Jewish Music Quotes

Jews like to write and sing. In America, a lot of us have been eager to show that we're part of American culture. But it all goes back to King David writing Psalms.

I don't hide my being Israeli. I say it in every interview. I put out a record with songs in Hebrew. The people who signed me have no connection to Judaism or Israel.

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...Songwriting is best. It's the hardest-finest-tightest. It also requires the most discipline.

When I was growing up in Israel, Cantorial music was something I heard over and over on the radio, so it wasn't at all strange to me. I was very familiar with the music.

All my songs are based on melody, which is retrieved from my Jewish heritage. Melody will always exist no matter what the rhythmic changes there are.

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.

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.'

I attended five different Jewish day schools as a teenager. I mean, I was trained as a hazan!

My parents genuinely loved Vienna, and in later years I learned from them why the city exerted a powerful hold on them and other Jews. My parents loved the dialect of Vienna, its cultural sophistication, and artistic values.

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

For a Jewish guy, I've recorded a lot of Christmas albums.

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.

Do you know most of the Jewish songs have the same trend of sadness as Negro spirituals?

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.

Before, we may have taken part in it without even thinking it was American Jewish, but in this case, I think, you have now perhaps pointed us in a direction of a new interest in this repertoire.

Listen to any cantor, any good hazan, sing and you can hear a little bit of Ray Charles going on.

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.

To call somebody a Jewish composer is obviously redundant.

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.

All the Jewish tradition I had came from my grandmother, who grew up in Palestine and eloped with my grandfather and went to New York. She lived very close to us until she died when I was around 20. She sang a lot of songs, led the Passover seders. It was a very rich part of my life, and my grandmother was a big part of my life.

I don't think I ever really knew the right words to 'Hava Nagilah,' which isn't great for a Jewish singer.

Music, among those who were styled the chosen people, was a religious art.

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.