Currently Browsing: Martin Jaffe 9 articles
Danny Kalb: Jewish Blues Icon
Martin Elliot Jaffe reflects on his musical inspiration since 1966. Reading the New York Times obituary for guitarist Danny Kalb, who died aged 80 in November, I was transported back in time: aged 15, Framus guitar in hand, struggling to find a chord progression as I listened to Projections, a new album from Kalb’s band, […]
Volodymyr Zelensky: From Rootless Cosmopolitan to Democratic Icon
Martin Elliot Jaffe profiles the Ukrainian Jewish President. “Both Ukrainians and Jews value freedom and they work equally for the future of our states to become to our liking—not the future others want for us—we know what it’s like not to have our own state and land and with weapons in hand at the cost […]
Jews & Brews
Martin Elliot Jaffe discusses the history and joys of Jewish coffee house culture. ‘One cannot attain presence of mind without the aid of coffee’. These words of Italian Rabbi Hezekiah Da Silva from the early 1600s fueled my immersion into the rich Jewish role in the rise of European coffeehouses and the cultural, political and […]
Neshama Reggae
Forty years after his death, Martin Elliot Jaffe reflects on Boby Marley’s Jewish Soul. My heart pounds a bit as the stage lights dim and after a long pandemic-enforced hiatus we return to the jam night stage of the Winchester in Lakewood, Ohio. Guitarists await the count, the drummer signals me and I launch the […]
From Mount Sinai to the Blue Ridge
Martin Elliot Jaffe discusses Jewish Bluegrass Mountain Music. Join my wife and me on a pre-pandemic evening, Saturday night at Temple Tifereth Israel in Beachwood, Ohio as an enthusiastic crowd participates in a unique new American Jewish tradition: a night of bourbon tasting, soul-stirring, foot-stomping music by the wildly popular Jewish bluegrass group NEFESH Mountain, […]
Congahead: Martin Cohen
Martin Jaffee reflects on Martin Cohen’s lifelong love affair with Latin music. On stage, hidden behind my full set of congas and bongos—a warm evening at Cain Park, Cleveland Heights, Ohio, the Workmen’s Circle Klezmer Orchestra ( now Tischler Klezmer Orchestra) launches into Ich Hob Dich and I latch onto a sinuous Latin rhumba on […]
George Orwell: Oracle, Political Visionary, Antisemite?
Martin Elliot Jaffe considers the reputation and writings of George Orwell. During my years as a graduate student at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio during the 1970s I read a great deal of political theory and history of England during the 1930’s— the denial of the reality of European fascism, insularity, class-bound decadent aristocratic political […]
Rabbi Zalman Schacter, My Career Counselling Mentor
Martin Elliot Jaffe reflects on work as a way of life or in the way of life as inspired by the writing of Rabbi Zalman Schachter. As a recently retired career counsellor with 35 years of expertise dealing with a diverse cross-section of Americans facing a turbulent era of career transition and the hollowing out […]
‘The Greening of America’ 50 Years Later
Martin Elliot Jaffe looks back at a landmark book and its enduring relevance for today. As a college student in 1970, I was captivated by the vision of a new America articulated by Yale Law Professor Charles Reich in his best-selling The Greening of America, where the ethos of enlightened, privileged middle-class college students were […]