Tale of tragedy and triumph for a struggling Hasidic rap star
BY SIMONE WEICHSELBAUM
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
“He dodged bullets on a streetcorner. He watched his mother die from a cocaine addiction. But Flatbush’s Yitzchak (Y-Love) Jordan is more Hasidic than ‘hood.
New York’s only known black ultra-Orthodox Jewish rapper left his native Baltimore at 21 for Brooklyn, converting to a religion that drew him into a far different world.
Jordan, now 29, travels the globe rhyming his views – as a black man and a Jew.
“The entire way I look at the world is a fusion between Baltimore and Brooklyn,” said Jordan last week, finishing a performance at the Knitting Factory in Tribeca.
Shemspeed is an independent recording label and promotional agency highlighting cross-over music artists with positive and unifying messages. Founded by Erez Safar, an American-Israeli DJ/Producer, Shemspeed promotes over 15 dynamic artists representing a wide range of genres including hip-hop, reggae, and rock. These artists include Y-Love (revolutionary Jewish hip-hop), Diwon (Yemenite / Sephardic hip-hop, Israeli music and more), DeScribe (soul-awakening dancehall, hip-hop, & soul), and Electro Morocco (Israeli rock, dance music.) Shemspeed artists, collectively showcasing the diversity in world Jewish music, have performed with musicians as varied as Snoop Dogg, Lou Reed, Idan Raichel and Eminem; they’ve been profiled in Rolling Stone, SPIN, The New York Times and XXL; and they’ve been seen and heard around the world on various TV appearances (Conan O’Brien, CBS and BBC World) and global radio. Shemspeed’s mission is unifying people through culture and education, celebrating diversity and common ground. By way of this work, we add a public Jewish voice to multi-cultural, inter-faith, creative and collaborative bridge-building.
Tale of tragedy and triumph for a struggling Hasidic rap star