Quotes & Sayings About Jewish Music

I had already been a young singer. And once, as a profession, I was a young singer, what you would call a soprano in England, but I was an alto in singing Jewish music in bar mitzvahs and weddings and synagogues throughout New York City because, after Israel, New York is probably the biggest Jewish community in the world. — Charlemagne Palestine

My father was - actually was an Episcopal priest as a young man. Became a psychotherapist, a psychologist. My mother is Jewish, so I grew up in a mixed background. But the common denominator was certainly music, and that was sort of emphasized in my household as music being sort of the spiritual force. — Joshua Bell

The No. 1 best-selling Christmas album of all time is from Kenneth Bruce Gorelick, the Jewish smooth-jazz legend Kenny G. American Jews have always produced a lot of holiday music, just not Hanukkah music. — Matisyahu

I claimed identity as Jewish musicians for political reasons, because most of us were touring in Germany and, at this time, twelve years ago, there was a strong resurgence of Nazism in the places we were touring and part of that was on the music scene. — Marc Ribot

I started the label Tzadik to support an entire community of musicians, not just Jewish musicians. But the radical Jewish culture movement was begun in a lot of ways because I wanted to take the idea that Jewish music equals 'klezmer' and expand it to, 'Well, Jewish music could be a lot more than that.' — John Zorn

We've come from the same history - 2000 years of persecution - we've just expressed our sufferings differently. Blacks developed the blues. Jews complained, we just never thought of putting it to music. — Jon Stewart

In Jewish folk music, despair is disguised as the dance. And so, truth's disguise was irony. — Julian Barnes

My influences were mostly gospel. So I was playing my twisted Jewish equivalent of gospel music over his twisted equivalent of rock and roll music. And it was a very excellent marriage. — Al Kooper

This quality of Jewish folk music [- it can appear to be happy when it's tragic-] is close to my idea of what music should be. The should always be two layers in music. — Dmitri Shostakovich

My music education was oral. I was resistant to scores and things like that. In Jewish religious music, there are no scores. You learn everything by rote, by ear, by repeating. — Charlemagne Palestine

They called themselves socialists, and in some ways they were model socialists, fighting for the rights of workers, the way a lot of Europeans are socialists now. They hide behind their fake egalitarian principles, but really nothing has changed. Outwardly, they're no longer anti-Jewish. Instead they're now anti-Israel, but they're still filled with hatred. They have all these grand ideas, with culture and cathedrals and their music, but actually they're all just hooligans who want to kill people, identical to their anti-Semitic ancestors. — Mark S. Smith

One of the great virtues, apart from the pleasure of performing these works, is that it's opened up an entirely new, expansive repertoire of American Jewish music. — Neville Marriner

But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed? How has it happened that all the fine arts, architecture, painting, sculpture, statuary, music, poetry, and oratory, have been prostituted, from the creation of the world, to the sordid and detestable purposes of superstition and fraud?
[Letter to judge F.A. Van der Kamp, December 27, 1816.] — John Adams

With no music to listen to, I just biked around in circles talking to myself like a kid on the cover of a Robert Cormier young adult novel, circling around puzzled Jewish families walking back to their cars. This is how I learned to ride a bike. — Mindy Kaling

I was one of I think three white girls in my school. So, I was very much an outsider. And plus I was Jewish and all of my friends were black and Baptist because they listen to the coolest music. We were all listening to Ray Charles and what was then called race music. — Janis Ian

I'm half Jewish, I'm half black, I look in-between. I dress funny. I play all these different styles of music on one record. It's like, What is he doing? — Lenny Kravitz

I've always had to deal with being biracial, even in music. When I came on the scene, I'd go to these record labels, and they'd say things like, "Lenny Kravitz. That's a weird name." I'm brown-skinned and I've got these dreadlocks and I've got this Jewish last name. — Lenny Kravitz

The real reason Jews don't have more Hanukkah music is that, historically, American Jewish singer-songwriters were too busy making Christmas music. 'White Christmas,' 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,' 'Silver Bells' and 'The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting)' were all written by Jews. — Matisyahu

Reggae music isn't Jewish, but a lot of the ideas are. — Matisyahu

Jewish comedy doesn't come out of nothing. Jewish music doesn't come out of nothing ... I don't want to be part of a story where Jews are just victims or bullies - and I'm not saying that's what the Israelis are. — Simon Schama

What I took back, because of my exposure to the Jewish music of the 30s and the 40s in my upbringing with my father, was that kind of theatrical songwriting. It was always a part of my character. This desire to make people laugh. — Pete Townshend

My music is really about people connecting with their identities, even if they aren't Jewish. — Matisyahu

This American Jewish music is a new experience for us at least consciously. — Neville Marriner

My mother's father was Jewish, so she was very conservative. She liked little, pretty music-orchestral-type things. — Andrae Crouch

Jewish cantors employ a peculiar art and method of singing in their delivery. They are unexcelled in the art of covering the voice, picking up a new key, in the treatment of the ritual chant, and overcoming vocal difficulties that lie in the words rather than in the music. — Enrico Caruso

In the oldest chronicles of the times conserved in Hungary, reports will be found of Gypsy music, but never of any other, either Magyar, Slavic or Jewish. — Franz Liszt

The Jewish culture - people that are Jewish have a certain cultural habit that they've formed and one of those habits is an appreciation of theater and music - these are cultural things one does associate with values that are promulgated by Jewish families. I think that's a good thing. — Woody Allen