A surprising look at the
entertainers for the JCC's
Stephen Gottlieb Musiffest.

Elizabeth Applebaum

Special to the Jewish News

B

efore each performance, Mike
Burstyn drinks a gleyzale tey, a
glass of tea.
Jazz great Jeff Haas is terrific at wiggling
his ears.
Debbie Friedman's father was a kosher
butcher.
Elaine Serling wanted to be a doctor
when she was little, and the Klezmatics
have collaborated with one of indie music's
biggest stars: Ben Folds.
They're the musicians, singers, songwrit-
ers behind some of our favorite songs, and
all will appear at the Jewish Community
Center of Metropolitan Detroit's Stephen
Gottlieb Jewish MusicFest 2008. The event,
chaired by Maida Frank Portnoy and
Martin Hollander, with Elaine Schonberger
as MusicFest director, will take place March
1-9. Also featured is the film Knowledge Is
the Beginning, the story of an orchestra of
80 young Arab and Jewish musicians.
But before you enjoy the show, here's a
peek at the more private side of the enter-
tainers.

DEBBIE FRIEDMAN
Debbie Friedman has been a leading
composer and performer of Jewish music
for 35 years. She has produced 21 albums.
Among her fans is Barney the dinosaur,
who has taught children across the world
how to sing the aleph-bet using her melo-
dy. Also ...
• In 1999, Debbie was inducted into the
hall of fame of Highland Park High School
in St. Paul, Minn., where she grew up.
Another of the school's famous grads: for-
mer Detroit Tiger pitcher Jack Morris.
• Debbie's song Mi Sheberach, a prayer for
those who are ill, often is used on the TV
program Strong Medicine.
• Debbie inherited her love of music from
her grandparents, who lived upstairs in the
family's home.
• Her first album, Sing Unto God, fea-
tured a collection of Shabbat songs origi-
nally intended just as a demo tape; when
1,000 copies were printed, they quickly
sold at the camp where she was a song
leader.
• Hallmark features a line of greeting
cards for Passover, Chanukah and Rosh
Hashanah, based on Debbie's song lyrics.

Debbie Friedman

MIKE BURSTYN
Since age 3, Mike Burstyn has been a star
of stage and screen, playing such diverse
characters as Kurt Weill, Al Jolson, Meyer
Lansky, Roy Cohn and Mayer Rothschild.
And ...
• Mike is a big fan of the late Frank
Sinatra, from whom "I learned everything I
know about diction and phrasing."
•When he was little, he wanted to be an
actor, a lawyer or an aeronautical engineer.
• Mike speaks eight languages and is now

Mike Burstyn

learning his ninth: Russian.
• One of the most interesting places he
performed was during the 1982 war in
Lebanon when, "as a reservist in the Israel
Defense Forces, I performed for a tank
unit in Beirut. I had just finished starring
in Barnum on Broadway, and the soldiers
asked me to re-create the famous tight-
rope song. I said I would, but there was no
tightrope to walk on — at which point they

Behind The Music on page C6

February 2102008

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