Uncategorized
There’s a Grammy for Christian music. These musicians want Jewish music to get one, too.
(J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — There is a Grammy Award for just about every kind of music — from pop to metal to New Age to Contemporary Christian — but there’s no Jewish category. Two Jewish musician friends hope to change that.
Joanie Leeds, a children’s musician and Grammy winner in New York City, and Mikey Pauker, a self-described “devotional rock” artist from California, are working on a formal proposal to add “best Jewish music album” to the list of Grammys awarded each year. They plan to submit their proposal to the Recording Academy, the body that governs the Grammys, by March 1.
In the past, albums of what is traditionally considered to be Jewish music have been nominated in a variety of categories, including best contemporary world music. The Klezmatics’ “Wonder Wheel” album won in that category in 2006, and some referred to the award as “the first Jewish Grammy.”
But musicians who produce albums of Jewish music often find themselves caught between categories, Leeds said. The global category is not a fit for American musicians, and categories for religious music, even if expanded, are also not an easy fit, she said.
“‘Jewish’ is complicated, because it’s not just a religion like Christianity,” Leeds said. “It’s also a culture.”
To strengthen their proposal, the pair consulted with rabbis and Jewish educators about what constitutes Jewish music.
“We’re doing our best to be as clear as possible and as inclusive as possible, because not everybody knows that Jewish music is diverse,” Pauker said. “It’s transdenominational, it’s based in spirituality, it’s based in culture and it’s not just Ashkenazi.”
Mikey Pauker, seen here performing in Berkeley, California, is one of the musicians behind a petition to add a Jewish music category to the Grammys. (Courtesy Pauker)
In their proposal, Pauker and Leeds make the case for a new category that will encompass Jewish religious music, such as cantorial music, nigguns and Mizrahi music, as well as secular music, such as klezmer, Yiddish, Ladino and Judeo-Arabic music. Albums with Christian themes, including those produced by Messianic Jews, would not be eligible.
“It needs to have some sort of Jewish content in it to make it Jewish music,” Leeds said. “If there’s a song in Israel about some guy meeting a girl at a bar, or whatever it’s about that has no grounds in text or liturgy or anything, then it wouldn’t be considered Jewish music.”
“Our goal is really to educate not just the Recording Academy about what Jewish music is, but also educating the public as to what Jewish music is,” she said.
The Recording Academy regularly adds and modifies Grammy categories. This year, it added five new ones, including best score soundtrack for video games and other interactive media and best spoken-word poetry album.
Pauker said this is not the first time musicians have petitioned the Recording Academy to add a Jewish category. But this time, he said, he and Leeds can point to the consistent output of high-quality Jewish music in recent years. He noted that in the past two years alone, more than 100 albums were released that could have been nominated in such a category.
“We’re at a point in music history where we’re having a Jewish renaissance, and the market has arrived,” he said. “We have enough artists where we can get this done.” He added that the Recording Academy has been supportive of him and Leeds in their endeavor.
In an effort to raise awareness about their proposal, they have launched a petition on the Change.org website. By Friday, it had more than 1,800 signatures, including from non-Jewish musicians.
A petition to add a Jewish Grammys category garnered more than 1,800 signatures in its first week. (Screenshot from Change.org)
Among the signers is Sephardic singer and activist Sarah Aroeste. She said she supports the push to add a Jewish category at the Grammys because her albums, including 2021’s “Monastir,” do not fit cleanly into the other categories.
“Jewish music crosses so many musical boundaries, yet we get lost, or are ineligible, in existing categories,” she wrote. “As a Ladino musician specifically, I’ve always been put in the global music category. I am literally up against musical acts from all around the globe!”
She added: “Having our own category — much like other ethnic or religious groups have them — would highlight the breadth and diversity of Jewish music as a genre and would allow those Academy members knowledgeable about the music to be able to vote.”
Pauker, 37, lives in southern California and recently launched his own folk-rock-reggae-chant record label called Beautiful Way Records. He will help lead Shabbat services during Wilderness Torah’s upcoming Passover in the Desert festival.
