Brightest Young Things

Hannukah, the Jewish festival of sock-giving, is a time of celebration. Where our goy-friends sip on gingerbread lattes, our Jew-friends get down with fried up latkes. In celebration of the many spellings of Ch(H)an(nn)uk(k)ah, we combed through the archives of JewsRock.org to chose a few of our favorite chosen rockers. So, to all of our brightest young Jews - Challah!

A note: While JewsRock.org provides an ample supply of Jewish rockers, the site does miss a few. I mean, how can it list Vanessa Carlton but not Amy Winehouse?

A few other overlooks noted by BYT:

Sean Paul, the Jamaican reggae-pop singer is actually a Jewish Jamaican reggae-pop singer. Pete Burns, lead singer of Dead or Alive (You Spin Me Right Round) and now sorta-tranny UK reality star. Babydaddy (Guitarist for the Scissor Sisters), Ani DiFranco, Ari Gold, George Michael, Steve Bays (Hot Hot Heat - Lead) and Miri Ben-Ari (Hip Hop Violinist).

And now for our selection of favorites from JewsRock.org (we kept in some cheesy stars for fun...all descriptions courtesy of JewsRock.org).

Paula Abdul (Better Half of MC Scat Cat)
Paula Abdul is often counted among the many half-Jewish American celebrities, but she’s actually one hundred percent: her father is a Syrian Jew, while her mother is Jewish and French-Canadian.

Jack Black
Jack Black (that’s his real name) grew up in Los Angeles, where he discovered his acting skills during a game of Freeze after a Passover seder one year. As an actor, he has often played musically-inclined roles, including Barry in High Fidelity and the hero Dewey in School of Rock. But Black is also a rockstar of sorts as one half of Tenacious D.

The Beastie Boys
Ad-Rock, MCA, and Mike D. began playing together as a hardcore punk act in the early eighties, when they were still known as the New York high school kids Adam Horowitz, Adam Yauch, and Michael Diamond.

Bob Dylan
Perhaps the single most famous Jew in rock, Bob Dylan is a self-made enigma. Born Robert Zimmerman in 1941, Dylan began fabricating an image for himself from his first performances at the University of Minnesota, taking his new last name from the poet Dylan Thomas.

Brett Gurewitz (Bad Religion - Lead)
Gurewitz was raised Jewish but had become disillusioned enough by the time he was fifteen to name his band Bad Religion. Founded in 1980, the band has a lifespan unrivaled in the fast-moving world of hardcore: Despite several lineup changes and a long hiatus on Gurewitz’s part, Bad Religion is still around today.

Susanna Hoffs (The Bangles - Lead)
Who knew that the voice behind "Walk Like an Egyptian" grew up singing at Passover seders? Lead Bangle Susanna Hoffs is an L.A. Jewish girl who formed the band in 1981 by placing a want ad.

Mama Cass Elliot
Poor Mama Cass: eternally haunted by the rumor that she died choking on a ham sandwich, which is no way for a Jewish girl to go. Born Ellen Naomi Cohen, Cass Elliot started her performance career as an actor.

Perry Farrell (Jane's Addiction - Lead)
Perry Farrell is another loud, proud Jewish rock star. Born Peretz Bernstein in Queens in 1959, Farrell worked in his father’s diamond business for a while before moving out west to found Jane's Addiction 1985.

Janis Ian
Janis Ian was born Janis Eddy Fink in New York City in 1951. Though she began using "Ian" as a surname when she started playing folk music in high school. She released albums throughout the late sixties but really came into her own in the seventies. Roberta Flack’s performance of her song "Jesse" became a Top 30 hit; more famously, "At Seventeen" won a Grammy and reached the Top Three in 1975. (BYT gives bonus points for being a Lesbian Jew. A lesbian folk singer...who Jew?).

Scott Ian (Anthrax - Lead)
Scott Ian of Anthrax has managed to thrash his way into hard rock history despite being short and Semitic. Starting with 1984’s Fistful of Metal and continuing through the eighties, Anthrax set the standard for speed metal with lighting-fast guitar work and heavy vocals.

Jason Kay (Jamiroquai - Lead)
Neo-soul Brits Jamiroquai boast a frontman who sounds like Stevie Wonder but looks like the kid who always sat in the back of the class in Hebrew School. Jason Kay was born in 1969 in Manchester.

KISS
Born Chaim Witz, Gene Simmons grew up attending yeshiva in Brooklyn (his upbringing was so Jewish that when he first saw a picture of Santa Claus, he figured the bearded guy must be a rabbi). Simmons began playing with fellow Hebrew Paul Stanley (Stanley Harvey Eisen) in a band called Wicked Lester, but the two soon joined forces with Peter Criss and Ace Frehley to form a group positioned somewhere between the macho end of glam and the theatrical end of hard rock.

