Ruby Harris – Founding Member of the Diaspora Yeshiva Band –
Is Still Going Strong
Let’s talk about rock music — the kind many of us associate with a certain age, a certain season of life, and maybe a little bit of youthful nostalgia. Nothing scandalous here, I assure you.
I started listening to rock music when I was in high school, and I still like to listen to it occasionally. My most favorite music is Jewish music, but when I am alone in the car without the kids, I like to listen to other genres as well, including rock n’ roll. But I wasn’t aware of any Jewish rock – like the real deal, with all the distorted guitars, drums, and “good vibes.” Modern Jewish music is not what it used to be, which is something I talk about a lot in this column. In the last couple of years, EDM (Electronic Dance Music) has found its way into Jewish music. But rock? I didn’t think so.
It turns out there was a Jewish rock band which had its roots in the 60s but was active in the 70s and 80s, and somehow, I was not aware of them. (It happens, I suppose…) So I was very happy when, a few weeks ago, I was invited to interview Rubin (Ruby) Harris, one of the original members of the Diaspora Yeshiva Band, the band that invented Jewish rock.
It was one of the most interesting interviews I’ve ever done. The man is like an open encyclopedia of music. We spoke about the history of rock n’ roll, Jewish music, klezmer, the Diaspora Yeshiva Band, and Harris’s own story. While a typical interview usually takes about 40 minutes to an hour, with Harris it was double that, spread over more than one fascinating call. He kept adding more and more pieces of information, history, and stories.
We started by talking about how rock n’ roll began. When Elvis Presley popularized the genre, some said it was a very bad thing. People over age 20 were more comfortable with the great music of the 1930s and 40s. They liked classical, swing, Broadway, and Hollywood tunes. Suddenly, along came a guy with a guitar and jumped around, and most of the adults just didn’t get it.
Before World War II, kids used to come home and go to work in the family business, on the farm, or in the factory. After the war, it was a time of prosperity for Americans, so young people had more free time. They used to head down to the ice cream parlor, drink some Coca-Cola, and just hang out; they had nothing to do. In those days, music was for everybody – swing music was for both adults and kids. But then the music industry invented a new genre for these lost teenagers, and called it rock n’ roll.
In the beginning, rock developed out of blues and country. Elvis came from those roots. They then made faster beats with electric instruments, and that became rock n’ roll, a term coined by Cleveland DJ Allen Freed, who was Jewish.
At this point in the interview, Harris mentions to me what I assumed: that the introduction of electric guitars by Fender and Gibson contributed to the development of rock n’ roll, and he tells me the following story:
Little Walter was the leader of a blues band in the 50s. His bass player was Dave Meyers (whom Harris actually got a chance to play with in Chicago in the late 80s). One day, in approximately 1953, a man from Fender opened up a case and said, “I have something new for you: an electric bass.” So, Dave Meyers got one of the first – a brand-new Fender bass, and he really liked it. With his electric bass incorporated into blues, the band – along with a few other famous innovators – basically invented rock n’ roll.
Harris tells me another interesting historical fact about rock n’ roll: Apparently, the Beatles named themselves after the Crickets, who were an American rock n’ roll band formed in 1957 by singer-songwriter Buddy Holly, who also helped influence the Beatles to write their own songs. Holly played a Fender electric guitar. Some of his songs were based on the music of Bo Diddley, another great Chicago blues player, guitarist, singer, and songwriter who played a key role in the transition from blues to rock n’ roll. He played on Chess Records, founded by a Jewish-Polish family, with Little Walter, Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, and Willie Dixon, who were the blues masters. Rock n’ roll was the offspring of the blues, explains Harris. In fact, Muddy Waters has a song called “The Blues Had a Baby and They called It Rock ’n Roll.”
Chuck Berry was another one of the musicians who invented rock n’ roll. Also, a Chess Records recording artist, he was a genius in lyrics, music, and guitar-playing, and the most copied guitarist in history.
And there we have it: Just a few of the legends of the invention of rock n’ roll.
Harris himself worked with some of the people who invented rock n’ roll, including Elvis Presley’s band, the Sun Records Original Rockabilly All Stars, which recorded and performed in both America and Europe.
I ask Harris whether the development of electric guitars and distortion also contributed to rock music. He tells me that Dale Hawkins, another American rock singer (part of that All Stars band I just mentioned) once broke his amplifier and his guitar sounded distorted. This became one of the first uses of distortion.