Leeds, who is based in New York City, won a 2021 Grammy in the Best Children’s Music Album category for her ninth album, a compilation of secular children’s music called “All the Ladies” that included a song about Jewish Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She has also released multiple albums of Jewish kids’ music, including “Meshugana” and “Challah, Challah,” as well as a Christmas record called “Oy Vey” in collaboration with the rapper Fyütch.
Pauker said the two became close friends during the pandemic, when they spent many hours on the social media app Clubhouse discussing Judaism and music.
As the Recording Academy considers their proposal in the coming weeks, Pauker said he and Leeds will hold community conversations about trends in Jewish music.
“One of our hopes is this will launch hundreds of new artists, new records and collaborations that can really help push this genre forward,” he said.
This story originally appeared in J. The Jewish News of Northern California and is reprinted with permission. Jackie Hajdenberg added reporting for JTA.
—
The post There’s a Grammy for Christian music. These musicians want Jewish music to get one, too. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Meet Matt Turner, the only Jewish player on Team USA in the World Cup
(JTA) — When the U.S. squad suits up Friday night to face off against Paraguay in its opening contest in the 2026 World Cup, one Jewish player will be in the mix.
Goalkeeper Matt Turner is not only the lone Jew on the U.S. team but he could well be the only Jewish player in the entire tournament, which is being jointly hosted by the United States, Mexico and Canada starting on Thursday. It’s the first edition of the tournament to be hosted by three countries, and the first to feature 48 teams.
Israel did not qualify for the World Cup and hasn’t since 1970 — due, in part, to geopolitics that pushed its soccer federation to compete in the talented European body, not in Asia.
Jewish players DeAndre Yedlin and Daniel Edelman, who both play in the MLS and have previously played for the national team, are not on the roster this summer. Yedlin played with Turner in the ‘22 tournament in Qatar, where Turner, 31, was a star.
Turner, a New Jersey native, discovered his Jewish heritage by finding his paternal great-grandmother’s emigration papers that had allowed her to flee Lithuania during the Holocaust.
“Once I found the documents, I was certainly very, very excited,” Turner told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2023. “America, in general, it’s a melting pot, and everybody has those roots elsewhere. So to understand your story, your history, a little bit is really nice.”
The revelation allowed him to obtain a Lithuanian passport, which made it easier for the goalie to pursue soccer opportunities in Europe. It also changed his relationship to his Jewish identity.
“The more my father and I dug, the more we learned, the more connected I felt to my Jewish side, the Jewish culture of my family,” Turner said at the time. “It really changed a lot of me.”
Turner, who now plays for the New England Revolution in MLS, started all four matches in 2022 for an American club that advanced to the Round of 16. He was the first American goalie with back-to-back shutouts in a World Cup since 1930.
Turner has 53 career appearances with the national team, with a 29-16-8 overall record, including 27 matches in which the opposing team did not score at all. He has also played in the Premier League and was the 2021 MLS Goalkeeper of the Year.
This time around, he is seen as less likely to start, following the ascent of a teammate to the top goalie slot. Still, he says he is moved to be part of the national team once more.
“I’ll probably cry when the national anthem goes,” he told FOX Sports. “It’s just such a huge honor — overwhelming honor — to be granted that responsibility to be on this team to do our best in those roles and ultimately, change soccer here forever.”
Although there are few Jews on the field during the 39-day tournament that ends July 19, one familiar Jewish face — or more accurately, voice — will return this year. Legendary Argentine broadcaster Andres Cantor, whose famous “Goooooooal” calls have helped popularize the sport in the United States, will be calling his 12th consecutive World Cup.
Cantor was born in Buenos Aires to a Romania-born mother and a father whose family fled the Nazis in Poland. He moved to the United States as a teenager and has publicly embraced his Jewish identity.
The post Meet Matt Turner, the only Jewish player on Team USA in the World Cup appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Their nickname is the Red Crosses, but these World Cup challengers practice at a Jewish day school
For years, San Diego Jewish Academy had been preparing for the World Cup. The school, serving students from pre-K through 12th grade, has one of the best soccer fields in California, and tournament organizer FIFA had approved the site to serve as a national team’s base camp — if any visiting countries were interested.
When the school looked at the World Cup’s qualifying nations, they wondered if their plans might be for naught.
