Diwon is the newest in the litany of identities of Erez Safar, the producer/drummer/promoter/DJ/occasional backup vocalist. Perhaps best known for being one-half of the touring band for Orthodox hip-hop M.C. Y-Love, Safar, who’s always alluded to his Yemenite Jewish ancestry, is now openly embracing it with a new wardrobe, a new sound, and a new series of concerts. At his upcoming weeklong residency at the Jewish Museum, expect to hear a lot of traditional music, a lot of untraditional music, a guest appearance or two...and a straight guy in a shiny dress.

You’ve got a million aliases already—DJ Handler, Guy Emanuel, and, for a long time, the Prince-like mononome “Erez.” Why all the secret identities? Why the need to break this one out, and why now?

The only one that’s actually a secret is Guy Emanuel. Thanks a lot…Anyway, Saul Williams said that “words create worlds.” Different companies and different events I run, each one’s like a different conception, like the Beastie Boys, making a million aliases for every project. Each name represents the world I’m trying to create within the project.

DJ Handler I started before I became a DJ, and I never felt like it was me—it never really fit. I always knew I wanted a one-word handle, I just didn’t know what it was yet. Making Yemenite music under the name “Handler” sounded kind of absurd…and not in a good way.

For the folks out there without too much other Yemenite music to compare yours with, can you give us a cheat sheet on what Yemenite music is exactly?

I draw influences from a lot of cultures. Simply put, it’s music that Yemenites made. A lot of it’s influenced by the Muslims and Arabs that lived with them in Yemen—it has a Middle Eastern scaling similar to Sephardic music. Yemenite music might be a little more mantra-like, very repetitive.

They use the same melody throughout the whole service, don’t they?

The Kabbalat Shabbat part is. The evening service is different melodies, but yeah. To me, it’s really holy because the Yemenites didn’t move around a bunch. They just left Israel, and they stayed in one place. Even Moshe Feinstein says that the Yemenite pronunciation is the most accurate, because they never moved. To me, they seem like they’re the most in touch with the way it was in the beginning.

Actually, most people probably don’t know what Jews were doing in Yemen in the first place -- can you give us a thirty-second history lesson?

I have no idea how they got there. Locationally, it’s a lot closer to what was going on in the Bible than, say, Eastern Europe…

When you remix, what factors go into your musical reimagining?

Usually, I try to strip a song bare. I’ll take just vocals, and grab a keyboard line from somewhere. For instance, the woman who sold me my Yemenite clothing – it’s called Galdiya – she gave me a CD of her and her daughter singing. There was one song for the henna ceremony, just their voices and a darbouka [hand drum]. When I remixed that, I cut up the darbouka parts and laid out a 70s-style disco beat and layered on bass and snare drum parts, and textures, so it sounds electronic, and now it sounds really cool. It’s open. There aren’t too many instruments, so it plays as its own rhythm.

Do you ever pick artists or songs that you don’t like, or do you ever try to subvert or go against the original idea of a song?

Not really. Unless there’s insanely huge sums of money, but I haven’t really gotten there yet.

In your work with Y-Love, you’ve really straddled the boundary between the secular and the religious—using Spank Rock’s “Bump” song with pretty religious lyrics, for instance. Do you ever get complaints? Do Haredi people ever recognize the music or go “hey, what’s going on?”

I can never tell who knows it—I can’t tell whether people like the beat or whether people actually recognize it. On Martin Luther King Day in D.C., a bunch of people came up to me afterwards and complimented me on a Slick Rick beat I’d played, and none of them looked like someone who’d even know who Slick Rick was.

I don’t think that frum people who have an issue with secular beats would ever come to the show. Sometimes Charedi people come out to it, but they’re not Charedi Charedi, they’re Charedi-minus-one. They wouldn’t mind being at a hip-hop show, so they wouldn’t mind being at a Y-Love show.

This upcoming gig at the Jewish Museum is your first official show as Diwon. Do you have any special stuff planned?

I bought the clothing, so that’s going to be a surprise for a lot of people. I’m probably going to bring Miriam Zafri up. There’ll be some special guest vocalists, maybe Smadar—who’ll also be dressed in traditional vocals, maybe. My residency goes all week, so we can have lots of stuff planned. The live parts are Sunday evening and Thursday evening. Thursday is the closing ceremony—we’re expecting over a thousand people.

