✦ Published pieces
One Trope, Two Continents
The same cantillation marks appear in a Yemenite Torah and a Polish Torah, written identically - but what they sound like when sung went its own way over a thousand years of separation, and the closeness that remains is the real story.
Read the piece →Psalm 137
By Babylonian rivers the tribe learned that a song could remember Jerusalem even when the singer could not stand in it.
Read the piece →Ladino Romances
The exiles of Spain carried ballads east, and Ladino kept medieval Iberia singing in Ottoman kitchens and courtyards.
Read the piece →Klezmer
Klezmer is the sound of the Ashkenazi wedding professional: clarinet laughter, fiddle sobbing, and a room told when to move.
Read the piece →Unetaneh Tokef and Leonard Cohen
A High Holy Day piyyut about judgement became, in Leonard Cohen's hands, a modern song about the same trembling question.
Read the piece →Im Nin'alu
Shalom Shabazi's Yemenite piyyut crossed from manuscript and wedding voice to the global charts without losing its gate of heaven.
Read the piece →Rivers of Babylon
Psalm 137 moved from exile text to Rastafarian song to Boney M single, carrying Jerusalem into pop radio.
Read the piece →In the workshop