Klezmer Punks, Gangsta Rabbis: An Oral History of JDub Records

Mon, Nov 12, 2012

By Daniel Arkin

“Music is spiritual. The music business is not.” —Van Morrison

Ten years ago, JDub Records was a collegiate pipe dream. By 2006, it was the single coolest thing in Jewish popular culture. Five years later, JDub Records ceased to exist.

Even if you’ve never heard of JDub Records, you may have heard of the Hasidic reggae-rapper Matisyahu, their flagship artist. But the story is bigger than him.

It’s the story of a scrappy start-up that broke all the rules, revolutionizing Jewish music over eight years and thirty-six albums. It’s the story of the savvy innovators and radical artists who shook up Jewish popular culture at the dawn of a new millennium.

And who better to tell that story than the people who were there: the founders, the staff, and the artists. Nearly 20 JDub principals spoke to The Brooklyn Ink’s Daniel Arkin about their decade at the forefront of alternative music.

Aaron Bisman (Co-Founder; President and CEO): I studied music business at NYU.

Ben Hesse (Co-Founder): Aaron and I were at NYU together in the late 1990s, early 2000s.

Hesse: Aaron was a DJ and doing a lot of beat-making. I’d write songs to Aaron’s beats. We spent a lot of time in our apartment on the Lower East Side sampling and writing and recording music.

Bisman: We both schlepped our turntables around and we would DJ parties.

Hesse: We were into the downtown, Lower East Side experimental music scene. We were into the stuff John Zorn and Tzadik Records label were pushing out of Tonic. It was secular, abstract. At the same time, I was hanging out with a lot of Hasidim and Lubavitchers in Brooklyn, listening to a lot of old Eastern European Jewish music.

Bisman: Ben holed himself up at home and taught himself to use ProTools, which back then was very expensive. He came out of it with a really interesting project. It was some songs, some soundscapes, some in Hebrew, some with Hasidic melodies.

Hesse: Aaron and I saw there was a void between those two worlds: secular, esoteric sort of music and religious sort of music. There was really nothing in between.

Bisman: We saw no one else doing anything like it, professionally or artistically. We got really excited about it. We asked ourselves, ‘What should we do with this music?’

Hesse: Aaron was very much interested in running a label. We started applying for grants.

Bisman: I knew about Joshua Venture, which gives you 60,000 dollars over two years, plus training. I applied. We spent about six months during our senior year at NYU hashing out ideas for the grant application.

Hesse: Aaron and I started kicking around the idea of JDub. It was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if Jewish music wasn’t just Hava Nagila and Fiddler on the Roof kitsch?’

Bisman: The American Jewish world had done a really crappy job of creating meaningful culture for young people beyond Jewish summer camps and a few other things.

Hesse: Jewish music was just cornball.

Bisman: The idea was, I want to make music that some high school kid in the Midwest can play in his car and bump and really feel: ‘It’s cool, it’s mine, it’s Jewish, and I’m totally proud of that.’ I remember being sixteen, working at Camp Ramah in California. One day I went to a Phish show at the Ventura County Fairgrounds. Fifty-thousand people there. Trey [Anatasio], who’s not Jewish, broke into ‘Avinu Malkeinu,’ singing in Hebrew, and doing a damn good job. I looked around and saw recognition on other people’s faces. It was a powerful, transformative moment. We wanted to create those moments for other people.