Tune in every Sunday, 3 – 4p EST for fresh episodes.
The program re-airs Tuesdays, 7 – 8pm EST.
Each week, music lover & program producer, Nadine Nunberg & composer, conductor Aaron Kula, introduce listeners to new sounds being created by Jewish musicians around the world, from jazz to hip-hop, Ladino, folk-rock and more. Rabbi Levi Friedman of Chabad of Miami provides words of inspiration. Susan Gladstone Pasternack and Jacqueline Goldstein of the Jewish Museum of Florida – FIU share the works of innovative Jewish visual artists.
Check out the Season 3 Launch Party – a LIVE vintage radio broadcast! Travel back in time to 1930’s New York when Yiddish radio was a vital part of Jewish culture. You’ll be an audience member of The American Jewish Radio Hour. The concert features a Aaron Kula’s Klezmer Company Jazz Orchestra, vintage clips of live radio broadcasts from New York City and Brooklyn Jewish radio stations such as WEVD, WVFW, WBBC, and WCNW. Music includes standard Klezmer and Yiddish songs played in an American Jazz style, reflecting the American music of that period.
Noam “Nani” Vazana is one of the only artists in the world that write & compose new songs in the endangered Ladino language. In her new album ‘Ke Haber’ (What’s New) she captures the spirit of the ancient, matriarchal language and culture and propels it into the 21st century with socially pertinent lyrics, celebrating migration, gender and female empowerment.
Multifaceted American jazz pianist and composer Emmet Cohen is one of his generation’s pivotal figures in music and the related arts. Leader of the Emmet Cohen Trio and creator of the Masters Legacy Series, he is an internationally acclaimed jazz artist. Cohen headlines regularly at Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Village Vanguard, and Birdland, and has appeared at the Newport, Monterey, and North Sea jazz festivals. Cohen’s entrepreneurial energies led to his developing “Live From Emmet’s Place,” a live-streamed “Harlem rent party” that unites a worldwide audience via tens of millions of internet views.
Folk Rock duo, Rogers Park is America’s Only Hassidic Folk Band. They offer a fresh and exuberant new style to contemporary Chassidic folk and popular music, but with a few major additives: sincere adherence to major conceptual chassidic Torah ideas, angelic blending of harmonic and soulful voices, creative rocking and easy listening arrangements, and wise use of some great musicians, all adding up to the next big thing in Jewish music!
Born and raised in Toronto, Batsheva is an internationally known singer and songwriter. She is a concert artist, singing in Ladino, Yiddish and Ivrit. She is an award-winning songwriter. A ballet based on three of Batsheva’s translations of Leonard Cohen in Yiddish, Hebrew and Spanish/ Ladino was produced last year by director and choreographer, Jeffrey M Rockland., at Kent State University in Ohio. She recently gave concerts in London and Tel Aviv. Batsheva has been touring the American south under the auspices of the Institute for Southern Jewish Life.
Danielle Wertz is an award-winning artist on the rise, making a name for herself as a jazz vocalist, composer and arranger. The New York City based artist weaves together elements of jazz, folk and the use of her voice as an instrumental texture to create an intimate and personal musical world. Described as, “untarnished by the politics of music” (Jazz Music Archives) and “at home alongside more contemporary exponents of improvised singing” (LoudMouth, AU) Danielle has rapidly gained national acclaim.
Neshama Carlebach is an award-winning singer, songwriter and educator who has performed and taught in cities around the world. A winner and four-time nominee in the Independent Music Awards for her most current release, Believe, and winner of the Global Music Awards Silver Award for Outstanding Performance by a female vocalist for the album, Neshama has sold over one million records, making her one of today’s best-selling Jewish artists in the world.
Nissim Black has been a gangsta rapper, a gang member, and a faith seeker. But it is his current incarnation that is here to stay: an African American Hasidic Jew who brings sharp beats and hooked-filled rhymes to the masses. His first single of 2020, “Mothaland Bounce” is a confluence of everything he’s ever done, and everywhere he’s ever been. The vibe is old school, but the song is thoroughly fresh, pairing big beats with an African hook and a catchy chorus for a video that has already garnered 4.5 million views on YouTube.
A nationally recognized conductor, educator, composer, accordionist, and producer, Aaron Kula is a Fulbright Music Specialist and was awarded a 2018 grant to conduct and lecture in Israel with appearances at the U.S. Embassy, Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, and music conservatories in the Negev and Western Galilee. Mr. Kula’s interdisciplinary career in classical, jazz, and folk music led him to form the award-winning genre bending Klezmer Company Jazz Orchestra in 1997. An innovator of concert programming he has conducted concert performances of Broadway musicals with the original orchestration and a full cast including: My Fair Lady in Concert (2019),Funny Girl in Concert (2018), Fiddler on the Roof in Concert (2017), South Pacific in Concert (2016), and On The Town in Concert (2014). Mr. Kula also led the first Florida performances of Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown, and Beige in 2011 and Bernstein’s Jeremiah Symphony in 2016.
