kfarcenter.com Blog

Welcome to J-ARTS, the Jewish Artists Regional Touring Service. Our goal is to help arrange contemporary Jewish performances in your community. J-ARTS is a talent broker, not a talent agency; our clients are synagogues, Federations, Hillels, schools, camps and other organizations and institutions.   We have extensive relationships with artists that we can leverage to meet your organization’s needs, and that is our first priority.

As experienced Jewish music presenters, we’re here to serve you with our knowledge and experience. We know what its like to put on these events and can provide practical advice, not a sales pitch. To serve the needs of your organization and tastes of your community, we work with a broad array of artists across a number of genres. We don’t push a specific artist on you; we provide options that can fit your programmatic and budgetary parameters.

To peruse the artists we work with, click on the Musical Acts button to the right and browse our roster by genre. Our aim is to your community stage a great event, be it a concert program, fundraiser, melava malka, Israel celebration, Bar Mitzvah or family Simcha.

Simchat Torah has just passed, and as we restart the cycle of reading the Torah, its worth noting something about the way our primary Jewish text begins. “B’reishit bara elokim et hashamyim v’et haaretz.” In the beginning, G-d created the heavens (waters) and the earth. But How curious that Hebrew grammer places the word for created, ‘bara,’ second… A more direct translation in the correct order emphasizes the creation act: “In the beginning, created…”

The first thing in the most sacred text in the world is creativity. In the tzim tzum of the ‘beginning’ came the ideation, the notion of nations, of imagining everything from clouds to the human genome. We marvel at everything that came next, which is a fascinating study of form and technique. But the real breakthough was the creative act, and HaShem the artist.

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We have just returned from New York, where very exciting things are happening. I was there speaking at Last week’s Sidney Krum Conference, which explored the state of cultural and the arts in American Jewish life. I attended dozens of Jewish performances as part of the 3rd annual Oyhoo! New York Jewish Hertiage and Music Festival.I also sat in on the NFJC’s conference to veiled the findings of important its study on the link between Jewish Arts Events and Young Adults. Tee New York UJA-Federation has just unveilved a $1 milliion investment in an exciting incubator for Jewish artists living in NYC. These are vibrant times for Jewish arts and culture, especially if you live in New York City.

Most of us, however, do not. And we sometimes feel left out on the trends or unaware of them at all. As presenters, educators, clergy members, institutional leaders and foremost as cheerleaders and grass-roots organizer of this “stiff-necked people,” our attentions are already stretched by budget reviews, board meetings, and endless demands by our constituents. We’ve got to stay hip with the times, too?

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Moadim L’Simcha! Thursday at sundown begins Shavuot, the celebration of the gift of Torah at Mt. Sinai. It is a time of learning, of dedication to study and the consumption of cheesecake! Shavuot is also inextricably tied to another holiday- Simchat Torah. Why two Torah-centric holidays? Both are seasons of Joy, but the manner of celebration for each is different. (more…)

Last Shabbat, we read Parshat Kedoshim, which explained the mitzvah of Tzitzit. As an English-speaker, the common translation of Tzitzit into “fringes” leads me to explore their contemporary implications of both the word and idea. Traditionally, the knotted fringes remind us of the 613 mitzvot and the four corners of the tallit on which they’re placed can represent the lands from which our people will return from exile. I’ve come to think of tallit as a wearable reminder of the impefection of life and the world around us.

Each of its fringes is a mitzvah yet to be woven into it, thus completing it, and the gathering of those fringes together from the four corners of our Tallit symbolically express hope for the gathering of exiles and redemption. Its a nice additional layer of meaning.

But with a State and modern transportation and communication, the nature of our exile has changed. Our Diaspora is now by and large spiritual, and our exiles those mentally distanced from Jewish life, for whom Jewishness is not at the center of their lives, but appropriately, on the fringes. We see them on the streets, at coffee shops and a couple times a year and on High Holidays. But we wish they were walking into and playing an active role in our institutions, not avoiding them. Each Jew is like a thread; hundreds of them woven together by the warp and woof of our heritage create the strong fabric of our communities, like a Tallit.