Courtesy of Modular Moods Records, The Telegraph is pleased to present the new collaboration between Jewish hip-hop artists Y-Love and Kosha Dillz.

Y-Love, who is currently touring internationally, jumping from Jewish conferences to secular hip-hop events, released his debut album This is Babylon earlier this year to rave reviews from mainstream hip-hop publications like XXL, XLR8R and URB, several of which described his music as “revolutionary.”

Kosha Dillz, the latest addition to the Modular family, is an Israeli-American emcee who has been cited by URB as “a universal voice” and “a rarely seen culture clash in music.” Dillz has performed with the likes of Matisyahu, Pharcyde and Jurassic 5, and will see his first Modular recording, a collaboration with rapper C Rayz Walz, released later this summer.

You can listen to Y-Love and Kosha Dillz’s collaboration below.

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Now visiting the Western Wall as part of Migdal Ohr’s NBA Legends Goodwill Tour to Israel, from the University of Massachusetts, at 6′6, number 6, Dr. J, Julius Errrrrrrrrrrrrrving…

This video of Bob Dylan’s pro-Israel song “Neighborhood Bully” is making the rounds on the Internet:

Mazal Tov to JTA’s director of digital media, Daniel Sieradski, for being picked as one of the Jewish Week’s 36 Jewish innovators under the age of 36. (Who says the competition is always wrong?)

Daniel Sieradski, 29
Founder of Jewschool and Jew It Yourself;
Director of Digital Media for JTA

When Dan Sieradski founded Jewschool.com in 2002, he didn’t quite realize what he was getting himself into.

“We were the accidental roots for progressive Jewish communities,” he says. “We didn’t mean to start a movement. We were creating something that was obviously needed.”
The Web site, a blog with a variety of contributors covering Jewish topics from politics to tradition and culture, had 50,000 monthly readers at its peak and 80 international contributors. As with all variations from the norm, there was opposition, and in the age of the Internet, opposition is ceaseless.

“I’d get phone calls from ardent Zionists at four in the morning,” Sieradski said, recalling those upset by the blog’s critique of Israel policy. He’s had to abandon multiple email addresses due to pointed spam attacks by unappreciative readers. For now, he remains on the board of Jewschool, but has curtailed his blogging.

His new project, Jew It Yourself, an online network providing tools and resources to Jewish individuals and communities to help them engage in Jewish learning on their own, is on hold until it gets a visit from the funding fairy. Among the innovative ideas set for the site is Shul Shopper, a “Zagat meets Wikipedia” for Jews looking for a prayer community to fit their needs. Users would be able to input their criteria and Shul Shopper would match them to a searchable list of possibilities, where they could peruse reviews and ratings as well as a connection to Facebook, which would find other locals with the same preferences. The site would also include an open-source beit midrash, tools for learning how to read Hebrew, and voiceover IP chevruta for the entire spectrum of Jewish communities.

Inspiration: His mom, Jeanette Friedman-Sieradski, a journalist. “Her commitment to pursue justice and fighting for a Judaism that’s inviting, welcoming and authentic has given me a sense of obligation to pursue the same mission.” Strangest job: Working at a golf course as a “garage guy,” loading clubs from car to cart, washing both clubs and cart for the argyle-and-spiked-shoe crowd.
— Randi Sherman

See the full list.

The Tallahassee Democrat ran an article about the legislative push being launched by Irv Hoffman, whose 23-year-old daughter, Rachel, was killed earlier this month while taking part in a drug sting. She reportedly agreed to be an informant after being arrested on drug charges.

“I don’t think kids should be doing police work,” Irv Hoffman said Monday from his Palm Harbor home. “I am going to try to get a Rachel Law going so kids aren’t used in this way.”

The newspaper ran an earlier story on her funeral, during which her rabbi read from her Bat Mitzvah speech.

Click here to watch a local television segment headlined “Who was Rachel Hoffman.”

Students for Sensible Drug Policy, a campus group with which Hoffman was involved, have setup a page on their website encouraging people to donate to a fund to help get the law passed.

In the current issue of New Voices, the magazine written by and for Jewish college students …

A report on assertions by some students that the threat of anti-Semitism is being exaggerated by outside Jewish groups.

A look at how other ethnic groups are looking to replicate Birthright – and what the implications are for the melting pot.

An interview with Newark Mayor Cory Booker in which he talks about the future of the American city, a politics of hope and Shmuley Boteach.

The publication is also sponsoring a May 28 panel discussion titled “Jews, Blacks, and the Post-Racial Candidate.” Speakers include: Ari Berman (The Nation), Ta-Nehisi Coates (Village Voice and The Atlantic Monthly) and Sam Freedman (Professor of Journalism, Columbia University and New York Times columnist).

Kind of weird last Tuesday night listening to Adam Mansbach, a nice Jewish boy from Newton, MA, tell a bunch of white Jews at the San Francisco JCC he was a dope emcee who grew up listening to hip hop.

Sure, Jewish kids are fascinated by black culture, said the 32-year-old Berkeley author of “The End of the Jews,” his third novel about race, hip-hop, and alienated young Jews trying to find their place in the world. His second book, “Angry Black White Boy,” is taught in more than three dozen universities, and is in development as a feature film.

Mansbach talks fast, in a rhythmic, jazzy kind of patter that prompted one audience member to ask why he “talked black,” a suggestion Mansbach dismissed. “What does that even mean?” he asked.