Harris was born in 1955 in Long Island, New York, a baby boomer, and grew up in Forest Hills and Great Neck. His mother, from a Williamsburg family, was in the record business in the 40s on Broadway, specializing in jazz and popular music. He went to public and Hebrew schools. Way before the Persian invasion of Great Neck, it was mostly former Brooklyn Jews – from Williamsburg, Brownsville, and Boro Park.
He and all his friends liked three things when they were kids: the Beatles, the Yankees, and pizza. They wanted to be American and didn’t care too much about Jewish things. And they wanted to be modern – so they were interested in TV, electronics, cars, and so on.
At age six, Harris started to play the violin. His parents sent him to music school because his uncle had given him a violin, and he joined the school orchestra, which he played in for five years. Then his sister started on guitar, so he picked that up too. Everybody wanted to play Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and all those great 60s artists, and eventually, in high school, he played in a rock n’ roll band. His music background was a combination of opera, jazz, blues, TV themes, and early rock n’ roll.
Toward the end of high school, he got a job at Patrick’s Pub in Douglaston and played Irish music there for two years. He then went to Manhattan School of Music and studied violin. During that period, he also started to play jazz, Irish, and bluegrass.
After his time at the Manhattan School of Music, Harris, also being an artist, attended the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he studied environmental design and commercial art.
Between 1965 and 1975, he was very lucky to attend many concerts of all the great musicians of those legendary times – Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, and countless other legends.
In 1975, Harris took off for Europe, with a plan to study music and art for one year. It was a fantastic year, he says. He traveled all over Europe: Scotland, Ireland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Greece, etc., and took in all the music you can imagine in those countries.
In Rome, when he saw the statue of Moses by Michelangelo, he had a revelation: He said to himself, “This is my people.” At that time, he was spiritual but basically secular, and he decided to go visit Israel. It was his first time there.
In 1976, he took a flight to Tel Aviv from Athens, which cost $75. He traveled all around Israel for one month – Megiddo, Tel Aviv, Golan, Tzfat, Beersheva, etc. Then he discovered Mt. Zion and the Diaspora Yeshiva, where he started learning Torah and joined their band.
How did he get to the Diaspora Yeshiva? When he arrived in Israel, he started playing music with a Jewish American girl who had moved there from Boston. After about a week at her place in Rechavia, she suggested a yeshiva in Jerusalem where he could learn Jewish history and also play music because they had some other fiddlers, plus he could get free food and a place to stay. At that time, he was living what they called the beatnik/hippie lifestyle. They continued to date and stayed friends (even till today!).
At this point of his life, he didn’t even know what a yeshiva is, or what Shabbat is, or what Mishna is. He had heard a little as a child in New York, but was basically a tinok shenishba. He now wanted to learn about Israel and the Jewish people. \
It was only about nine years since his bar mitzvah in Great Neck, and he had thought he was free of all that. As was very common amongst Jewish teenagers at the time, he hadn’t wanted anything more to do with Judaism. He wanted to just be American, to have fun, go to concerts, and enjoy baseball and rock n’ roll. He was a typical American hippie. In those days, the other yeshivas in Israel did not welcome hippies.
But now he wanted to know more. So, in 1976, he began to learn in the Diaspora Yeshiva and stayed there for five years, where he studied Torah and made music. The Diaspora Yeshiva Band (“DYB”) started coming together around 1975, and when he began to learn in the yeshiva, he became one of the founding members, and together with the other guys, made it famous. Before he got there, they were mostly playing and jamming, but when he joined, they made a six-piece band and started officially – they made recordings, did their first world tour, won festival prizes, and actually became famous.
The Diaspora Yeshiva has an interesting story. Founded in 1966 by Rabbi Dr. Mordechai Goldstein, it became a yeshiva for hippies. A group of baalei teshuva came from all over the world to the center and the source: Mt. Zion in Jerusalem – Biblical ground zero, home of Abraham, David, Solomon, and all the rest. These students brought with them their musical talents, and combined with their new, Divinely inspired enthusiasm for the Torah, they wrote and played some of the most beloved songs of the era, many of which are still among today’s favorites: “Ivdu!,” “Malchuscha,” “Pitchu Li,” “Hafachta,” “Tzadik,” “Hu Yiftach Libenu,” and more.