Why do you think 1980s-style synth-pop has this huge, undying love in Israel?

I thought all Israelis love Gwen Stefani and that was it. Israelis are the new Harajuku girls, and Diwon is the new Gwen.

Remix contests, when done right, can be the coolest things in the world (ultra-hipster warning: refer to the Dismemberment Plan's fan-remixed best-of album that was their final release) or can, of course, be hackneyed cliches.

In honor of Y-Love's impending debut album, Shemspeed is throwing open the master-tape vaults and offering open access to the sounds and vocals, and hoping you come up with something better than they did. (Well, not better than -- it's a pretty incredible album, okay, let's hype it and say it's the best hip-hop album put out by a Bostoner Hasid EVER.)

So do your best -- if you're not sure how to make a remix, download Ableton to get started -- and we'll see what happens. Word is, next they're going to let you kids run wild with Pharaoh's Daughter, the Sephardic/world-music phenomenon who sounds really amazing without the use of blips and beeps. See if you can change my opinion about that.

From the Izhbitzer Rebbe, this little bit of excerptage comes to us by way of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, by way of my old yeshiva Simchat Shlomo. I edited it a bit, solely for purposes of cutting out the Hebrewese and the "you know"s, but for the most part, it's Shlomo's words. It's about how what we can learn from the way trees and seeds and vegetables pray.

Continue reading...

I've never been that big a fan of Good for the Jews. Super nice guys, catchy songs, and they're great at thinking on their feet (and, if Rob was here, I'm sure he'd insert a snappy line here about what they are off their feet) -- but, you know, I'm of the opinion that you can only hear a certain number of circumcision-joke songs a certain number of times before the humor, much like the Manischewitz, wears off. And I'm sad to say I probably exhausted that number listening to 2 Live Jews as an impressionable and easily-amused 11-year-old.

And I guess this all mirrors my fears and expectations in my last month of pre-fatherhood -- of my writing career, and of not making enough to pay for our next-of-kin's extravagant lifestyle. And I have to say, I was super jealous of the amazing-sounding Heeb Magazine/Good for the Jews tour, blogged about right here. But last night, I dreamed that I was standing ouside one of their concerts like a protester, hatin' on them, and on life itself, because Heeb didn't offer me to sponsor my tour (my spoken-word poetry tour or something, I guess -- I don't know, it's a dream, dude).

And then, like a weird angel manifesting in American Pie or Can't Hardly Wait, Rob appears beside me. (In real life, by the way, I have never had a spontaneous manifestation. I've barely spoken to the guy. We were at a conference together once, but that's it, I swear.) He sits down on the curb next to me, channeling Jerry O'Connell, reaches his arm around my shoulder and gives me a pep talk: "This life -- this whole damn Jewish art thing -- it isn't sustainable. Things like this," he says, pointing to my stomach, which isn't pregnant like my wife's but we both know what it means -- "This is sustainable. You can write till you die, man, and they'll keep reading even longer than that. But kids -- the remarkable thing about kids is that they live."

And then he proceeded to jam out in a band with Mike, my dead best friend and favorite guitarist, and Carrie Brownstein from Sleater-Kinney, my other favorite guitarist. But I wasn't even listening. I was just blown away.

I've been asked to suffix all of my comments that address Limmud as "Limmud UK," which is a giddy curse-turned-blessing-in-disguise -- Limmud NY starts in just about two weeks, and Limmud LA comes right after that. I'm going to be otherwise occupied with being on the verge of giving birth, G*d willing, but oceans cannot contain the amount of jealousy I have for everyone who gets to carry on in the grand tradition of Limmud.

Before I went, I asked what Limmud is, exactly, and this is what I've discovered: it's the Hebrew word learning. There's a whole universe of stuff that falls under the arbitrary umbrella we've decided to call the Jewish nation, and

I wish I could be more specific. I wish I could nail down everything that I've learned. I wish I could even give you the highlights. Man -- maybe next year, Jewcy'll sponsor me and buy me a PDA to do instant updates from each session. I started to make a list, and here's what I got:

