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I was recently asked, at a conference where I was teaching, if there is a uniquely Jewish musical idiom. To my questioner's dismay I said, "Probably not, unless you include the songs the Levites sang at the Temple...and we don't have that music anymore, just the lyrics." As a people, we've been very good at assimilating the local melodic modes, and using them in our own love songs and liturgy. We've done this in Eastern Europe, Morocco, India, Turkey, and Ethiopia and we have artists doing it today in America. To those who say, "But this new stuff doesn't sound Jewish," I say, "wait fifty years, it will sound Jewish to your grandchildren."
Miraj is one such group of artists, carving out a nice niche in the Jewish American musical landscape. It's a trio of women songwriters, Rabbis Rayzel Raphael, Juliet Spitzer and Margot Stein, who studied to become Reconstructionist rabbis together in Philadelphia, and who explore all kinds of American...