DYB consisted of six people: Avraham Rosenblum, Ben Zion Solomon, Simcha Abrahamsom, Ruby Harris, Gedalya Goldstein, and Adam Wexler, later substituted by Menachem Herman. And earlier there were Moshe Shur, Shimi Green, Chaim David, Ted and Beryl Glazer, Yochanan Lederman, Tzvi Miller, Yosel Rosenzweig, and Chaim Dovid Saracik. Over the years, there were six rabbis in the band. Avraham Rosenblum was the lead singer. A great electric guitarist and composer, he was responsible for making DYB famous.
The children and students of DYB members make up some of the top bands today: Moshav, Soulfarm, Solomon Brothers. Talmidim and fans include Shlomo and Eitan Katz, the Razel brothers, Matisyahu, Joey Newcomb, Shwekey, Benny Friedman, Yehudah Green, 8th Day, Zusha, Pumbedisa, Rogers Park Band, and old die-hard fans include MBD, Avraham Fried, Nahum Segal, Shelly Lang, Dudu, Dedi, Ding, and many more. It all started with DYB!
At the yeshiva, they sat next to a giant book, and Harris asked: “What is it?” And they told him, “This is the Talmud.” During this time, he also attended ulpan where he learned Hebrew. After asking many questions, he decided, in addition to music, to focus on learning Gemara, Torah – all this new stuff he was discovering.
Mt. Zion (Har Tzion) is where King David played his music and wrote Tehillim as a shepherd. It is next door to the Temple Mount, which is visible from the roof of King David’s tomb. There’s a lot of history there, from the Six-Day War, the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate, the Crusades, the Canaanites – everything. Harris eventually married on that rooftop, with the band playing in the background.
DYB performed for Prime Ministers Begin, Shamir, Sharon, Peres, and Rabin; for Rav Ovadia Yosef, zt”l, for Abba Eban, presidents, and countless others. They also played with Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach many times, including on classic recordings. They performed all over the world, including Carnegie Hall, Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, and many more places. They performed with many famous Israeli, Jewish, chassidic, and popular artists. In the late 1970s, they were a sensation when they won first place three years in a row at the World Chassidic Festival in Israel with the songs “Hu Yiftach,” “Malchutcha,” and “Pitchu Li,” respectively, and continued to win more top prizes after that.
Their banjo player, Ben Zion Solomon, lived next door to Rabbi Carlebach on Moshav Modiin, and his son Noach founded Soul Farm, while his other son Yehuda founded the Moshav Band, and even more sons make up the Solomon Brothers band. Ben Zion and Moshe Shur had met Rabbi Carlebach in the 60s in San Francisco, along with Martin Luther King, Jr., Bob Dylan, and Jerry Garcia.
The mid-70s saw the rebirth of klezmer music, and DYB played klezmer rock, Yiddish country, chassidic blues, Sephardi jazz, Israeli, and more. Harris toured the world with DYB, and also played with other musicians and bands, such as Hankus Netsky from the Klezmer Conservatory Band, Andy Statman, and Klezmatics’ Frank London, plus he played with famous Israeli musicians Tzvika Pick, Matti Caspi, Shuli Natan, Geula Gill, the Parvarim, Dudaim, Piamenta, Arik Einstein, Uri Zohar, Yosef Karduner, and others.
In 1985, he formed the Jerusalem Blues Band with Emil Leuchter, which jammed in the Holy City for a few fun years, plus he played with a great local band called the Taverners.
While in Israel, Harris worked as an artist/graphic designer for Ben Gasner and artist Michel Schwartz, and painted signs in addition to making music. He married an American Jewish woman and had four children. Altogether, he spent about 12 years in Israel.
In 1988, they moved back to the U.S. and settled in Chicago, where he got semicha from Touro HTC college. But he has always continued to work in music.
Harris has played for Presidents Clinton and Obama and Mayors Daley and Giuliani, and has played with members of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, Shelly Lang, Joey Newcomb, Matisyahu, and Zusha! He has his own band, and also plays with the Rogers Park band. He plays violin, guitar, harmonica, and mandolin.
Today, Rabbi Rubin Harris lives in Chicago with his wife Lynn, works as a chaplain in a hospital, and learns in kollel. He still plays all kinds of music everywhere, especially Jewish, rock, blues, klezmer, and jazz.
He plans to move back to Israel in the near future.
You can find more information about Harris and hear his three great albums on his website, www.rubyharrismusic.net.