Forward.com

A Jewish Pop Band Worth the WaitOn most evenings, the lower Manhattan venue Drom, where I recently caught a live set by the Los Angeles-based Moshav Band, probably seems very much like any other subterranean hipster hangout.…Read more

Horn of PlentyIt’s rarely wise to single out a particular group of instrumentalists — saxophonists, pianists, laptop artists — as an engine of change in a given genre. Doing so usually just means you’ll end up ignoring the vast numbers of other people doing equally interesting work.…Read more

Listening In to the Field of Jewish Pop, High and LowIn music, as in life, there are cool kids and misfits. And in music, as in life, you sometimes find yourself rooting for the underdog.…Read more

A Melody of Jewish MeditationWhen I asked composer Daniel David Feinsmith what his former life as a Zen monk had entailed, he had a ready answer. “Well,” he told me by phone from San Francisco, “it involved celibacy. It involved meditation — hours facing a blank wall. And it involved frugality.”…Read more

Songbook Recaptures Lost MelodiesHeard any good Yiddish folksongs lately? Chances are good that the answer is “no.” Not because there aren’t any good Yiddish folksongs to be heard; for generations, the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern Europe sang innumerable songs about love and loss, death and marriage. They sang to their children to soothe them to sleep, and they sang at work to relieve the drudgery of menial labor.…Read more