Over the last two weeks, I’ve been generalizing Americanly on the musics of two of the world’s three major religions, in an effort to divine some cultural signals from their modes of musical communication. It has been a remarkable failure. If you missed it, and are lacking the requisite fingers or neurons to scroll down, I’ll summarize: a dollop of curiosity, a teaspoon of research, a soupçon of delicacy and sensitivity. Also, a sprinkle of MP3s, and the occasional “joke” for garnish. But now we’re on the subject of my people, so the gloves are fucking off. Because, really, If you can’t be honest about your own horned, penny-pinching, media-running people, then what can you be honest about? Cue the Shylock pic, for real this time!:

[Didn’t I fire you two weeks ago? –Ed.]

The Jew [Stop that! –Ed.] has an entire book consisting of one song, called the Haftorah. Its history is under some dispute, but most Jewish authorities agree that it was created after the Greeks conquered Judea in the second century, B.C.E., and banned all public reading of the Torah (Hebrew for “Old Testament”). So, the rabbis got together and cobbled together the early Talmudic writings of the Prophets (like the Gospels, with more complaining) and used the teachings in the Haftorah, derived from the original anyway, in their services. Showed them. They did a fun thing with the Haftorah too, etching in little dots, lines, and curlicues above the letters, representing notes, which are “sung” to this day by tone-deaf rabbis and hormonally-crazed thirteen-year-olds. I have a few MP3’s of real, synagogue readings of some portions, and you can find some more with a bit of Googling, but, honestly, spare yourself. We’re not singers. As a people, we have abnormally large sinuses. Think Bob Dylan, without the cool mystique.

So your friendly local temple (or “synagogue,” if you, like, really mean it) must go on an exhaustive search for the one Jew in any given 100-mile radius who can actually sing well, and this person is called the cantor. He leads the congregation in all the sung prayers, and gets all the tail. Not that Jewish prayers are a particularly snappy lot; they exist in deep minor keys, and roll by in dissonant hunks, with word-length peaks and valleys. Entire congregations of sinusoidal folks stand up and recite these weird contraptions on a weekly basis In Hebrew. It’s fucking crazy. It’s been so long, I forget how it’s done, but when it’s done correctly by a professional, as here—an archival recording from the Golden Voices Of the Synagogue compilation—it can have a strange, melancholic beauty to it. This particular prayer is one of atonement, and it sounds from the outside as if Sin is looked upon some shameful, sad human farce, with its doleful moans and impossible anti-phrasings, but I assure you, the hymns of Praise for the Almighty sound like that too.

More recently, John Zorn has been having his Judaica and eating too, throwing down half his label for his Radical Jewish Culture series of albums inspired by Jewish traditions or specific Jewish musicians (Serge Gainsbourg, Marc Bolan). So that’s your avant-jazz-klezmer niche covered. In 1993, Zorn inaugurated his new series with Kristallnacht, a horrifying take on the Night of Broken Glass that you only have to listen to once, and has put out dozens of records, featuring the best downtown boho Jewsicians that no money can buy, featuring the dulcet tones of my people mined through filaments of jazz, cool and skronk. Naming his ever-expanding song book and one of his bands Masada—after the fortified mountain taken from the Romans by Judah Galilee’s Zealots—and the other band Bar Kokhba—after a guerilla army raised against Hadrian a little earlier—is no small matter, beyond Zorn’s own long-standing affection for old-timey violence. His deconstructions have a similar way with history and tradition, and here, on a track from 1998’s Circle Maker, one of literally zillions of Masada-related discs, we hear the undulating downward-turns sheets of notes from violinist Mark Feldman and cellist Erik Friedlander, quickly devolving into chaotic scrapings and crashing about. This may or may not symbolize persecution. It probably symbolizes persecution.

Speaking of persecution, I haven’t mentioned straight klezmer really. Thing is, I don’t love it. It sounds like polka with a complex. I know that isn’t a reasoned, thought-out statement, but what is these days? And while we’re on the subject of reasoned, thought-out statements, we have here “Giuliani Uber Alles,” a semi-cover of the Dead Kennedys’ chestnut by Hasidic New Wave. Now, if you aren’t a virulent anti-Semite, the name Frank London should ring some bells as one of the founding members of the Klezmatics, the most renowned, and shred-happy, Western klezmer band. He broke off and formed the Hasidic New Wave with saxophonist Greg Wall, bringing with him a sack full of punk rock maneuvers, funk grooves, and screamin’ winger politics. This one here isn’t precisely representative of their hot megillah, but it is a klezmer-fied cover of a stone-cold punk-canon classic, complete with blaring horns on the chorus and a shout-down fervor unmatched by any of their peers.