“You have Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Iran — teams that wouldn’t necessarily choose the Jewish Academy,” said Adam Benmoise, SDJA’s director of auxiliary programs. “We were nervous.”
To their relief, the World Cup schedule delivered a stroke of luck. The four teams playing group-stage games on the West Coast did include Qatar. But one the others was a country famous for its neutrality. Switzerland began practicing at the Jewish day school June 2.
Both sides have found the arrangement a winning one. For Switzerland, San Diego Jewish Academy is more than just a practice field. It’s also a gym, a media center and an office space. (Or a synagogue, if they needed one.) And for SDJA, a pluralist school with about 500 students, the rental arrangement doesn’t just pay the bills: it also connects the local Jewish community to the world’s biggest sporting event.
The partnership is the culmination of four years of planning for Benmoise, a lifelong soccer fan whose job is to drum up outside revenue for the school. Recognizing the unusual quality of the SDJA field — real grass, not turf — he pitched the school’s CFO and athletic director on the idea of renting it out to pro teams with an eye on the 2026 World Cup.
His first move was to bring San Diego tourism officials for a site visit. They were shocked — and word got around about the 56-acre hillside campus.
“It’s a true gem,” Benmoise said. “It’s built properly, it’s manicured properly, it’s mowed properly, we have the proper irrigation. It has all of the footprints of a professional-grade soccer field, but was built for a school.”
The field was used for practices during the Gold Cup, a biennial international soccer tournament, then by Major League Soccer and touring European clubs, and finally by the U.S. men’s and women’s national teams — whose rave reviews of the campus put San Diego Jewish Academy on FIFA’s radar.
To be added to FIFA’s official site catalogue for the World Cup, though, the vetting was more rigorous. The international soccer governing body has strict pitch standards, and it employs a phalanx of inspectors and groundskeeping experts to ensure fields are up to par and consistent with one another. Benmoise also had to prove that SDJA’s facilities could accommodate the wide-ranging needs of a national team program.
In response, the school expanded the playing area by covering an unused softball diamond with 16,000 square feet of sod — a project funded by school donors. (SDJA hasn’t fielded a softball team for over a decade, Benmoise said.) The school also rented and installed a 4,500 square foot tent with tile flooring to set up a gym alongside the pitch — a temporary construction that will be paid for by the Swiss. Benmoise is hopeful the school will get to keep the workout equipment.
Sergio Affuso, a press officer for the team, said in an email that Switzerland was “very happy” with the base camp. “It is great to see how enthusiastic everyone is about hosting us here, included the kids of the school, and the facilities are very well prepared,” Affuso said.
Per FIFA rules, each of the 48 countries playing in the World Cup has to host a public community day at their base camp to locals during one of its first five days of practice. But because school was still in session those days, FIFA allowed SDJA to invite only the internal school community to the event.
That day — June 3 — the SDJA student body, faculty and a few dozen parents filled the bleachers to watch the “Red Crosses” practice. Then the team set up some mini games to play with the kids — shooting on the goalies, passing and dribbling drills, and the crowd-pleaser known as “three Swiss players against 45 fourth graders.”
A pair of journalism-interested SDJA students are getting another special perk: the Swiss federation hired them as media interns for the duration of their stay in San Diego.
Benmoise didn’t want to share how much FIFA is paying to use the field, but said the compensation is “very generous.”
“Let’s just say we’re not charging FIFA the same that I would charge, like, a youth team,” he said.
SDJA isn’t the only Jewish school whose facilities rate professional use. A pair of Orthodox high schools in Los Angeles rent their basketball gyms to NBA players for off-season workouts. The all-star roster that uses those courts appreciate not only their quality, but also the schools’ privacy and security.
Benmoise said the Swiss team — which kicks off against Qatar on Saturday in San Francisco — was thus far too focused on game prep to explore the rest of the campus. But a social media post from the team’s Instagram account about their practice field did cause a stir back home.
The post was an overhead map of the practice facility, showing the dressing area, the play area, the goalkeeper area and — on the next slide of the carousel — the hills beyond the field, labeled “snake area.”
“Watch out for the snakes 🐍 👀,” the caption read.
An alarmed Swiss media published a number of stories about the threat of serpentine pitch invasions, forcing Affuso clarify that the post was an attempt at humor.
