NIGGEN III: The White Jewish Supremacy Continues in “Progressive” Berkeley
David Shasha
NIGGEN III: The White Jewish Supremacy Continues in “Progressive” Berkeley
After a long Sunday, I finished watching my first evening movie and before I started another went to check my e-mails before shutting off the computer for the day.
I was quite shocked to find an e-mail from someone who I did not remember, but who managed to find their way into two of my White Jewish Supremacy articles, one on “Progressive” Ashkenazim and Black Lives Matter hypocrisy, the other on NIGGEN and the HADAR Rising Song Initiative.
And let me tell you, he was not a happy camper!
As I read the hostile e-mail, I was forced to look up the person on the SHU Google Group website, and was then able to quickly formulate my response to his overheated confrontational communication with me, which called me a “racist” for calling out his participation with the White Jewish Supremacy. Naturally, he stated that he was very fond of Sephardic culture.
It is what the White Jewish Supremacists call CHUTZPAH.
Idiotically, given my dogged penchant for engaging with such people even when in a state of exhaustion, I decided to send him some of my articles to help clarify the matter, though it must have made no impression on him, given that he has yet to respond.
Central to the contentiousness was my two NIGGEN articles:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/15BPpMs591RzxIIwcH0Lrfbevopl7KtG3p1BA7ohbDM4/edit
I will be resending the articles in a subsequent post.
A couple of days later, right on cue, the subject resurfaced in the following article announcing a Jewish Music Retreat in Berkeley:
https://jweekly.com/2022/08/22/local-jewish-music-retreat-will-be-a-mini-university/
The complete article follows this note.
It is not the first time that the fabled Berkeley Jewish “radicals” have found themselves implicated in reactionary hypocrisy and White Jewish Supremacy:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y5_qZRLaE3uCbQHew66ekpAPh5fCm9UkFMRO9mRbiyE/edit
It should also be remembered that Northern California is also the home of the Ashkenazi-run fraud JIMENA, which apparently has no real connection to the Jewish culture of the area, as it acts as a HASBARAH tool of the institutional mainstream:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tXd9HrTpRUm3oOkegJtKAw3MMuD-jt-mume90yyTvMg/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xzRZtYI1amnNyGM47ny41p_A32xToEQJPZyUUimzrbI/edit#heading=h.gjdgxs
It has waged a relentless war against Gavin Newsom’s California Ethnic Studies Curriculum, as it continues to completely ignore Ashkenazi racism against us:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SBkVBFplCWMowuOs6V_0aJ1ZDh6JQd8vtwz22A_xdvA/edit
It is important to keep all this in mind given the way that Intersectionality works in the institutional Jewish world.
There is a disconnect between Sephardim and the Ashkenazim who run things, and who have kept us off the Adult Jewish Table.
You can read details of the Berkeley Jewish Musical Retreat in the following document:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QkAgAEx-Sn08Y6njvNVvSc1kHTKmnf6ZCYcNrZHa5BQ/edit
Naturally, the organizers are all Ashkenazim:
“We’re like a mini university of music and Jewish culture today,” said Eva Orbuch, who is organizing the weekend with fellow music lovers Atid Kimelman and Elan Loeb. “Our goal is to show that Jewish music doesn’t have to [sound] just one way. It can be cool and hip for young musicians, and it can also be beautiful and nostalgic and homey for older folks.”
The workshops will be taught by both professional and non-professional musicians. Rachel Valfer, a local singer and oud player, will teach women’s Ladino songs and Shabbat music from the Middle East. Debbie Fier, a prayer leader at Kehilla Community Synagogue in Piedmont, will give two drumming workshops. Zvika Krieger, spiritual leader of Chochmat HaLev in Berkeley, will lead Shabbat services.
Orbuch, 33, and Kimelman, 31, met through Thrive Street Choir, a non-religious music circle that participates in Bay Area protests. In 2018, Orbuch attended Hadar’s Rising Song Intensive and Kimelman participated in Let My People Sing! They both yearned for a similar program closer to home and decided to create one themselves. They quickly brought Loeb on board, and the three of them planned the retreat with little outside funding.
