extensive history of attempting to puncture the American national security apparatus. The country has been accused of attempting to embed spies within American institutions and agencies. It has also been accused of encouraging violent protests and spreading anti-Israel, Islamist propaganda across social media platforms in an attempt to disrupt American society.
Iran additionally plotted an assassination attempt against Trump, according to the US Department of Justice.
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