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Indiana Hillel Group Invited to Perform at White House
October 24, 2006Comments (0) | Add | E-mail this to a friend
 Jewish vocalists at Indiana University rehearse before their performance at the White House.
An all-star group of Jewish vocalists from Indiana University has been invited to sing at the White House Chanukah party on December 18.
The 16-member group, affiliated with the Helene G. Simon Hillel Center at Indiana University, includes members of the popular IU men’s group, Straight No Chaser, as well as Hannah Farahan, a participant in IU Hillel’s Campus SuperStar™ Competition. The group will be directed by Prof. Judah M. Cohen, an IU professor of folkore and ethnomusicology and a specialist in Jewish music.
At the White House, the group will sing two songs, “Ma’Oz Tsur” and “Hatikvah” at a menorah-lighting ceremony attended by President Bush, First Lady Laura Bush and a few guests. Later, they will sing at a White House party with several hundred people in attendance, performing three songs, including a do-wop arrangement of “I Have a Little Dreidel.”
The group is part of a growing phenomenon of Jewish a cappella groups on college campuses singing a mix of traditional music songs to vocals-only rock.
Prof. Cohen, who helped start an a cappella group at Yale University in the early 1990s, said that Jewish a cappella incorporates elements of barbershop, Israeli and European choral music, liturgical songs, 1950s doo-wop and pop harmonies.
“Part of the fun of this is, it really is an important form of collegiate music-making extended into the performance realm," Cohen said.
Cohen is a recent arrival to the Bloomington campus, having arrived this fall to take an endowed chair in the Jewish studies program to teach and conduct research about Jewish culture in the arts. Being involved with a group that's invited to the White House is a good start he said.
"It's very exciting to be able to see this happen at IU as part of what I hope will be a real flowering of these kinds of groups," he said.
This is the second time that a Hillel group has performed at the White House. The University of Maryland, College Park Hillel’s Kol Sasson a cappella group entertained during the 2003 Chanukah party.
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