Ms. Valfer “does” our music, as she remains ensconced in Ashkenazi hermeticism:
Rachel Valfer Sills is a song leader, instrumentalist, and Torah trope teacher. Rachel has been preparing B'nai Mitzvah students for their ceremonies for the past 20 years throughout the entire Bay Area. Rachel is a Berkeley native who was part of the founding class at Tehiyah Day School, has been a B'nai Mitzvah tutor at Temple Sinai in Oakland, Congregation Beth El in Berkeley and Congregation Netivot Shalom in Berkeley.
Rachel has worked on and off in a cantorial capacity in Berkeley at Congregation Beth El and Netivot Shalom. You will often find her davening at Netivot Shalom on the High Holidays, performing around the Bay Area in Hebrew, Ladino, Arabic and Turkish, and working privately with her Torah and trope students.
Rachel received her B.A. degree at Brown University and her M.A. from Hebrew University in Jerusalem in Hebrew Civilization. Rachel studied Middle Eastern Music and Dance in Jerusalem at the School for Classical Music from the Near East in Jerusalem. Rachel is a performing musician and vocalist, part of the internationally acclaimed Qadim Ensemble, and often performs with the acclaimed dancer Miriam Peretz. Learn more about her music at her ensemble's website here: http://www.eliyahusills.com/qadim/
Naturally, her formal training was conducted in Israel; the place where Sephardic culture is being erased and put into museums in order to die.
As I was processing the White Jewish Supremacy of the Retreat, I had just posted items on the great ensemble Siwan, with its profound connection to classical Andalusian culture:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/bBN6IhGClJ0
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/jdHrBN0Pg9M
My Tikkun magazine article, ancient history by now, does not seem to have made much of a dent in this Ashkenazi cultural appropriation, with its patent erasure of actual Sephardi representation and a consciousness of Andalusian Jewish-Muslim heritage and its intellectual-literary context known as Convivencia.
Only Ashkenazim can represent us.
Here is the program of teachers listed on the Retreat website:
● Eli Wirtschafter is a string musician and radio
producer who formerly led the East Bay Nigun Collective. He will be leading a
workshop on writing original nigunim.
● Eva Lyons is a multilingual devotional soul singer,
song-catcher, and founder of
Becoming the Instrument (BTI). She will be leading a workshop about ancestral
singing.
● Eva Orbuch is a percussionist/singer and community
organizer. She and Atid
Kimmelman will be leading a workshop on Jewish social justice music.
● Jessalyn Levine is a leader of Jewish spiritual
experiences through music as well as a professional choral conductor, singer,
and educator.
● Josh Wirtschafter is a string musician who will be
teaching a workshop on Klezmer.
● Matt Takiff is a musician and local music teacher. He
will be leading a workshop on musical accompaniment for Jewish nigunim.
● Nadav Recca will be leading a workshop on celebration
poems in Arab Jewish music. He comes from Algerian and Ashkenazi lineage and
grew up in Atlanta in
Ashkenazi-dominated communities, while always attending the tiny Sephardic
synagogue. He built a strong relationship with the dissonance of those tunes,
which
don’t sound much like the sounds on the radio.
● Rabbi David Cooper of Kehilla Synagogue will be leading
a workshop on cantorial music.
● Reyna Schaechter will be leading a workshop about Yiddish
singing.
● Shaina will be leading a workshop on Orthodox-style
music.
● Zvika Krieger is the Rabbi of Chochmat HaLev synagogue in Berkeley and will co-lead Shabbat services, incorporating interactive, heart-opening Torah study.
It is chock full of NIGGEN Ashkenazim!
Based on the list, I could only find one putatively Sephardi, Nadav Recca:
https://www.nadavrecca.com/posts
His website is rather short on information, but the Retreat provides some detail:
Nadav Recca will be leading a workshop on celebration
poems in Arab Jewish music. He comes from Algerian and Ashkenazi lineage and
grew up in Atlanta in
Ashkenazi-dominated communities, while always attending the tiny Sephardic
synagogue. He built a strong relationship with the dissonance of those tunes,
which
don’t sound much like the sounds on the radio.
I like the word “dissonance” and the pejorative “tiny Sephardic Synagogue” in “Ashkenazi-dominated” Atlanta.
Mr. Recca’s very spare website provides some indication of his literary interests – none of which are Sephardic:
https://www.nadavrecca.com/posts/books
I wonder if he attends Congregation Or Ve-Shalom:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/SkbtROTYj2k/m/IdAHA7GuBwAJ
That’s right, back in 2020 I noted that the “Sephardic” Synagogue hired itself an Ashkenazi Conservative rabbi!