• Former Speaker of the Knesset Avrum Berg's assertion, while reading I.B. Singer's Nobel address, that Yiddish is a language without words for violence. That, he says, should be our model for building a Jewish state and a model for its future -- with all the corollaries that come with that. (After our session, I pointed out to him that one of the first Yiddish phrases I learned was potch in the tuchus. He said it didn't count.)
• Raz Hartman teaching a room full of young/old/middle-aged hippies/punks/investment-banker-lookin' people how to sing wordless Chasidic dirges. (We came late, and met someone leaving the room, jaw dropped open, who told us, "I just sang for ten minutes straight. And I didn't even know the words.") In between, he taught slices of Rebbe Nachman, who said that the prophets weren't able to give over their prophecy unless there was music playing.
• Shalva Weil's intense sessions on Ethiopian Jewish refugees, and the halachic battle that determined where, ultimately, they landed in Israel's diaspora. The final word came, in the early 1970s, from a young Sephardic rabbi named Ovadia Yosef, who ruled that, based on a 14th-century precedent, they were not Jews -- because Jew implies from the tribe of Judah -- but Israelites; they were the lost children of Dan. (This probably could and will get its own article, if not its own book; but here is a very brief answer.)
• Daniel Boyarin. The most controversial straight queer commentator on the Talmud today. I think I can say that unabashedly: he gave over a three-part lecture charting the course of Chapter 7 of Baba Metzia that started
  with the laws of hiring bricklayers and then proceeded into a discussion of how the size of a man's member corresponds to the size of his desire, and how all the rabbis with the biggest stomachs managed to impregnate their wives (Rav Papa, according to the Gemara, was the size of - if anyone has this in front of them, please correct me - five half-barrels of wine, and some say it was seven.)

This seems like the perfect opportunity to say that, if you don't learn this at Limmud, you will probably have to enroll in a yeshiva for multiple years of your life in order to find out. One more reason to make it to LA or NY (or one of several other Limmuds around the world, from Turkey to South Africa)....and one more reason for me to be jealous of you.

This morning's sessions: when the messiah's coming, and what it means to believe - fave quote: ''Why wasn't the Rambam just, like, I KNOW the messiah's coming?'' -- and a veritable feast of the Danish gay poet Jacob Israel van Haas, whose brother became a hasid and sister became a nun. Issues always sound better in dutch. Seriously: it's like Italian seduced German and had a kid who never stops french kissing.

There are SO many different lanugages here. I'm getting lost in them and I love it.

And I stand by what I said, that there's nothing like this anywhere. At least, not that I've seen. Yes, I know we have lots of Jews stateside -- I'm a yank myself, I live in Brooklyn and I'm representing NYC over here, whoo, but the feeling I get here is that of jews of nearly every different band coming together -- can't wait for NY Limmud and the amazingness that will come with it, but Tamar, you've gotta get yourself over here. England is a very different place than New York - know, though, us New Yorkers think there's nothing else out there, certainly nothing better - but the very smallness of the UK is what makes it so fascinating that all these little demographics interact in a way that I've never seen in america.....that is, actually interacting. and without those petty labels like ''conservative'' or ''reform'' or ''breslov hasid who would never ordinarily go to the shiur of a conservative rabbi, but hell, we're at Limmud and boundaries are sooo last decade.''

Today at Limmud, nothing has happened yet -- well, it's 7:30 in the morning and my rabbi from yeshiva just pounded on my door to wake me up, but I asked him to, and now I'm iChatting to my wife and her big expectant belly. It kicks when I talk to it -- and I am feeling uncomfortably like our friend George Weinberg (of John Saffran vs. God fame, if you're Australian -- but, if you're Australian, you probably know George Weinberg anyway), who travels a lot and, when he is home, his daughter runs to the computer video camera to talk to him.

Last night, I hopped between two events -- one of the difficulties of an event like this, where at any given moment you could be having six completely different life-changing experiences. At 11pm was the Y-Love show, featuring guest M.C. Daniel Silverstein (of the band Emunah, until 2 nights ago) and about a zillion screaming girls, and upstairs, as far removed as you could get, was a crowd of people sitting in a nearly-dark room, surrounding Rabbi Raz Hartmann, who was teaching nigguns, wordless Chasidic melodies, and then, between them, giving over tidbits of Rebbe Nachman teachings. Like, for instance, did you know that it was traditional for prophets to not give over prophecies without accompaniment? There's one part of Prophets where someone is literally, like, "Fetch my backing band -- I need to prophecize." And then, like Sarah Silverman, they pop up, ready for a jingle-perfect tune about....well, no, probably not about *that.*

Dateline, Limmud UK: All the way here, I saw signs for Stratford-Upon-Avon. Banking on my last post, about the merits of visiting the graves of tzaddikim, I am trying to convince people here to come with me to hang out with me at Shakespeare's final resting place. (If ''hang out with me'' means ''give me a ride,'' that is.)

