JEW UP
Most artists prefer to practice and wait for the phone to ring.
When I started out in klez, a Cleveland Irish musician, Dermot Somerville, told me: “You need to remind people you’re alive at least every six months.”
I do — X 26. As you know.
Yiddishe Cup is one of the most popular klezmer bands, because:
(1.) We’re good.
(2.) We promote ourselves.
I learned item #2 , and the chutzpah to say item #1, from my dad, who was not a WASP-modest George “Poppy” Bush kind of guy. My father said if you don’t toot your own horn, nobody will. When my father was at the hospital dying of leukemia, he told the doctor, “I own this place.” My dad owned a Cleveland Clinic municipal bond.
I used to be shy. So was my father. He took a Dale Carnegie course on public speaking. In my twenties, I was still shy; I heard a West Side hardware store owner say “jew down,” and it took me 20 minutes to sputter, “Bob, you know I’m Jewish.” (My family spent about $500 a month in that store. I figured Bob would be open to my viewpoint.)
Bob didn’t know “jew down” had anything to do with real Jews. He apologized. He was a decent guy.
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2 of 2 posts for 12/23/09
2 comments
The way I’ve always heard the expression is “You have to toot your own horn every so often or people will start to think it’s a funnel and dump shit in it”.
About a dozen years ago, a faculty physician attending one of my seminars with his resident physicians used the expression “jew down.” I was stunned – and the best I could do was to comment that, as Jew, I took exception to the term, and then move on in my presentation. His residents apologized to me during breaks throughout the day. The faculty physician never said a word to me. Though I had presented to this residency program’s physicians annually, they didn’t invite me back. Just as well.
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