Monday Media: Roberto Rodriguez and the Cuban Jewish All Stars

Where do Klezmer and Cuba intersect? Miami, of course–home to Cuban ex-pats and a robust Jewish community. Roberto Rodriguez and the Cuban Jewish All Stars is the product of one man’s expansive musical imagination and unique upbringing. Bring your dancing shoes on May 14 at the DCJCC.

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What We’re Listening To: A Song for September 12

Sometimes a song has the fortune to meet the zeitgeist perfectly. When that happens, a perfectly good song becomes an anthem for an age.

For me, Five for Fighting’s Superman (It’s Not Easy) is that song. Their soulful ballad, written well before 9/11, start with the words “I can’t stand to fly,” and, hitting ever more resonant cultural notes, insists that “even heroes have the right to bleed.”  In constant rotation in the weeks and months after 9/11,  it still sends me reeling back to those uncertain days. What’s your 9/12 song?

What We’re Listening To: Leonard Bernstein’s East Side Story

Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Harold Prince, Robert E. Griffith, Leonard Bernstein, and Jerome Robbins in 1957.

This week, Leonard Bernstein would’ve turned 93.

West Side Story, for which Bernstein composed the famous music, showcased the early collaboration of three nice Jewish boys – with Stephen Sondheim doing the lyrics, and Arthur Laurents writing the script.

See if you can imagine the show as originally conceived, as East Side Story: the conflicted love story between a Jewish girl from a family of Holocaust survivors and an Italian boy from a Catholic family on the Lower East Side.

What We’re Listening To: Eurovision 1978

Happy Tu B’av, the Jewish holiday of love.
Translation of the lyrics here. Translation of the clothes here!

What We’re Listening To: By the Rivers of Babylon

Click to listen to The Melodians sing “By the Rivers of Babylon“

What We’re Listening To

Looking for some inspiration this Monday?

Here’s a beautiful tune from Grammy award-winner Miri Ben-Ari, who performed at the Washington Jewish Music Festival in 2009.

What We’re Listening To

A great talent lost too soon. May her family be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.