The best Jewish music store in the world is on Fairfax Avenue in LA, Where Music Aficionados Debate Who's the Elvis of the Cantorial World.
Not just Jan Peerce and Yaffa Yarkoni, but Bessarabian drinking songs. Ladino and Arabic. If chasidic CDs ain't the party, there's always Mexican klezmer — or Guns 'n' Charoses and Doc Mo She. Would you believe there's even a "Lambchop's Passover Surprise" from Shari Lewis?
. . . Elliot Gould and Theodore Bikel are customers. Carl Reiner comes in. "Leonard Cohen always buys the same cantorial music," Rutberg said with a grin. "Shalom Katz." Hollywood has called too, when a movie ("Mr. Saturday Night") or TV show ("X-Files," "Brooklyn Bridge") or Jewish-themed documentary needs an appropriate track. . . . "Nobody in the world has ever tried to market Ladino music," Rutberg said. "First of all, the market is Jewish, which is [as] big as the end of your finger. And Ladino is like a microbe in that. Which means that nobody wants it. But I really dug it. We have over 200 Ladino CDs, which is like having antique automobiles. I import them from Spain, Germany, Austria, France. They're my No. 2 seller, bigger than cantorial, Israeli and klezmer."
Did someone mention Ladino? After decades of domination by klezmer, popular Jewish music is being permeated by Sephardic and Mizrachi influences. But yo! Jewish hip-hop is not far behind.
Enter Sneakas, ne Yoni Ben-Yehuda, a 22-year-old budding hip-hop artist who is striving to take Jewish hip-hop out of the novelty category and into the ears of serious rap fans. . . . He and his mother emigrated from Israel to the United States in 1993, when he was 12. His deep voice still bears a faint trace of an Israeli accent. As a teenager on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Sneakas discovered underground New York hip-hop artists like Mos Def and Talib Qweli . . .A tale of two cities: Daniel Libeskind, the architect chosen to rebuild the WTC, was a Jewish kid from the South Bronx,
immersed in an environment in which progressive politics, Yiddish literary debates and a community spirit thrived. "It shaped me completely," Libeskind told the Forward.There was an old Jewish community in Medina when Mohammed arrived there, all excited about his new religion.
It's that same universalistic, secular Jewish attitude that underpins his work today, Libeskind said. "Most architects are concerned with buildings — actually, I'm concerned with people," he said. "There's a big difference. Most architects are concerned with technology. I'm much more interested in the story a city tells, a story a building tells, a story a space tells."
. . . whoever settled in Yathrib and gave it its non-Arabic name of "the Medina" or "the city" were originally Aramaic speakers from elsewhere. At first this was just a local usage employed by these immigrant Medinians for their town, just as New Yorkers, when talking among themselves, call New York "the city," too. (If you come from Philadelphia, on the other hand, you call New York "New York," just as other Arabians went on saying "Yathrib.") This usage must then have spread to the Arabic-speaking population of Yathrib, which attached the Arabic definite article to make it "Al-Medina" (as Arabs call Medina to this day), a form then adopted by the Aramaic speakers when they eventually switched to Arabic themselves. And it is highly likely that these immigrants were Jews from Palestine or Babylonia, both Aramaic-speaking areas in the early centuries C.E., because we also know from Arab historians that, in Muhammad's time, three large Jewish clans — the Banu-Nadir or "Sons of Nadir," the Banu-Korayzeh and the Banu-Kainuka — dominated the city. In addition, there were in Medina two large non-Jewish clans, the Aws and the Khazraj, whose origins were in Yemen.Eskimos have many different words for snow, Hebrew - born in a climate with well-defined wet and dry seasons - has several different words for rain.
The yoreh falls in October and November, before the heavy winter storms set in, and the malkosh in March and April, which is the Israeli springtime.
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