Eddie Cantor in "Moe The Tailor" (1929)

Israeli Song Contests Feature Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"

Israeli Song Contests Feature Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"

by Al

Hallelujah, the song Leonard Cohen wrote in 1984, was not a big hit when it was first released. But over the years, it has been the choice of a large number and broad range of artists, who performed cover versions in recordings and in concert. The song has also seen significant use in film and television soundtracks, including Shrek.

In the last two years, it's been the choice of some very talented young singers participating in Israeli television talent shows. 

In 2011, eleven-year-old Shalev Menashe rode it into the finals of the School of Music talent show, singing it in Hebrew.

Earlier this year, Inbal Gershkovitz did the same for another TV talent show, The Voice, singing it in English.

Here are both versions, as performed on TV. Enjoy!

 

Borekas

Borekas

A crunchy Israeli classic.

By Leah Koenig

Borekas are nothing short of edible perfection--heavenly little parcels of dough crisped with hot oil or melted butter and stuffed with any number of delicious savory ingredients. Nutritious and filling, they make a satisfying meal any time of day. And like Italy's calzone, Spain's empanada, and India's samosa, these pastries are self-contained, which makes them the perfect portable snack to power an afternoon spent browsing through the shuk, or just about any other activity. More >>>

Categories:Appetizer, Cheesy, israel, Israeli food, Lunch, Vegetarian, Hanukkah, Purim, Rosh Hashanah, Shabbat, Shavuot, Simchat Torah, Sukkot, Yom HaAtzmaut, Yom Yerushalayim, Meat, Rosh Hashanah Ingredients Filling 1 10-oz package frozen spinach, thawed, squeezed of excess water a 1 egg, lightly beaten 1 cup ricotta cheese 1 cup grated mozzarella cheese 1 clove garlic, minced 1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg Salt and freshly ground black pepper Dough 1 16-ounce package of phyllo dough, thawed 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted 1 large egg, beaten Toasted sesame seeds for sprinkling

Directions

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	Yield Prep Cook Total	about 3 dozen borekas 40 mins 20 mins 1 hr 0 mins

Combine spinach, egg, ricotta, mozzarella, garlic, and nutmeg in a bowl and mix well. Season with salt and pepper to taste and set aside.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and lightly grease the bottom of a baking sheet with butter or cooking spray.

Place the thawed phyllo dough on a flat surface and cover it with a lightly damp dishtowel to keep it from drying out when not in use.

Remove one sheet of dough and place it on a flat surface. Cut it lengthwise into 4 and a 1/2-inch wide strips (you'll end up with 2 or 3 strips per sheet of dough). Working quickly, brush the dough strips with melted butter. Fold one side of the strip over lengthwise to meet the other (like closing a book) and brush again with more butter.

Spoon 1 teaspoon of filling at the bottom end of each buttered strip. Fold the bottom right corner of the strip upwards, towards the left edge to make a triangle. Then fold the triangle over to the opposite side. Continue folding upwards in this manner until you are left with a fat triangle with the filling tucked safely inside.

Brush the outside of the triangle with a little more butter and place on the baking sheet. Repeat with additional pieces of phyllo until all of the filling is used up. Just before baking, brush the filled borekas with the beaten egg and sprinkle with sesame seeds. Bake until golden brown, about 20 minutes.

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How ‘Hava Nagila’ Took Its Place on a Global Playlist

By SAM ROBERTS

“Hava Nagila” was born in Eastern Europe, but became emblematic of Israel. It went global as a universal anthem of celebration and was recorded by performers ranging from Allan Sherman to Lena Horne. It evokes strong emotions — it has been denounced as “the kudzu of Jewish music” and hailed as “a profound haiku of Jewish history and identity.”

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A Portal Into History

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The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives

A hora, which is a circle folk dance that "Hava Nagila" often accompanies, at a displaced persons camp in Germany.

Can all those reverberations from a single song be captured in a spare 900-square-foot octagonal gallery?

Well, why not?

The Museum of Jewish Heritage, a Living Memorial to the Holocaust, in Lower Manhattan, has done just that. Its curators and designers have created a jaunty aural and visual exhibition, “Hava Nagila: A Song for the People,” that portrays the song in virtually all its exponential iterations.

Few songs have proved so ubiquitous and transformative — “Amazing Grace” and “Strange Fruit” immediately come to mind — that they merited the scholarship that has been lavished on “Hava Nagila” in the exhibition and in a 73-minute documentary. The film is excerpted on one of the gallery’s two video screens (the other features an eclectic pastiche of  YouTube performances from around the world).

Yes, the museum’s Rotunda Gallery is more compact than some New York studio apartments. That it is so self-contained, though, amplifies the power of the buoyant beat that resonates under life-size aluminum “umbrellas” suspended from the ceiling and activated by motion detectors to provide cones of salience for visitors.

