Debbie Friedman—who she? / Mue [sic] recommendations

[lethargic_man]

I read all over Facebook today that Debbie Friedman has died. I heard her perform at Limmud a few weeks ago. She gently poked fun then at the fact she was older than the last time she performed at Limmud, fifteen or so years ago; I don't think anyone was expecting this to be perhaps the last time she performed anywhere.

She was introduced as being the writer of loads of songs we'd all know, and everyone else in the audience was singing along with them, but the only song she performed that I knew was a tune to Psalm 150 that I know she didn't write, because we were told at Limmud last year that it was originally a Sufi tune. (Later, someone told me that she wrote one of the other tunes to Psalm 150 I know.)

Possibly her tunes are more widely known in the Reform movement, but I think this article was overstating it to say "She is the voice of the Jewish people of the 20th century."

So, nu, what songs of hers might I have known that she didn't perform at Limmud?

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Whilst I'm at it, what other bands/singers should I know about, that I didn't before, like Gogol Bordello. (I haven't listened to music radio since 2000, so anyone new since then who's not ultra-massive the chances are I don't know... but what little pop I have heard, hasn't impressed me much, which is why what someone (I forget who) termed the "weirdo" section of my music collection (Taraf de Haïdouks, Los Desterrados, Kočani Orkestar, Gogol Bordello, etc) is growing at present faster than the pop/rock section.)

Comments

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

As I heard it, until a few years ago, the Conservative movement was the largest, but it has recently been losing people to both left and the right, making it now smaller than the Reform movement.

Of course, nowadays the (small) majority of world Jewry is secular Jews in Israel. (And, at the outset of Friedman's career, the very large minority of world Jewry would have been secular Jews in the Soviet Union...)