Thursday, June 09, 2005

Not that rap is exactly poetry...

but I've had the Hip Hop Hoodios' version of "Hava Nagila" stuck in my head for a week now, damnit, and none of my Jewish poetry friends seem to know it, and they should:

I'm a Jew for thugs, a jew for hugs,
A Jew for lobster, a Jew for bugs;
A Jew for masturbation, five-week vacations,
A Jew for FDR, Salon, and The Nation.
Pass on Ronald Reagan--give me Donald Fagen!
(Ma Nishtana, Menachem Begin?)
And, of course, the chorus, which my daughter loves to holler at the most sublimely inappropriate moments:
I'm a Jew for Allah, a Jew for Jesus,
A Jew for milagros and telekenesis,
A Jew for you, a Jew for me,
A Jew for birds and a Jew for the bees...
Now if only my Hebrew were good enough to hear--but really hear--the wit and horror of "The Sticker Song," too!


2 comments:

E. M. Selinger said...

Welcome aboard! What are the "Big Muslim Blogs" out there (a poetry one, even) that I should know about?

Anonymous said...

I LOVE HIP HOP HOODIOS!!!

Don't get me wrong, "Havana Nagilah", is great. But has anybody heard the new album 'Agua Pa' La Gente'? It's even better - I've caught the video "Gorrito Cosmico" on MTV-Espanol a couple of times, and it's hilarioius.

I believe that unlike their 1st album, the new one is in places like Tower, Amazon, etc.