The exhibit was designed for the museum by two Brooklyn-based practices, Situ Studio and MTWTF. (Flor provided multicolored carpet squares, which help isolate the sound so visitors hear only one version at a time.) The goal of the designers was to meld aural, tactile and visual effects into a single experience — “to communicate the diversity of the song’s infinite embodiments while also conjuring that particular joyous fervor that the melody imbues,” as Bradley Samuels, a Situ partner, put it.

A clockwise tour of the gallery begins with the history of this folk anthem, from its roots as a nigun — a wordless tune — in the court of Rabbi Yisroel Friedman of the Sadigora Hasidic community in what is now Ukraine.

During World War I, expatriates exported the melody to Jewish Palestine, where, in 1915, it was transcribed by Abraham Z. Idelsohn, a musicologist. Apparently inspired by a verse in Psalms (“This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad on it”), he is generally credited with the Hebrew lyrics.

Not long after Idelsohn’s choir recorded the song in 1922 (its rendition can be heard under the gallery’s first umbrella), “Hava Nagila” (translated as “Let Us Rejoice”) was embraced as the inexorable musical accompaniment to an imported circle folk dance, the hora, which spread to Palestine from Romania.

Depending on the tempo, the tune can be bittersweet, which transformed it into a song of remembrance and of hope (“Awake brothers with a happy heart”) embraced by Holocaust survivors and by pioneer Zionists committed to a Jewish state. Photographs in the exhibit depict children dancing the hora at the Jewish Palestine Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York and at a displaced persons camp in Germany after World War II.

It didn’t take long for the song to resonate in America, where the beat and the joyous lyrics made it a staple of weddings (with the bride and groom precariously hoisted on chairs) and bar mitzvahs — to the point that some Jews shunned it. (Enough, already!)

“I want them to suspend their original feeling, whether they love it or hate it,” said Alice Rubin, the museum’s project manager. “When you unpack it, it has connections for everybody.” Those connections are apparent in photographs and other personal memorabilia that visitors have submitted online, through social media and in person since the exhibit opened in September.

What is so striking about the exhibit and “Hava Nagila: The Movie” by Roberta Grossman and Sophie Sartain is the song’s global crossover reach. (The film is scheduled to open for theatrical release in New York next March; the exhibit runs through May.)

Harry Belafonte discovered “Hava Nagila” in Greenwich Village coffeehouses and his recording of it at Carnegie Hall in 1959 bridged ethnic and cultural boundaries. He says it quickly became his second most popular song, just behind his signature “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song).”

“The most moving experience I ever had singing ‘Hava Nagila’ was in Germany,” he says in the video. “An African-American, an American, standing in Germany, which a decade earlier had been responsible for mass murder, these young German kids singing this Hebrew song of rejoicing.”

The exhibition demonstrates how interpretations run the gamut, from a  bhangra festival of Indian dance in Vancouver to a klezmer concert in Wales, from a celebration at B’nai Jeshurun in Manhattan of the legalization of same-sex marriage to the musical accompaniment for the gold medal performance of Aly Raisman, the American gymnast, at the London Olympics.

“Everybody knows ‘Hava Nagila,’ yet few people know the song’s long journey — from Sadigora, to Palestine, to the global jukebox,” said Melissa Martens, the exhibit’s curator and the museum’s director of collections and exhibitions. “Its familiarity since the ’60s positioned it for new uses: as comedy, protest, politics and parody. Today the song is still often played with a purposeful nod and wink to the listener. New versions surface daily on YouTube from people all over the world who find pride, humor, nostalgia, identification or momentum in the melody we know as ‘Hava Nagila.’ ”

Chubby Checker performed it and so did Elvis, Josephine Baker, Celia Cruz, the Muppets, Dalida in sultry French and Glen Campbell on the flip side of his recording of “True Grit.” The Barry Sisters (née Clara and Minnie Bagelman) recorded “Hava Nagila” and so did Connie Francis. (“I’m 10 percent Jewish on my manager’s side,” she says in the film.) Lena Horne sang the melody to a civil rights anthem (“Now!”) in 1962 (lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, the setting by Jule Styne).

“As ‘Hava Nagila’ and American Jews gained acceptance in mainstream culture, self-humor, reflection and parody came into the remix,” one caption explains. Allan Sherman sang “Harvey and Sheila” about the Jewish exodus to the suburbs. The Simpsons went caroling and sang it to neighbors with the lyric “Hava Nice Christmas.” Larry David downloaded it as a ring tone. Nowadays, you can buy a Harvey Nagila singing and dancing doll and even find the recipe to a Halvah-Nagila smoothie.