“This book is about margins,” he told the crowd. “If we look at the Jewish community of the past, those artists we value most highly occupied those margins. That’s where creativity happens.”

Mansbach spoke about his own early attraction to black culture, when he’d ride the bus that brought black kids to his heavily Jewish suburban school back to their African American neighborhoods to hang out and listen to the music that meant more to him than the Hebrew school he was thrown out of. In a world where chain stores use hip-hop to sell everything from computers to running shoes, he wondered, where does one draw the line between cultural appreciation and appropriation?

Oh yeah, that scary title. Once he was at a bar mitzvah with his grandfather, a retired law professor and judge from the Bronx whom Mansbach calls “brilliant, a heavy dude.” The gentleman surveyed the scene, with the Mexican hats and the over-sized sunglasses and the cheesy games and the extravagant buffet, turned to his grandson and muttered, “it’s the end of the Jews.”

It’s not, of course. But it makes good cover copy.

An audio segment of the author in conversation with Dan Schifrin, writer-in-residence at the soon-to-open Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, follows:

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The man behind the NPR program “This American Life” believes in stories, not in God. But, in an interview with Beliefnet, he has interesting things to say about his Jewish upbringing and religion generally:

Would you want your kids to bar mitzvah?

I don’t know. Culturally I am a Jew. I don’t have a choice about it. You can’t lose your cultural heritage like luggage at the airport. It’s a part of me. But my kids…it is weird to indoctrinate your child into something that you don’t believe. It violates some sort of golden rule. I don’t think it is bad to raise your child as an atheist, but I say that as someone without children.

I have to say that when I go to synagogue I find it very…if you don’t believe in God, what business do you have being in a synagogue? When I go into a synagogue, I know the songs, I read Hebrew, it is very reassuring to be there. It is a part of my life that hasn’t changed; it is like walking back into my childhood. But at some point you do notice the words and prayers and, as someone who doesn’t believe, it feels weird to use other’s moment of worship as a moment of nostalgia. It feels disrespectful; they are not there to entertain me. It feels strange to be chanting something with everyone else, but not believe it – it feels wrong. …

When you are interviewing religious people, do you think that their belief is just an experience that differs from your own or do think they are delusional?

I have a polite and a not-so-polite answer, and the polite answer is a huge part of what I feel. And that answer is: that is their experience of the world, it is different than mine. And then there is another part of me that is not so charitable which feels that what they are saying is nonsense. There is no big daddy in the sky but they need to tell themselves this story for whatever reason, and I am glad that is not me.

Ten years ago, when I was thinking about religion a lot more because a lot of things were happening at the same time, I did have moments when I really wished that I had faith, that I had the reassurance of that, that I could believe. But I don’t feel that way any more at all–ever. A couple of years ago I read a book by Bertrand Russell called “Why I Am Not a Christian.” And he lays out a thesis for how destructive religion is, and I remember thinking, “Wow, that is not someone who was raised in the United States of America.” Before that, it had not occurred to me that religion was causing a lot of unhappiness for people–people are estranged from each of other, people think there is something wrong with themselves because the faith they were raised in tells them that they are sick, whatever it is. But I wasn’t seeing this part, because the people who I am closest to who have faith, their experiences of it are so positive.

Sunday’s New York Times marks Israel’s 60th birthday with four Op-Eds about the Jewish state.

Thomas Friedman writes that the whispering campaign to stoke Jewish fears about Barack Obama is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the U.S. president in supporting Israel and promoting a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Jeffrey Goldberg, who recently interviewed Obama for The Atlantic, draws on his conversations with Ehud Olmert for a story in that same magazine to argue that American Jews are the monkey wrench in the peace process. He throws the U.S. Jewish organizational world some bones — “The people of AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents are well meaning,” he writes — but, echoing the arguments of the new left-wing, pro-Israel lobbying group J Street, Goldberg writes that being pro-Israel sometimes means saying no to Jewish settlement in the West Bank and yes to a Palestinian state.

In her essay, Ruth Gruber recall the stateless Holocaust refugees for whom Israel’s establishment was a godsend.

And in the obligatory “Nakba” piece, Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury ponders the “catastrophe” of Israel’s existence for the Palestinian Arabs. While an eloquent expression of Arab sentiment about Israel, Khoury ignores the nakba of the last 60 years: the Arab world’s insistence on keeping the Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war homeless and disenfranchised, outsiders even after it became obvious they would never return to their homes in the Jewish state.

The Times’ coverage Sunday also included an insightful, amusing and depressing Reporter’s Notebook by Sheryl Gay Stolberg about President Bush’s Middle East tour. Turns out he doesn’t quite understand why Arabs and Jews don’t dance together.

On Monday, the Times added another a feature about how Israeli artists are undergoing a rare flowering, gaining international recognition for works that make universal statements about very Israeli phenomena.

The Jewish culture folks over at Nextbook are putting on the latest installment of their Festivals of Ideas series Sunday in New York. Among the literati lined up to talk about Jews and Power: Cynthia Ozick, Shalom Auslander, Ruth Wisse, and Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg.

Nowhere on the Web page, however, is it noted the irony of the festival venue — The Times Center, the event space on the ground floor of the gleaming new headquarters of the New York Times. Whether you see the Times as the citadel of American Jewish power or as the symbol of Diaspora Jewish weakness, it’s an interesting choice.