Meanwhile, I have a new favorite writer: Bernard Kops. An 81-year-old British dude whose play about Anne Frank is going up in LA next week and soon in NYC, he did some amazing poetry -- just sat down and started reading, his voice against the loud air conditioner. He has a singuar talent for the one-line zinger:

People always tell you

everything will be

alright.

 

You thank them

and shut the door

and lie awake all night.

About this, he said: ''I've suffered more from reassurance than I have from criticism.'' He also told us that, if politics changed anything, it would have been abolished years ago.

Hello from Sunny Old England, where today's sky is grey, but bright grey, which might be the closest it's come to sunlight in, well, years. (Don't listen to me -- I just landed at 7:oo last night, 12 hours later than I was supposed to. We sat in the airport for practically forEVER -- which gave me a chance to meet Judith Hauptman, who has some pretty amazing ideas for getting twentysomethings involved in Jewish party life, I mean, holiday life....and really, there is such a fine line between the two).

Getting off the bus, they wouldn't give me my room key because there was a note that I had to see E.J. immediately. I'd just been in airports for 24 hours and Virgin Atlantic is nowhere near as space-age and spiffy as everyone says -- after a flight, you're still tired and gross. But I ran to meet her and to fight for my right to shower. A girl said she knew where E.J. was, and the led me through corridors and then through this door that spilled out right onto a stage. EJ was the MC. They were having the Opening Gala, and wanted to know if I'd perform.

 So -- tired, plane-dirty, and deprived of sleep for the past 24 hours, I ripped of my coat and my Doctor Who scarf and let loose a poem.

My actual show was an hour later. By that time, I'd managed to clean myself up, both body and language, and managed to meet some of the most amazing and insightful personalities that I'll tell you about in my next post, because afterwards we went to this concert that I need to tell you about now.

The amazing and rave-worthy mostly-Jewish-but-with-a-Palestinian-M.C.-and-a-kickass-violinist band Emunah played last night. Imagine a howling jungle beat with fat heavy bass and a Russian diva wailing Shlomo Carlebach melodies over it. A bunch of people took pictures, but I think they're all still too hung over to post them. This was the band's final show with their other M.C., a brilliant lyricist named Daniel Silverstein. "Five years of my life," he kept saying again and again after the show. (Honestly, I don't know how he could talk at *all* after that -- I really think he spoke faster than I can type on that last song, a drum&bass beat that sounded like a stopwatch being fast-forwarded.) He also said that he's leaving the band but he's never leaving music, and then alluded to the possibility that he might be moving to New York......!?!?!?!? People in New York -- if he does, you have to hunt him down and stand outside his house and listen to every word he says. It'll be worth it.

Nosson Zand, more popularly known by his hip-hop and Internet handle Niz, is a bona fide Orthodox hip-hop phenomenon -- you know, along with Ta-Shma and Y-Love and (me, I guess?). Besides the questionable and debated Jewish appropriation of hip-hop culture, we can argue that Eminem and one of the Fat Boys did the same thing and save that for another blog post. The fact remains, some of these young gentlemen (and I wish I didn't have to say "gentlemen"; the only Orthodox female M.C. I know is the Bay Area's fabulous Rebbitzin Queen Esther, who has been working on her album for, what, 11 years?!) are on top of their game, both lyrically and deliverically -- they're dropping some pretty impressive stuff.

But Niz has Eminemed (or Fiddy'd?) his game once again, and not in a half-assed way: he's playing the starring role in Song of David, a movie about a yeshiva boy who, after being turned off from yeshiva, immerses himself in hip-hop culture. That's about all I've gleaned so far from the summary and preview, which you can find on the movie's website.

I have to be honest -- I'm skeptical. These things often don't get made in the Orthodox world unless you've cleaned the emotion right out of it. But I've also heard great things from Niz, and I trust his talent, and I'm pretty excited to see this movie. And you know I'm gonna let you know about it.