It is not much to go on, but it is enough for us to know that this pathetic attempt at “Jewish Diversity” is a complete and utter sham.
It is all White Jewish Supremacy Intersectionality.
So, once again, it is all about Ashkenazim and the way that they have used their demographic majority as a tool to smash Sephardim; at the very same time that they appropriate our culture, leaving us in the dust and invisible to the larger world.
David Shasha
Local Jewish music retreat will be ‘a mini university’
By: Andrew Esensten
For years, the East Coast has hosted the best Jewish music retreats, from Let My People Sing! in Falls Village, Connecticut to Hadar’s Rising Song Intensive in New York City. Next month, that kind of multiday, communal music-making experience is coming to the West Coast.
Kol: A Retreat for Jewish Music Across the Diaspora will take place Sept. 9-11 at Urban Adamah in Berkeley. Workshops will be offered on a variety of musical styles, including nigguns (wordless melodies), Middle Eastern, Ladino, Yiddish and cantorial music.
The nonresidential retreat is open to both Jews and non-Jews 12 and up (under 12 must be accompanied by an adult). No musical background is required. Register on Urban Adamah’s website.
“We’re like a mini university of music and Jewish culture today,” said Eva Orbuch, who is organizing the weekend with fellow music lovers Atid Kimelman and Elan Loeb. “Our goal is to show that Jewish music doesn’t have to [sound] just one way. It can be cool and hip for young musicians, and it can also be beautiful and nostalgic and homey for older folks.”
The workshops will be taught by both professional and non-professional musicians. Rachel Valfer, a local singer and oud player, will teach women’s Ladino songs and Shabbat music from the Middle East. Debbie Fier, a prayer leader at Kehilla Community Synagogue in Piedmont, will give two drumming workshops. Zvika Krieger, spiritual leader of Chochmat HaLev in Berkeley, will lead Shabbat services.
Orbuch, 33, and Kimelman, 31, met through Thrive Street Choir, a non-religious music circle that participates in Bay Area protests. In 2018, Orbuch attended Hadar’s Rising Song Intensive and Kimelman participated in Let My People Sing! They both yearned for a similar program closer to home and decided to create one themselves. They quickly brought Loeb on board, and the three of them planned the retreat with little outside funding.
Urban Adamah is providing the site and logistical support for free, and One Table is sponsoring Shabbat dinner. “We hope to make this annual and bring in other partners in future years,” Orbuch said.
The three organizers will co-lead a workshop on Jewish social justice music. Among the songs they plan to teach are “Olam Chesed Yibaneh,” an anthem by Rabbi Menachem Creditor that has been adopted by IfNotNow, Hazon and the Union for Reform Judaism; a Yemenite arrangement of “Ozi v’Zimrat Yah” by Israeli composer Nahum Nardi; “We Rise” by Batya Levine; and songs of the Jewish partisans who fought the Nazis in World War II.
“The workshop is a learning space for people to come away with a few songs and know that Jews have been part of social justice movements for a long time and continue to be, both fighting for ourselves and also being good allies for other oppressed people,” said Orbuch, a consultant and life coach who lives in Berkeley. As a child, she attended Congregation Kol Shofar and Camp Tawonga, two places that cultivated her love of Jewish music, she said.
Kimelman, an environmental lawyer in San Francisco, was raised by a music teacher mother. He has played viola and clarinet since the age of 10, and in college he sang in the Yale Glee Club.
For the past nine months, he has facilitated the Nigun Collective, which he described as the primary venue for Bay Area Jews to sing communally “outside of the formal context of synagogue or a performance space.” Founded a decade ago, the group meets once a month at Urban Adamah.
The retreat’s third organizer, Loeb, serves as the music specialist and song leader at the Oshman Family JCC. Growing up in Palo Alto, Loeb sang in choirs and performed on stage, but they were turned off by the competitiveness of their peers and took a break from singing for a few years. “Music has become this thing in our culture where you are only supposed to do it if you’re really good at it,” Loeb, 27, said. “In fact, if you’re a human being, you’re musical.”
At the retreat next month, the emphasis will not be on “how perfect your harmonies are, or how perfect your voice is,” they said, but on “connecting to the community and to the moment and to the words.”
From The Jewish News of Northern California, August 22, 2022