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Sundown: Shofar Santa Claus

Rosh Hashanah at work, on stage, and in the Big Easy

by
Hadara Graubart
September 18, 2009

• What’s that strange sound coming down your office hallway? It might be your coworker’s avant garde jazz, or it might be Chabad Rabbi Aaron Cunin, who roams businesses in Silicon Valley the day before Rosh Hashanah, blowing the shofar and offering honey cake to harried Jews. [SJMN]
Jeremiah Lockwood, frontman for Jewish indie supergroup The Sway Machinery, talks about bringing the band’s project Hidden Melodies Revealed, a revitalization of Ashkenazic cantorial music, to the stage on Saturday night at Temple Emanu El in San Francisco for a Nextbook-sponsored New Year’s concert. [Mother Jones]
• The woman who will be leading the first Rosh Hashanah service at a synagogue in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina is grateful that “we have the opportunity to come together as a community, look in each other’s eyes and recognize that we may have lost material things … but we know that what matters is the spiritual.” [NPR]
• A video mocking the allegations of Swedish anti-Semitism since the blood libel incident takes aim at a pitifully easy target—campy pop group Abba—rewriting the band’s lyrics “Gimme, gimme, gimme a man after midnight” as “Primi, primi, primitive and phlegmatic.” Catchy! [JPost]
• Although Washington-area fashion guru Ernest Marx, who died last week, came to the States “in 1938 after the Nazi-led Kristallnacht attacks on Jewish businesses and homes,” a friend describes him as having been “like a pastor” when it came to style. [WP]

Hadara Graubart was formerly a writer and editor for Tablet Magazine.