When Ziggy Marley and Alpha Blondy performed in Park Eshkol in 1987, it marked my first major reggae and African music concert. The nighttime performances helped us to avoid the scorching day-time heat. After surviving in the shade with 3 digit hear – I danced to inspired performances that planted seeds that eventually became our own Jewlicious festival.

Ziggy here is being interviewed by Ynet- the interviewer is totally wack – but the first part where he talks about Judaism, and the last part where he talks about peace and dismisses the Cottage Cheese crises are worth seeing.

From YNetnews.com

Ziggy Marley feels very close to Israel. He’s married to Orly, an Israeli woman, and they have three children: A girl named Judah Victoria, a boy called Gideon, and a baby – Abraham Selassie.

Marley admits that, having no other choice, he celebrates all the Jewish holidays and is very jealous of our culture.

“The history of our connection to the roots of Israel, to David, Solomon, goes way before I met my wife,” Marley says. “My father, my Rastafari culture, has a tight link to the Jewish culture. We have a strong connection from when I was a young boy and read the Bible, the Old Testament.

Luchtime Picnic at Camp Jewlicious, Brandeis-Bardin, 2010.

Don’t take it from us that Camp Jewlicious is the best time that any young Jewish adult can have this summer. Here are some replies to our survey after Camp last year:

CAMP JEWLICIOUS 2010- TESTIMONIALS

“My favorite part about Camp Jewlicious was the Carlebach services — with Yehuda from Moshav band!!!”

“My favorite part about Camp Jewlicious was being at summer camp again, with a havdallah bonfire and concert!”

“My favorite part about Camp was the relaxed camp atmosphere. The inclusion of all Jews regardless of background was amazing and a credit to Jewlicious programming. I can’t wait to see what next year is like!”

“The activities were awesome! I had an amazing day Saturday. I woke up, ate breakfast, did yoga, ate more, napped, ate lunch, did ropes course, swam, went on a hike, and then had dinner and an awesome concert.”

“I had a chance to experience Judaism in a different way then I am use to. Since I was borne and raised in Israel being religious is very limited in options of how religious you are. I got to experience faith in a setting that is more relaxed and open, and I really enjoyed it.”

“Hot-seat funders session was an opportunity for me to hear real feedback on my project proposal and to hear it discussed in a frank and open way.”

Jewlicious is proud to present Jewnfest: LA Concert Series Vol 1, June 14 and 15th at one of LA’s most beloved music venues, The Mint. Jewnfest brings out the best local and independent artists from the West Coast for an intimate and rocking musical experience that won’t break your bank. Enjoy $2 Asahi premium beers, lots of other great drinks, and tickets start at only $10.

This two-night musical journey is put together by the team behind the award-winning Jewlicious Festival, which started in 2005 promoting independent rising stars with great success. Jewnfest’s first evening will be dedicated to sounds of the rising indie folk-rock revival made huge by Mumford & Sons. The second evening will be a high energy evening of local musical wizards.

Featured artists for Jewnfest include Independent Music Award Nominee Hyim , rising Indie Music sensation, Yael Meyer, and The Wellspring, fronted by Blue Fringe’s Dov Rosenblatt — With more artists to be announced soon. (More bios of the artists will be posted on JewliciousFestival.com)

Tickets for Jewnfest can be purchased online or at the door, space permitting. Pre-sale tickets are $10 per night,or 2 nights for $15. Doors open at 7pm, with music from 8-11pm each evening. The Mint is located at 6010 W Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90035. The shows are for adults 18+. Support for Jewnfest comes from The Jewish Community Foundation Los Angeles, Asahi Beer and JConnect.

 

JEWNFEST TICKETS

Both Nights $15.00 Tu. Jewn 14 $10.00 We. Jewn 15 $10.00

 

Jewlicious Festival is proud to present Soulfarm, a fixture on the New York City club circuit. The band has released 9 albums, first  as Inasense and laters as Soulfarm.