Billy Joel
Billy Joel once pretended to be Irish and Catholic - hence the many songs about things like crosses and communion - but both of his parents are Jewish.

Mick Jones (The Clash - Lead Guitar, Vocals)
Lest you think there was a single band in the heyday of punk that was entirely Jew-free, we present for your consideration Mick Jones of the Clash. Jones grew up in a working-class household in Brixton, the son of a Jewish mother whose own mother was a Russian refugee.

Lenny Kravitz
Lenny Kravitz is one of rock’s most famous half-Jews. The son of a Jewish TV producer and actress Roxie Roker (Helen on The Jeffersons), Kravitz has made a career of playing his rock heroes almost better than they could play themselves.

Geddy Lee (Rush - Lead Vocals)
Geddy Lee, who is best known for his unnaturally high-pitched singing voice (yes, he does speak like an ordinary guy), was born Gary Lee Weinrib in 1953. His unusual nickname comes from his grandmother’s Yiddish accented English, in which "Gary" became "Geddy." Lee’s parents were Holocaust survivors who got married at Bergen-Belsen a few months after the concentration camp was liberated.

Lisa Loeb
Lisa Loeb proved a lot of things in the early nineties. With her number one single, "Stay," she proved that you don’t need a record deal to top the charts; with her unabashedly Jewish name, she demonstrated that there’s no need for pseudonyms in this day and age; and with those giant spectacles, she let a generation of nerds know that glasses can be sexy.

New Found Glory
Like the Calling, New Found Glory often gets mistaken for a Christian rock band despite being chock-full of Jews: three out of the five members grew up in Jewish homes in Coral Springs, Florida.

Sylvain Sylvain (New York Dolls - Lead Guitarist)
The New York Dolls got their start in 1971 and found their Egyptian Jewish guitarist, Sylvain Sylvain, in 1972. Originally named Sylvain Mizrahi, Sylvain Sylvain was born in Cairo but moved to New York with his family as a young boy.

Joey Ramone (The Ramones - Lead)
Joey Ramone may not be the only Jew with a hip corner of downtown Manhattan in his name (just ask the Lower East Side’s Rabbi Yaakov Spiegel). Born as Jeffrey Ross Hyman.

Lou Reed (Velvet Underground - Lead Guitarist, Chief Songwriter)
In the pantheon of Jewish rock visionaries, Lou Reed (his father changed the family name from Rabinowitz) ranks up there with Bob Dylan. After his run with the Velvet Underground, once he’d made it OK to sing about heroin and S&M and to use feedback and soundscapes in rock songs, Lou Reed went on to release Transformer in 1972.

Gavin Rossdale (Bush - Lead)
British grunge heartthrob Gavin Rossdale is half-Jewish; his father is descended from Russian Jews. In 2000, Rossdale recited the Motzi at a Friday-night concert in Austria as a statement against the nation’s newly elected radical right-wing government.

David Lee Roth
As Adam Sandler tells us on radio stations across the country every December, David Lee Roth lights the menorah. Sandler’s not just being poetic with that line: David Lee Roth is, and always has been, a proud Jewish rock star.

Sleater-Kinney
Fittingly, Sleater-Kinney’s best-known song off their best-known album is an ode to a fellow Jewish punk icon. "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone," from 1996’s Call the Doctor, showcases the band’s signature ingredients: Corin Tucker’s mad banshee yelp and Carrie Brownstein’s angular guitar. Both Brownstein and drummer Janet Weiss, also of Quasi, are Jewish.

Dee Snider (Twisted Sister - Lead)
When a half-Jewish guy named Dee Snider joined the band in 1976, Twisted Sister lost some of their glam schtick and developed a harder sound. The singles “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “I Wanna Rock” took full advantage of the new medium of MTV. Within a year, the band had gone from underground metal darlings to monsters of rock, so the backlash may have been inevitable.

The Strokes
Depending on who is counting, there are either one or two Jewish Strokes. Guitarist Nick Valensi is the son of a Tunisian Jew. And guitarist and keyboardest Albert Hammond Jr told Rolling Stone in 2003 that he’d informally converted to keep Valensi company.

Veruca Salt
You might not expect a band named after a character by the famously anti-Semitic Roald Dahl to contain members of the tribe, but both Nina Gordon and Louise Post of Veruca Salt are Jewesses. So was the band’s drummer, James Shapiro, Gordon’s big brother.

(Others include Michael Bolton, Vanessa Carlton, The Barenaked Ladies, Matisyahu, Niel Diamond, Barry Manilow, Carley Simon, Paul Simon)