“People in Switzerland understood the joke,” he told The Athletic. “But maybe, abroad, they didn’t.” (Benmoise said snakes had “never been an issue” on the campus.)
The post Their nickname is the Red Crosses, but these World Cup challengers practice at a Jewish day school appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Mamdani was set to meet Colombian president known for inflammatory Israel rhetoric
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani had planned to meet this week with Colombian President Gustavo Petro — who has compared Israel’s leaders to Nazis and recently defended his use of the phrase “Heil Hitler” on social media — during the South American leader’s visit to New York, a source familiar with the mayor’s schedule plans confirmed.
The meeting — set to be Mamdani’s first with a foreign leader — was reportedly canceled after the Trump administration intervened, directing Colombian officials to call it off, arguing that it would violate the terms of Petro’s entry into the United States for a United Nations Security Council session on Wednesday.
The State Department revoked Petro’s visa last fall after he appeared at a pro-Palestinian rally in Manhattan, calling on U.S. soldiers to disobey presidential orders over its support for Israel’s war in Gaza and urging an armed response to counter Israel’s action against the Palestinians. Petro was granted a limited waiver this week to attend the U.N. meeting on the Middle East.
A former member of Colombia’s M-19 guerrilla movement and elected in 2022 as the country’s first socialist president in decades, Petro has repeatedly drawn condemnation from Jewish and Israeli leaders since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks for comparing Israel’s military actions to those of Nazi Germany. In 2024, he severed diplomatic ties with Israel, accusing the Jewish state of committing genocide in Gaza, an allegation Israel has strongly rejected.
This week, Petro came under fire after posting the phrase “Heil Hitler” on X in response to an op-ed supporting the right-wing presidential candidate, Abelardo de la Espriella, ahead of Colombia’s June 21 presidential runoff. Petro defended the post, saying he was criticizing what he described as the author’s “fascist” rhetoric rather than endorsing the Nazi slogan itself. In his UN remarks, Petro again compared Israel to the Nazis.
A City Hall spokesperson declined to comment on the matter.
The mayor’s canceled sit-down with Petro is the latest flashpoint in his fraught alliances with inflammatory critics of Israel.
Mamdani has faced scrutiny from Jewish leaders and Zionist organizations over his sharp criticism of Israel and embrace of Palestinian activism that is shaping his tenure as leader of the city with the largest population of Jews outside Israel. During his mayoral campaign, Mamdani refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and said he wouldn’t travel to the country and called for divestments in Israel’s economy. Recently, the mayor skipped the annual Israel Day parade.
In congressional races in New York City, Mamdani has actively been campaigning for candidates who have made inflammatory statements on Israel, including challenging U.S. military aid to the country and accusing the Jewish state of genocide. In particular, Mamdani has thrown his support behind former Columbia University Gaza War encampment activist Daraliza Avila Chevalier, who is challenging Rep. Adriano Espaillat with the incumbent’s support for Israel front and center. Avila Chevalier, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s NYC chapter, attended the Oct. 8, 2023, pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square, which was broadly condemned for celebrating the Hamas attacks on Israel. She has continued to defend her participation, saying that she showed up in anticipation of Israel’s “outsized reaction.”
Mamdani reignited tensions with many Jewish communities by posting a Nakba Day video produced by his City Hall media team commemorating the displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s founding in 1948. That was followed by what was perceived as a delayed and ultimately supportive response to pro-Palestinian protesters who descended on a heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood where a synagogue was hosting a real estate sale that included West Bank properties.
The head of Mamdani’s office of international affairs, tasked with interacting with the United Nations and handling diplomatic relations, is Ana Maria Archila, the past co-chair of the Working Families Party who led campaigns critical of Israel. On his first visit to the U.N. headquarters in March, Mamdani met with Secretary-General António Guterres, whom Israeli officials have criticized for his statements about the war in Gaza, accusing him of failing to sufficiently condemn Hamas. Israel recently cut ties with Guterres and barred him from entering the country following the blacklisting of Israeli authorities in a UN report regarding sexual violence in conflict zones.
The post Mamdani was set to meet Colombian president known for inflammatory Israel rhetoric appeared first on The Forward.