Soulfarm was founded in Israel by lead guitarist C Lanzbom and guitarist and lead singer Noah Solomon Chase. Their sound has been dubbed as New American music, full melodic song writing and progressive modern arrangements.

Their live shows are full of Mediterranean flavor with captivating guitar leads, dance rhythms and strong percussion breaks.  Soulfarm has a wide range of influences from rock and Latin, to Hebrew and Celtic folk music.

Soulfarm has recorded with many well-known musicians such as Perry Farrel and Dispatch; and has opened for Bruce Hornsby, Shawn Colvin, The Wailers George Clinton, to name a few.  They regularly sell out national venues, such as Whiskey-A-Go-Go, L.A., BB Kings Blues Club, NYC, Hammerstein Ballroom, NYC, The Knitting Factory, L.A., NYC, Fox Theater, Boulder, CO, and Firehouse – St. Louis, MO. Through extensive tours of the U.S. and Europe, the group has gained great popularity.

Sometime in the last week you may have received an envelope in the mail. In it was one over 1,500 hand-labeled, hand-stamped and sealed invitations to this year’s Night Of Unity Gala honoring Rhoda Weisman on Febuary 24, 2011. Do you remember this envelope? If not, feel free to go rifling through your paperwork and find it. We’ll give you a minute.

Helping send out the Gala invites is just one of the many jobs for this year’s Jewlicious HQ intern, Daniella Dolgin.

Daniella was born in Jerusalem, raised in South Florida, and moved to LA for school. She currently attends Santa Monica College, where she studies psychology.

In addition to volunteering four days a week at the Jewlicious Festival offices, Dani is the campus organizer for Santa Monica Goes Jewlicious, USC, UCSC, and SFSU. She also helps out with the Welcoming, Ritual and Music Committees.

Daniella got involved with Jewlicious because she “wanted to be a part of something big and know that I was making a difference for Jewish young adults.”

Her enthusiasm for Jewlicious runs deep, as anyone that has called the office on most weekday afternoons can attest. “I almost wanted to hang up and call back, just to hear that amazing enthusiasm,” a Jewish professional told us.

“Jewlicious is everything that’s been missing from the experience of so many Jewish college students,” said Dani (as her friends call her).

“Just the chance to be with other Jewish students from all over the country, and all different backgrounds, and to truly enjoy being Jewish, never existed before Jewlicious.”

Marissa Nuckles is according to her Facebook page “one feisty woman” with a passion for the Jewish people. This Santa Barbara native joined the Jewlicious team a few months ago and quickly rose from intern to full-fledged organizer.

Marissa’s duties include supervising a nationwide network of Jewlicious Campus organizers on two dozen campuses, recruiting new organizers and coaching our current team. On any given day Marissa might be in touch with a campuses in California, Maryland and Arizon.

Marissa is also spearheading the creation of a new Online Campus Organizer Manual for the network. “We are taking this manual we have and making an online one that can grow with our network, and be added to by our team members. It’s pretty amazing,” added Marissa.

“Marissa is about the most positive and friendly person I think I have met,” said one a new campus organizer at a west coast campus. “She tackels everything with passion, and can-do spirit.”

But don’t confuse her positive and chill attitude with complacency.

Marissa sees the situation on college campuses where most Jewish students don’t get involved with Jewish groups as a major area that needs repair. She cares deeply about making sure that students have access to great programs and people.

Even when she is not at work, Marissa organizes massive Shabbat Dinners sometimes with Birthright Next funding and sometimes not.

Bringing young Jewish people together is what makes Marissa happy, and why Jewlicious is honored and thrilled to have her on the team.

If you want to be in touch with Marissa you can find her on Facebook, call her at the office, or send her an email to marissa dot jewlicious at gmail dot com.

Pre-Sale tickets have been extended because of an error with our Facebook event – it vanished. We recreated the Facebook event, but in the meantime we are offering this special deal.

