About the Project
The Bible Raps Album will be an album of raps, where each rap will be based on a prominent Biblical story
or Jewish figure. Sample raps, enriching and creative accounts of Cain and Abel, David and Goliath and Raquel and Akiva, can be heard on this website. Alongside the album, the initiative will use a curriculum aimed at young Jews from all religious backgrounds and streams. The Bible Raps Project will include curricular materials for each track. The curriculum, relating directly to the rap's subject matter, will further the innovative nature of the initiative through the use of Talmudic page construction, with the following components:
• modern and ancient commentary about the relevant Jewish texts
• discussion questions
• access to the Bible Rap website which will contain a deeper examination of the concepts.
After the album, the curriculum and the website are completed a tour will be arranged with Jewish day
schools, Hebrew schools, summer camps, Jewish organizations at universities and other forums for
Jewish/Biblical education. Beyond spreading the music, the ultimate purpose of the tour will be the refinement and expansion of the curriculum by having each educational institution incorporate the Bible Rap curriculum into some of their classes. After each performance, feedback will be ascertained, partnerships cemented, and pilot possibilities considered. After incorporating the input of literally hundreds of teachers and thousands of students, a refined and expanded Bible raps curriculum will be created: One that contains 40-60 hours of material that can be used as a positive tool for Jewish educators, injecting needed excitement into the Jewish educational experience without compromising the content. In short, Bible raps will be a bridge between the overt curriculum of Jewish education with the covert curriculum of what's coming through the students' ipod many hours each day. Instead of kids, singing to themselves, "booty, booty, booty everywhere," they'll be singing "ha shomer achi anoki," thus providing an access point for Jewish education. This access point will be exploited by a curriculum and a website.