Jewish hip-hop

• 1. Introduction

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  Jewish hip hop describes a genre of hip hop music defined by its ties, whether thematic, stylistic, or cultural, to Judaism and its musical traditions. Josh Norek of the group Hip Hop Hoodíos once put it bluntly: "before Eminem, pretty much the only white rappers were Jewish." That single line reframes decades of hip hop history that most listeners never learned. Jewish executives, producers, and rap groups sat near the center of the genre's commercial rise in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet almost none of them rapped about being Jewish. So how did a genre that avoided naming its own faith eventually produce artists rapping in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino? Why did some of them go on to build labels devoted entirely to Jewish identity? And why, decades later, would rabbis still argue over whether hip hop itself could ever be kosher?

• 2. Sound And Language

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  Reggae rhythms and klezmer melodies frequently share space with standard hip hop tools such as cutting, scratching, sampling, looping, and beatboxing. Artists in this genre have emerged from a wide range of countries and cultures, each folding in sounds particular to their own background. Many rap across several languages at once, moving through English, Hebrew, Yiddish, Aramaic, and Ladino depending on where they grew up. That same linguistic range would eventually feed into record labels built to promote openly Jewish artists, years after hip hop's commercial breakthrough had already come and gone.

• 3. Hip Hop's Quiet Insiders

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  Jerry Heller managed N.W.A. during hip hop's commercial golden age in the 1980s and early 1990s. Producer Rick Rubin and former Def Jam Recordings CEO Lyor Cohen held equally central roles on the industry's business side. Groups such as 3rd Bass, The Whooliganz, The High and Mighty, and most prominently the Beastie Boys were majority Jewish rap acts at the time. In Israel, rappers such as Shabak Samech's Mook E, Hadag Nahash, Sagol 59, Subliminal, The Shadow, and SHI 360 pioneered the country's hip hop scene. This happened in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Despite this widespread presence, few of these acts acknowledged their Jewish heritage directly in their music. Exceptions included Hip Hop Hoodíos, the parody act 2 Live Jews, and Ruthless Records signees Blood of Abraham. Jewish religious music occasionally borrowed hip hop elements during this same period, though mostly for parody or children's songs. Examples include Craig Taubman's "Chanukah Rap" and Shlock Rock's collaborations with rapper Etan G.

• 4. Jewish Labels Go Global

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  JDub Records launched in 2002 as one of the first labels built specifically to promote openly Jewish rap artists. Its roster included Sagol 59, Canadian klezmer rapper Socalled, the Ethiopian-Israeli duo Axum, and the Middle Eastern-inflected group Balkan Beat Box. Balkan Beat Box's song "Hermetico" later resurfaced far outside the label's own reach. It was sampled for "Talk Dirty," the international hit by Jason Derulo and 2 Chainz. That same year, Hip Hop Hoodíos released their debut EP, Raza Hoodía, and found unexpected traction in Latino media. Several of their videos entered rotation on MTV Español. The group also went on to collaborate with members of Grammy-winning Latin bands including Ozomatli, Jaguares, and Santana. That sample carried Balkan Beat Box's sound to global pop radio, far removed from the small Jewish label roster where it began.

• 5. The Celebrate Compilation

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  In 2004, Craig Taubman co-produced the first Jewish hip-hop compilation album, working alongside music video director Jeremy Goldscheider. The record was titled Celebrate Hip Hop: Jewish Artists From Around the Globe, part of Taubman's ongoing Celebrate series. Contributing artists included Hip Hop Hoodíos, Sagol 59, Blood of Abraham, Socalled, Mook E, Etan G, and Remedy of the Wu-Tang Clan. Lesser-known acts joined them too, among them the Russian group iSQUAD and the British groups Antithesis and Emunah. A year later, one artist from this same wave would carry Jewish hip hop onto the pop charts under his own name.

• 6. Matisyahu And The Hasidic Wave

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  Matisyahu, a Hasidic reggae rap artist who had been signed to JDub, broke into the mainstream in the mid-2000s. His albums Live at Stubb's, released in 2005, and Youth, in 2006, were both certified gold. His single "King Without a Crown" became a Top 40 hit. That success opened the door for a number of other Hasidic rappers, among them Y-Love, DeScribe, Nosson Zand, Eprhyme, and Nissim Black. Many of these artists were baalei teshuva, people who had returned to Orthodox observance later in life. American Yemenite producer Diwon promoted several of them through his own label, Shemspeed Records. Non-Hasidic artists on the same label included rapper Kosha Dillz and the Middle Eastern-inspired group Electro Morocco. In Israel, Orthodox rappers built audiences across both religious and secular circles. The rap rock band Shtar formed at the Aish HaTorah yeshiva, founded by Seattle rapper Ori Murray and British guitarist Brad Rubinstein. The group later performed Linkin Park's "In the End" on the reality singing competition HaKokhav HaBa. Rinat Gutman, the country's first religious female rapper, drew attention in 2015 for her song "Shirat Ha'asavim Hashotim." The darkly humorous track addressed sexual harassment committed by a number of Orthodox rabbis and other authority figures. Around the same time, Eprhyme launched the alternative hip hop collective Darshan in America, and the Ladino-language group Los Serenos Sefarad also emerged. Not every Hasidic or Orthodox rapper found their embrace of hip hop welcomed without pushback.

• 7. A Gimmick Or A Threat

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  Blogger Heshy Fried placed "Chabad hip hop artists" on his 2011 list titled "The Most Annoying Frum Jews." He wrote, "I have no idea what happened, but all of a sudden there are dozens of chabad BT hip hop artists, and I think the market is a bit saturated, don't you think?" His complaint captured a wider pattern of criticism aimed at the genre from two directions at once. Rabbinic authorities condemned the mixing of secular musical styles with religious life. Hip hop fans, for their part, dismissed the pairing as a gimmick and called it inauthentic. That rabbinic unease would soon harden into a formal ruling over which sounds counted as properly kosher.

• 8. Kosher Music Wars

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  In 2007, two Haredi musicians from Bnei Brak, Chaim Shlomo Mayes and Dudi Kalish, released Rap in Yiddish. The album reworked American pop and rap songs, including tracks by artists like 50 Cent, into Yiddish-language parody covers. It sold moderately well, but a group of Orthodox rabbis condemned it in a full-page ad placed in the newspaper Hamodia. The ad denounced the record's "foreign" melodies "under Yiddish and Hasidic cover" and called for a boycott. It also praised distributors who had already refused to stock the album. Rabbi Ephraim Luft led the Committee for Jewish Music, which published its "Rules for Playing Kosher Music" in 2008. Among its provisions was a prohibition on secular styles such as rap, even in purely instrumental form. Rapper Yitz "Y-Love" Jordan responded to these rules in a 2010 interview: "Music can't be treif; the only thing that can be treif is the content in the music. There's no style of music which is automatically anti-Torah." Jordan's answer didn't end the argument. Names like Shyne, BLP Kosher, Ari Lesser, and Hebro kept appearing under the same genre label long after the Committee's rules were published.