There has never been a better way to make sure you are in on all the action at JF7.0

Jewlicious is a weekend experience unlike any other – and each ticket is already subsidized by our sponsors. The price of each ticket is just a fraction of the real cost of brining this amazing event to reality every year.

So what are you waiting for?

Pre-Sale Full Time Undergrad Student $45
SPECIAL OFFER Pre-Sale Young Adult $60
Group Tickets for 10+ until Jan. 15th $40

These tickets will start going up in price on January 8th, so don’t delay.

What will you get for $60? Access to all JF programs, concerts, and meals. Unlimited access to the Festival, including the option to sleep at the Alpert JCC gym.

And if you are one of the first 100 people to purchase a ticket— you get access to the music portion of the Festival opening “Night Of Unity”, Feb. 24th in Los Angeles!

From movies to music, food to fun, Jewlicious Festival offers an unparalleled fun time, where everyone knows your tribe.

Letter From Long Beach, CA

By Gordon Haber

I’ve just spent my entire weekend at the sixth annual Jewlicious Festival in Long Beach, Calif., and I’m exhausted. Between sundown Friday and Sunday afternoon, I have eaten Jewish food, exercised with a Jewish boxer, laughed at Jewish comics and listened to Jewish music. I have talked about the Jewish past and argued about the Jewish future.

I have met Conservative Jews, Orthodox Jews, Persian Jews, African-American Jews, Sephardim, Hasidim and people who converted to Judaism. All weekend, every single conversation was in some way related to Jews, Judaism or Jewishness. I feel like an over-stimulated child, or maybe like I’ve spent 48 hours in a mikveh.

Which is exactly how the festival’s organizers wanted me to feel. Not the exhaustion, but the metaphorical immersion. Jewlicious, which ran from February 19 through 21, is designed to touch on a huge variety of topics and to appeal to young Jews with a wide range of backgrounds and interests. All this sounded great to me. But I must also admit that beforehand, I felt a little dubious.

A glance at the event’s Web site, with its ’70s-style scripted logo and picture of a cute girl in an “I ♥ Hashem” T-shirt, suggests a certain packaged irony, an attempt at a more religious version of Heeb magazine’s hipster Judaism. This is not the end of the world (after all, I’ve written for Heeb), but the organizers of Jewlicious. What was their aim or agenda, other than getting Jews to meet other Jews and talk about Judaism?

But first, the experience. Although I wasn’t really there to participate, I loved mixing with Jews who came from all over and have different kinds of observance. (It’s not every day you get to hear about Adorno from a Canadian Breslover Hasid.) And I’d have to be hard-hearted indeed to grumble about Jews enjoying themselves in a Jewish setting.

Two moments stand out in my mind. The first was on Friday night, when the festival director, Rabbi Yonah Bookstein, was introducing Yuri Foreman, the WBC super-welterweight champion, and Matisyahu walked in. Suddenly it was like a frum celebrity harmonic convergence. And the second was on Saturday night, when I stepped out of the concert for some air and met a youngish Persian Jew from the Valley, who was practically glowing with happiness. “The musicians are amazing,” he said. “And it’s unbelievable, the diversity.”
But how diverse was it? While Bookstein told me that his organization’s surveys showed a neat divide between Reform, Conservative, Orthodox and “unaffiliated” Jews, my own (admittedly anecdotal) survey suggested that the attendees were mostly observant. The audiences for the bigger shows — the concerts and comedy — were a sea of yarmulkes, and all weekend the hallways resounded with the swishing of long skirts. So instead of broad diversity, it might be more accurate to say that there were all kinds of observant Jews.