Judith Leiber: Master Craftsman tells the story of a fearless woman ahead of her time. Madonna, Beyoncé, Katy Perry, Sarah Jessica Parker, JLo, and Blake Lively are just a handful of the of A-list fans of Judith Leiber evening bags. The great, late designer (Leiber passed away in 2018) made handbags go viral—on the red carpet and off—long before social media even existed.
In Zachary Balber’s series Tamim – which roughly translates from Hebrew as “perfect” – most of the photographed men wear the kippah that Balber was Bar Mitzvah-ed in, however they saw fit. In the photographs, the men take their shirts off and reveal themselves to the world as Jewish, proud and unashamed, something Balber could not do as a child. They expose their problems, heritage, insecurities, fears and humanity through these portraits. Balber describes these men as his “lost tribe, untraditional Jewish men.”
Mira Lehr: A Walk in the Garden. Mira Lehr, a self-described eco-feminist artist, is a native Miamian whose career spans over five decades. She has taken part in over 300 group and solo shows, with her works in collections all over the world. Lehr’s nature-based imagery encompasses painting, design, sculpture and video installations. Her processes include non-traditional media such as resin, gunpowder, fire, Japanese paper, dyes and welded steel. Mira Lehr: A Walk in the Garden is a site-specific installation that takes the viewer through a magical journey in a fantastical garden full of multi-media organic pieces.
La Alegria de Vivir: A Moment in Venezuelan Jewish Life Through the Eyes of Silvia Cohen. Journeys and travels have shaped Silvia’s life, from her parents’ long journey from Europe to South America during World War II, as well as her own migration to the United States. After her own relocation experience, Silvia realized the difficulties her parents had faced, arriving in a new country with a completely different culture and language. In this series, her parents are presented with others of the community enjoying life, meeting in their homes, and dressing up for dances, celebrations, weddings, and Carnival. Inspired by old photographs from the 1950’s and 1960’s, Silvia chose unique moments from her own family and friend’s stories to illustrate Venezuela’s vibrant Jewish community.
Shtetl in the Sun: Andy Sweet’s South Beach 1977-1980. The exhibition celebrates the legendary photographer’s work in the late 1970s capturing the colorful elderly Jewish community in South Beach, before his death at a young age. Taking a cue from the new book from Letter16 Press, edited by Brett Sokol. This is the first solo museum show of Sweet’s work.
Mark Podwal: Kaddish for Dąbrowa Białostocka features a series of eighteen drawings that were completed following Podwal’s 2016 visit to the shtetl in Poland where his mother was born. The series is a visual diary of his journey to Dąbrowa and is based on what he saw in the town and what he heard from elderly residents as they reminisced about their former Jewish neighbors while filmed by Tomasz Wisniewski for his documentary, The Absent Family: Reading the Ashes – Following in the Footsteps of the Jews of Dąbrowa.
Hello Gorgeous, is an eclectic exhibition of costumes, photos, videos, record album covers and other objects, celebrating the life of Barbra Streisand. With full-blown Brooklyn moxie, the young singer dismissed as too Jewish, too plain, and too obstinate upended the celebrity pantheon by refusing to let anyone rain on her parade. So what if she was born in Israel Zion Hospital and refused to pretend that Flatbush didn’t course through her veins? If she didn’t have a pert button nose or conform to anyone else’s view of femininity? Barbra Streisand was too talented to be ignored. A force of nature, she not only parlayed her vocal prowess and unique style into international stardom; she redefined female celebrity, paving the way for a new generation of women performers—and millions of Jews—to unapologetically be themselves.
Through the Hat includes more than 26 wood-carved sculptures and Jewish ritual objects, more than a baker’s dozen hand-drawn works of art on paper, and custom synagogue furniture. Steve Marcus seamlessly weaves his Proustian childhood memories of bagels and bialys, pickles and green tomatoes from the barrel, and paper-wrapped whitefish chubs with his personal journey and passion for his own roots and culture.
Ep. 1: Brandon Goldberg, Piano Prodigy
Ep. 2: Gary Levinson, Violins of Hope
Ep. 3: Violins of Hope Concert Broadcast
Ep. 4: Aaron Kula, Klezmer Jazz
Ep. 5: Destiny, 80’s Rock
Ep. 6: Avraham Fried, New Chasidic
Ep. 7: Mark Levin, S FL Jewish Chorale
Ep. 8: 8th Day, Jewish Pop-Rock
Ep. 9: Piano Bob, Local Blues Legend
Ep.10: Amernet String Quartet
NP Online Extra: Gregory Sullivan Isaacs
Season two of Nomadic Pentameter was sponsored by Brickell Motors.
