Shifting Paradigms, Pandemic Realities: The Reception of Ishay Ribo’s Music in the American Hasidic Community

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has irrevocably changed the landscape of social, communal, and religious life. Within the Jewish community, reactions to the virus have taken many forms. One of the most visible and criticized populations, the Hasidic community of Brooklyn, has been the focus of attention from the media and press, and has responded in unprecedented ways, both in political and social arenas. Our close study of the evolution of a particular instance of atypical musical permissiveness in the period preceding COVID-19, and its subsequent development during the pandemic period itself, follows this metamorphosis, limning the shift in communal norms as expressed through the Hasidic embrace of the music of Ishay Ribo. Ribo, an Orthodox Jewish Israeli singer-songwriter, has produced a musical oeuvre that creatively draws upon Biblical and liturgical language to create original lyrics in modern Hebrew, in a soft-rock musical style. This unique fusion has garnered surprising popularity in the secular Israeli world, but has also made inroads into the American Hasidic community which had previously distanced itself from modern Israeli music, specifically music with modern Hebrew lyrics and in that stylistically differs from the community’s sonic norms. Ribo was introduced to the Hasidic music scene before the pandemic, but the marked uptick in the popularity of his music became most evident during the height of this period, as public gatherings and political engagement in the Brooklyn Hasidic community increased. In this study, we argue that these coeval phenomena are interrelated rather than coincidental, and bespeak a larger trend toward openness and interaction with the other that was bolstered by the circumstances of COVID-19.