The Forward: "Holy Hip-Hop." By Bari Weiss
It’s Saturday night in Jerusalem’s Talbieh neighborhood, and a crowd of 50 is gathered to hear Matt Bar rap about the Bible. The lanky Iowa City native has achieved a kind of celebrity among young Anglos in Jerusalem with his Bible Raps project, a phenomenon he’s hoping to repeat this summer when he travels to Jewish summer camps across America.... Read more!
THE PASSOVER VIDEO!!! Watch it here!!!
THE PURIM VIDEO!!! You will laugh! Brought to you in partnership with Hypersemetic. Watch it here!!!
HaAretz: "Bible rapper infuses Jewish education with his rhymes." By, Daphna Berman
Matt Bar was a fledgling musician in New York supplementing his income as a Hebrew school teacher when he hit on the idea of inventing Bible raps. Now, he's spearheading a movement based on his raps to fuse popular music with Jewish education. A 'folk rapper' by profession, he was trying to keep a group of middle school kids interested in Bible, Hebrew, and yet another lesson on Jewish tradition one Sunday morning when he decided to rap for them as a kind of "carrot" to keep them well-behaved.
"The disposition of the class turned around 180 degrees and I realized I was on to something," he recalls. But then Bar ran out of "clean" material and so last year, he began composing new raps with Biblical themes for his pint-sized groupies with themes that ranged from Noah's flood to the ten plagues. "The very idea that Hebrew school can be exciting is a very big deal," he said in a recent interview. "Soon, I realized I was looking forward to my Sunday shows more than my Thursday shows. I'm used to a performance when you have 45 minutes and then you're off the stage. Here, I would talk afterwards and engage the students. It combined everything I enjoyed: learning about Judaism, teaching about Judaism, and music."
Bar - who now lives in Jerusalem-is trying to harness that energy to create a Bible rap movement that he says is entirely disconnected from previous attempts at Jewish rap. He says Jewish rap - with names like Fifty Shekel or Jew Tang Clan and lines like "You can see me in the shul because davening is cool"-is very often kitschy. "My rap isn't kitchy," he insists. "I am a rapper and I see it as a means of organizing language, just like iambic pentameter or a haiku. Through iambic pentameter, Shakespeare reached depths and through rap, I also believed that you can reach the real spirit of things."
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Israel National Radio with Ben Bresky
Hear Matt perform and talk about The Bible Raps Project on Israel National Radio here!
Shiur Times: Rising Star - Matt Bar's Bible Raps Project
Using narratives from tanach and Midrash in a new art form helps Jewish students appreciate their heritage... Read more.
MyJewishLearning.com: The Bible Raps Project
Everyone has different ways of learning about the weekly Torah portions: reading the actual text, studying d’vrei torah, acting out the stories. But now you can listen to raps about parsha hashavua.
Matt Bar, formerly known as the Ramblin’ MC, is working on a fantastic project...
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World On the Web: God Big Wheel and Ceiling Cat, By Alisa Harris
Bible Rapper Matt Bar used rap to hold the attention of his middle school Hebrew class and then attempted to spur a Bible Rap Movement... Read more
MASA Profile: Matt Bar and Bible Raps. By, Erin Kopelow
Through the combination of business, creative and educational exposure at the PresentTense Institute for Creative Zionism (PICZ) and the Pardes Institute for Jewish Studies, Matt Bar's Bible Raps Project has the potential to become an educational enterprise in Hebrew school classrooms around the world... Read more
The Bible Raps Project on NPR affiliated
"The Exchange." Click here to hear!
Israeli Museum ROI opening dinner. Y-Love on the beats!
Institute for Creative Zionism. "David and Goliath."
The Forward: A Youthful House, By Mattheu Roth
...For American self-described folk-rapper Matt Bar, the PresenTense House was supposed to be a brief stopover on his trip to Israel. “I thought I only needed to be put up for two weeks,” he said. “They made some room for me in a corner with a little mat to sleep on. After my time was up, I didn’t want to leave… being a resident was integral to the [PresenTense House] experience and added to my productivity.”
Bar is currently working on a Hebrew school curriculum structured around hip hop, and he plans to write a song for each of the 54 weekly Torah readings. Before the program began, he had written three songs. By its conclusion he had not only written seven or eight more, but also found two collaborators (including Hasidic M.C. Y-Love, a sporadic guest at the House) and a producer (PresenTense participant Ori Salzburg, who runs the music label Doogree Records)...
JTA: Cooking Up Fresh Ideas in Jerusalem, Uriel Heilman
Beyond all the argot and hype, it appeared as if something indeed was being accomplished at 3 HaRan St., where the Creative Zionism Institute is housed in an apartment turned dormitory with a broadband Internet connection. Wires crisscrossed the floor where one fellow sat tapping out computer code for an easy-to-use Web-based publishing system, while another, Matt Bar, worked on Bible-inspired rap music (http://mattbar.com/music-43.html).