”Y-Love, the son of a Puerto Rican mother and Ethiopian-American father, grew up in Baltimore. He gravitated to the Jewish faith at the age of seven, telling his mother he wanted to celebrate Passover after he saw a TV commercial for the Jewish festival. His mom arranged for him to attend a Jewish coworker’s Passover Seder. They gave him a yarmulke, and by the age of 14 he wore it daily together with other Jewish religious articles.” That was many moons ago. Meet Y-Love on Shtetl and find out what he’s up to today, whether he can still rhyme in Hebrew, Aramaic, Yiddish and Arabic after all these years, and how he feels about race, the Gulf spill, Islam, Jewish unity, Jewish community and a whole lot more.
I spoke with Y-Love at an Israeli restaurant in Brooklyn and was blown away by this one-of-a-kind human and Hasidic hip-hop artist who’ll be playing in Montreal as part of the Off Jazz Fest at the Ghetto Shul. His new album This is Unity hasn’t been released yet, but it’s true, you can hear never before heard tracks off the album tomorrow on Shtetl!
Speaking of Brooklyn, we’ll also get to hear about the true story of a drug cartel in the 90’s that used Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn to smuggle Ecstacy pills from Europe. I ain’t making this stuff up. Swear it. The film stars Jesse Eisenberg (of Zombieland, and from the best movie ever: The Squid and the Whale) and opens tomorrow in Montreal. We talk with director Kevin Asch to get the scoop on Holy Rollers.
Music by RAC, Y-Love and The Barry Sisters.
Thanks for tuning in!
Tamara
And here’s a little extra Y-Love for you. Yitz tells us how Jews learned about kosher wine, about tough Montreal chicks, but he starts with where we left off before we got chatting with the Israeli waiter in the last clip. enjoy!