And Bob Dylan deliberately mangled it in “Talkin’ Hava Negeilah Blues” after introducing the tune as “a foreign song I learned in Utah.”

“Nothing is more Jewish than that performance because it is both an embrace and a refusal,” Josh Kun, a professor of communication at the University of Southern California, says in the film. “And, to me, that’s Jewishness at its core.”

Chicken Breasts Stuffed with Pareve Ricotta Cheese and Olives with Balsamic Glaze

Serves 4 but doubles easily
This chicken is great warm or at room temperature. It works so well with the new Tofutti Pareve Ricotta Cheese. It is great accompanied by garlicky spinach or green beans.
4 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves (about 1-1/2 lb. total)
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
4 ounces pareve tofutti ricotta cheese
2 tablespoons coarsely chopped pitted Kalamata olives
2 teaspoons finely grated lemon zest (from 1 large lemon), divided
1-1/2 teaspoons minced fresh rosemary
1/2 cup flour
6 tablespoons margarine, cut into 6 pieces
1 tablespoon olive oil
3 tablespoons minced shallots
1-1/2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons chicken broth
With a boning knife, cut a wide pocket into the thickest part of each chicken breast half, taking care not to cut all the way through. Season the chicken evenly on both sides with 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper.
In a small bowl, mix the tofutti ricotta cheese, olives, and 1 teaspoon each lemon zest and rosemary. Stuff the pockets with the ricotta mixture and pin each shut with two toothpicks. Spread the flour in a shallow bowl and dredge the chicken in the flour, shaking off the excess.
Heat 1 tablespoon of the margarine and the oil in a 12-inch heavy-duty skillet over medium-high heat until the foam from the butter subsides. Add the chicken and cook, flipping once and adding another 1 tablespoon margarine halfway through cooking, until golden-brown and cooked through (reduce the heat to medium if necessary), 14 to 16 minutes total. Transfer to plates and remove the toothpicks.
While the chicken cooks, melt 1 tablespoon margarine in an 8-inch skillet over medium-high heat. Add the shallots and cook, stirring, until softened, about 3 minutes. Add the vinegar and boil until syrupy, about 3 minutes. Add the broth and boil for 1 minute more. Off the heat, whisk in the remaining 3 tablespoons margarine, remaining 1 teaspoon lemon zest, and remaining 1/2 teaspoon rosemary. Serve the chicken drizzled with the sauce.

"Judas Asparagus":

"Judas Asparagus":

(This is amazing and should bring tears of laughter to your eyes. I wonder how often we take for granted that children understand what we are teaching?)

A child was asked to write a book report on the entire Bible. Here is what was written: The Children's Bible in
a Nutshell

In the beginning, which occurred near the start, there was nothing but God, darkness, and some gas. The Bible says, ‘The Lord thy God is one,' but I think He must be a lot older than that.

Anyway, God said, 'Give me a light!' and someone did.
Then God made the world.

He split the Adam and made Eve. Adam and Eve were naked, but they weren't embarrassed because mirrors hadn't been invented yet.

Adam and Eve disobeyed God by eating one bad apple, so they were driven from the Garden of Eden.....Not sure what they were driven in though, because they didn't have cars.

Adam and Eve had a son, Cain, who hated his brother as long as he was Abel.

Pretty soon all of the early people died off, except for Methuselah, who lived to be like a million or something.
One of the next important people was Noah, who was a good guy, but one of his kids was kind of a Ham. Noah built a large boat and put his family and some animals on it. He asked some other people to join him, but they said they would have to take a rain check.

After Noah came Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jacob was more famous than his brother, Esau, because Esau sold Jacob his birthmark in exchange for some pot roast. Jacob had a son named Joseph who wore a really loud sports coat.

Another important Bible guy is Moses, whose real name was Charlton Heston. Moses led the Israel Lights out of Egypt and away from the evil Pharaoh after God sent ten plagues on Pharaoh's people. These plagues included frogs, mice, lice, bowels, and no cable.

God fed the Israel Lights every day with manicotti. Then he gave them His Top Ten Commandments. These include: don't lie, cheat, smoke, dance, or covet your neighbor's stuff.
Oh, yeah, I just thought of one more: Humor thy father and thy mother.

One of Moses' best helpers was Joshua who was the first Bible guy to use spies. Joshua fought the battle of Geritol and the fence fell over on the town.

After Joshua came David.. He got to be king by killing a giant with a slingshot. He had a son named Solomon who had about 300 wives and 500 porcupines. My teacher says he was wise, but that doesn't sound very wise to me.

After Solomon there were a bunch of major league prophets. One of these was Jonah, who was swallowed by a big whale and then barfed up on the shore.

There were also some minor league prophets, but I guess we don't have to worry about them.

Alef to Tav