Settler Rock Comes to The States
New Voices followed Shemspeed and Aharit Hayamim when we did the showcases at Jewlicious Festival and the 92Y in NYC. Here is their nice little write up:
For an audio version of this story, click here.
“We don’t get into politricks, man.” So says Shmuel Caro, the heavily bearded lead guitarist of the Israeli jam-collective Aharit Hayamim, or End of Days. It’s an unexpected statement from the front man of what’s been called the house band of the Hilltop Youth, the young radical settlers known for setting up makeshift outposts deep in the occupied territory of the West Bank.
Caro and his band are backstage at 92YTribeca, a Jewish music venue in Manhattan, preparing for a headlining set on the East Coast leg of a North American tour that had included a performance annual Jewlicious festival for Jewish college students, among other venues. While the band is associated with some of the most extreme elements of the settler movement, fellow performers and promoters say that their politics shouldn’t prevent them from appearing in mainstream Jewish venues.
“We’re here to represent the real vibe of Israel,” says keyboardist Yehuda Leuchter, before bursting into spontaneous harmony with the rest of Aharit Hayamim. Dressed in flowing shirts and large, knitted kippot, the four band members sang a reggae-inflected round of “Holy Mt. Zion.” After a minute, Yehuda announces: “That’s all we got to say, man.”
Aharit Hayamim was touring North America with Shemspeed, the Orthodox hip-hop label. They shared the bill at their March 15th concert at 92YTribeca with such regulars on the Jewish music scene as black Orthodox rapper Y-Love and Dov Rosenblatt of Blue Fringe, along with newcomers Eprhyme and Shir Yaakov. Matisyahu, the breakout Hasidic reggae star, made a surprise appearance.
Despite their avowed aversion to “politricks,” the group’s ideological orientation is apparent to its fans. Chaya Hershkopf, a young Lubavitch woman from Crown Heights, says that she first saw Aharit Hayamim perform at T’Koa D, a small, unauthorized outpost 2 km from the settlement of T’Koa, itself 8 km past the Green Line. “They talk a lot about the earth and the land and how it’s ours and the importance of holding on to it,” says Chaya. “They talk about Jerusalem and keeping it ours. They’re very settlery, and that’s mostly what I like about them.”
When asked whether they considered themselves Hilltop Youth, the members of Aharit Hayamim are evasive. “If you have a beard and a big kippah, you’re on the spot,” says Leuchter. “Doesn’t matter if you’re, like, Arab…Kids all over the world have tattoos and long hair. So, in Israel, they don’t have tattoos and they don’t have earrings. They have big payis and they believe in the land and they believe in peace and they believe in music and they believe in redemption.”
Each year, Aharit Hayamim hosts and headlines a music festival in Bat Ayin, a settlement in Gush Etzion. The celebration began as a memorial to Leuchter’s father, a musician who played with Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, and has grown into a multi-day gathering for Israeli jam bands. “It’s the most high festival in the world, man,” says Caro.
To read the full article, click to newvoices.org/community?id=0008, but from there to the end it gets a bit biased and word from the band is that this writer entirely misrepresented them.
– Guy Emanuel
p.s. check out MSNBC’s article about the peace band, Aharit Hayamim
http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/04/17/907693.aspx