And although according to David Abitbol, a Jewlicious.com blogger, the festival has grown “edgier,” that’s a relative term. Yes, at the Saturday night show some of the comics got pretty raunchy, but I would have loved to have seen what a really edgy Jew, like Heshy Fried of www.frumsatire.net, would have done with 15 minutes. And yes, there was a panel on Queer Jews, and another on medical marijuana, but I wonder if that was more about the sheer unavoidability of these topics. Observant Jews can no longer pretend that issues like homosexuality and drug use do not exist. Especially the latter: I had a lovely chat with one nice young bearded man while he got high in the parking lot.

Back to the question of why Jewlicious is doing this. On Sunday morning, I managed to corner Bookstein, and I asked him. “To help prevent a generation from opting out,” he said. “From disassociating themselves from Judaism and leaving the Jewish community behind. My philosophy is that this is a great way to build a dynamic and creative Jewish future.”

Now, let me say without reservation that I am all for a dynamic and creative Jewish future, and that Bookstein practically radiates positivity and good will. But most of the kids who showed up at Jewlicious reminded me of that anonymous quotation, “People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.” I did meet a few attendees who were secular, and a few who were interested in, or in the process of, becoming more religious. But I met many more who were already religious and looking to meet a nice Jewish boy or girl, or learn some Torah, or just hang around and have a good time. In other words, rather than saving the Jewish people from the Horrible Fate of Assimilation, Jewlicious seems to be reinforcing the cohesiveness of the existing community.

Over the course of the weekend, I was irritated many times. The application of tech buzzwords to religion (Open Source Torah! Judaism 2.0!) got on my nerves. As did the resolute belief that the Internet would save Judaism. As did the subtle but persistent message, “You’re great the way you are, but wouldn’t it be more great if you were like us?” As did the ferocious networking on the part of the some panelists, who could not go three steps without hocking something. Finally, I wish Jewlicious (and everybody else) would stop trying so hard to make Judaism seem cool. It’s our heritage, not a vintage T-shirt. For all these reasons, next weekend I’m going out for a beer with a buddy of mine who was raised Christian and is now a diehard atheist.

But next year, you can bet your life I’ll be back at Jewlicious, if they’ll let me.

Gordon Haber is a frequent contributor to the Forward.
Read more: http://www.forward.com/articles/126292/#ixzz18uHmJv7W

The subtext of any pop culture piece on Jewlicious is always the age old question “Is it good for the Jews?” I watched season 2 episode 2 of Glee recently and the answer is… well, not so clear. Glee, the Fox show about Glee Club at William McKinley High School in Lima, Ohio, does not lack for Jews, both overt and covert. First there’s Brad Falchuk, one of the show’s Executive Producers and writers. His Mom Nancy Falchuk has been the NationalPresident of Hadassah since 2007. That’s pretty Jewy, even by Hollywood standards where almost everyone in the biz is a yid. Hadassah… that’s some serious yichus! But who gives a shit about the behind the scenes people, right? There’s plenty of Jewyness on the show itself.

We have the mohawked Puck, aka Noah Puckerman whose family celebratedSimchat Torah by watching Schindler’s List. Do I need to tell you how fucked up that is? I hope not… Puck it seems is also a bit of a prophet. Who can forget his description of one divine exhortation: “When I woke up, I knew it was a message from God. Rachel was a hot Jew and the Good Lord wanted me to get into her pants.” The Rachel in question is Rachel Berry, the other overtly Jewish character in Glee club. With her two gay dads she brings new complexity to the “who is a Jew” debate. She does have a Streisandesque air about her, she is very ambitious and driven (Jew!) and like many of her fellow secular American coreligionists, she is dating a non-Jew (Finn Hudson, the school’s quarterback and a member of the Glee club).

Next we have the crypto Jews… Is Artie Abrams, the nerdy paraplegic a Jew? What about his love-interest, Tina Cohen-Chang? Does that mean her Mom is Jewish? Finally we have Quinn Fabray, head cheerleader and Finn’s former ex. As a hot, blond sexy cheerleader, former head of the school’s Christianabstinence club until she got knocked up by Puck, she has tremendous Sh*ksappeal (I can’t really use that term anymore, can I?), she is actually played by Member of the Tribe, Dianna Agron. Go figure.All of this however, is merely a prelude to the Jew issues raised by the most recent episode of Glee.

