Who Says Jews Don’t Have Soul?

By Beth Kissileff No one could have predicted thirty years ago that the cantorial school at Hebrew Union College would one day be named for Debbie Friedman.  At the dawn of her career, Friedman was considered a maverick, someone who didn’t know about the traditions of Jewish music, a self-taught song leader rather than the prevailing model of cantor, a carefully trained musician. The first time I attended a performance of hers, in the early nineties in a non-descript suburban New Jersey synagogue, my husband and I brought along a recent convert to Judaism who had been a member of the Princeton University Tiger Lilies, a female a cappella group.  Since music was so important to this young woman, we wanted to be sure that she knew the range of possibilities inherent in Jewish music. The...

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Maccabeats Suffer “Wardrobe Malfunction”

By Doni Kandel The Yeshiva University Maccabeats, the university’s a capella group that has taken the United States by storm, received one of their first ugly lessons in stardom Monday morning. While taping a performance on the CBS Early Show, Maccabeats vocalist Nachum Joel suffered a wardrobe malfunction after one of his beat-mates bumped into him, knocking his yarmulke to the ground, exposing the top of his head. Joel frantically picked up the fallen skull cap and slammed it back on his head but the CBS cameras had already caught every second of his nude scalp on tape. This, of course, was not the first time CBS has been victimized by unfortunate garment error. CBS was the station that covered Super Bowl XXXVIII when Janet Jackson was briefly exposed by co-performer Justin Timberlake during their half-time performance....

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