Greetings folks! Welcome to A Song of Zion, our weekly check-in and virtual minyan for Jews on Daily Kos. This is an open thread, and we treat it as a safe space for Jewish folks here. Non-Jews are welcome but we ask that they listen more than speak. No squabbling, please: if you want to fight, please step outside. (H/T wasplover)
Happy Thursday! This week I thought it would be nice to take a musical break with some queer Jewish artists. Post yours in the comments!
First up, it’s Miss Mitzi Manna, the great Yiddish drag queen, Miss Mitzi Manna:
If you don’t know Yiddish, the closed captioned English is really good! There is also a full show available on YouTube that’s really excellent. There’s not a lot of information readily available on her, but I found this article about queer artists that includes an interview of Manna.
The Shondes:
From an Advocate article on the Shondes:
There are so many ways that The Shondes have been described, with sexy, queer, transgender, feminist, radical, steampunky, Jewish rock band chief among the adjectives that separate the band from their contemporaries (the latter of whom are sometimes called "Sleater-come-latelys").
the band that was founded in 2006 by queer lead singer and bassist Louisa Rachel Solomon and transgender violinist Elijah Oberman and -- along with genderqueer drummer Temim Fruchter, 33, and guitarist Fureigh, 28 -- has been perfecting their sound ever since. Solomon, now 30, and Oberman, 28, were in a band in their late teens called the Syndicate and "have really been through everything together," she says.
My favorite of the bunch, Leslie Gore:
From Hay Alma:
While she sang songs about men, Gore was a lesbian in a time when it was taboo to not live a heteronormative lifestyle. She told Ellen DeGeneres during an interview in 2005 that she didn’t know she was a lesbian until she was in her 20s, but, while the music business was “totally homophobic,” she’d never felt pressure to pretend to be straight. She had experienced relationships with both men and women, but her first serious relationship reassured her of her preference. She suggested that those who knew her well already knew of her preference but she officially came out when she hosted a series on gay and lesbian issues on the PBS series, In the Life beginning in 2004.
It’s hard not to read some subtext in this video. You can check out a really nice article another Kos Member wrote about her here.
Collaborative video including queer Jewish artist, Syd Bakal:
Check out this great interview with them:
I think that I see Jewish music as a potential opening for people hoping to reconnect or dive deeper into Judaism. One thing that’s really excited me about writing Jewish music is that I get to sit down with prayers that I’ve known my entire life and try to understand them on my own terms with my own interpretation.
Using the Hebrew that I know, I look at other interpretations that others and ask, “What does this mean? What has this historically meant? How do I relate to this prayer and these words, which are often very gendered?” I see God as either a multi-gender or agender figure, and I reconjugate and reinterpret some of the Jewish text with that notion.