Featuring a guest appearance by Britney Spears, the episode was so popular that half an hour after the episode aired, 7 of the 10 trending topics on twitter were Glee-related. One of the trending topics was the term “JewishCloud.” See, after getting a shot of Nitrous Oxide at the dentist, Glee club member and cheerleader Brittany caressed Jacob Ben Israel’s Jewfro and said that it looked like “…a Jewish cloud.” She was tripping, get it?

Jacob, played by Josh Sussman, was an important part of this episode. The Glee club’s use of a Britney Spears number at a school assembly seemed to have hypersexualized everyone, and nowhere is that hypersexuality more on display than it was with Jacob. Jacob offered to kill his parents and give Finn his house if he let him have Rachel after she showed up to school in a Britney Spears inspired schoolgirl outfit. Afterward, Jacob was caught in the Library, butt naked and apparently pleasuring himself. But that was restrained compared to Jacob’s behavior at the homecoming assembly when the Glee Club performed “Toxic.” At least at the Library, he was (mostly) alone whereas at the assembly he appeared to be pleasuring himself while moaning and screaming out loud.

This episode had massive ratings. Massive. It drew 13.5 million viewers, even more than the season debut the week before and broke all kinds of records. Glee’s depiction of Jews tries to mirror, at least in some respects, the complexity of modern Jewish America. But Jacob Ben Israel’s cringing, self-loathing, hypersexual character seems to be a Jewish cliche based on a combination of Portnoy’s Complaint and Der Stürmer.

I’m not Abe Foxman and Jewlicious is not the ADL and I am not at all suggesting that Glee’s writers are anti-Semitic. However, Jacob’s over the top behavior is weak, juvenile and ultimately uninteresting. My suggestion? Since Jacob is both Jewish and a blogger, why not model his character more on Nick Denton, the founder of the Gawker media empire? A young Nick Denton(MOT) transplanted from London into Ohio, struggling with his sexuality and whatever… it’s got to be more interesting than the current Jacob Ben Israel tomfoolery.

Returning to the original question of this post: Glee. Good for the Jews? I have to make a small confession. The truth is, I don’t really care. Please don’t hate me.

… of nature, of life, of beauty, of music, of being with people, and looking at the stars, and taking a break from life and doing something completely different.

People who hang out with me for a while will hear me say that my favorite thing is Jewish summer camp. There is something magical about camp, and since I was 11, camp was the place I wanted to be, all summer long.

The camp where I grew up, <a href=”http://www.camptavor.com/”>Habonim Camp Tavor</a> in Three Rivers Michigan, had none of the fancy stuff of other camps. We had no power boats, no horses, no climbing, no computers. It was super rustic, and we slept in MASH style tents, with army bunks and mosquito netting. And I still loved every minute.

So it was no surprise to my wife Rachel, the co-founder of Jewlicious Festival, when I told her I wanted to do a summer camp Jewlicious style, for young adults.

Three years later, countless proposals, emails, phone calls, and car rides later, Camp Jewlicious is a reality.

I want to give a shout-out to the<a href=”http://www.campbisco.net/”> Disco Biscuits</a>, who reminded me that summer camp isn’t just for kids. Camp is a place for for everyone.

Camp Jewlicious has amazing facilities, beyond anything that I could have dreamed of. Plus, we have all the down home campy stuff too. I will be posting more soon! Prepare for a time that will you will never forget.

<a href=”http://campjewlicious2010.eventbrite.com/”>Space is limited — prices go up at the end of July!</a>
See photos from our walk through <a href=”http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=112478472133043&ref=ts#!/album.php?aid=2186431&id=30601047&ref=mf”>here on Facebook</a>.