80 | MARCH 30 • 2023
I
t’s no secret that many of the composers
who built the Great American Songbook
— Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George
and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen among
them — were Jewish.
Less celebrated, however, are the
Jewish women in those ranks. But Hadar
Orshalimy hopes to change that.
On March 8, International Women’s Day,
the Israeli-born, New York-based singer
and songwriter released a new album,
“Witchcraft,
” featuring nine pop standards
penned or co-written by Jewish women. Her
selections range from hits — Kern’s “The
Way You Look Tonight” (lyrics by Dorothy
Fields), “The Best is Yet to Come” and
“Young at Heart” (lyrics for both by Carolyn
Leigh) — while others represent deeper
digs, such as Ann Ronell’s “Willow Weep for
Me,
” which has been recorded more than
800 times, and Ruth Lowe’s “I’ll Never Smile
Again.
”
Presenting them together, “Witchcraft” is
both tribute and testimonial, shining a light
on artists whose contributions are not fully
appreciated.
“These women were amazing,
” Orshalimy,
41, says by phone from the New York City
home she shares with her husband and fel-
low musician, Sheldon Low, and their nearly
2-year-old daughter. “They were as badass
as the male writers at the time were — these
women were 10 times more badass. They
literally all went against every social norm
at the time — not just being Jewish, which
in the 1920s and 1930s meant you couldn’t
work anywhere. My grandmother couldn’t
get a job at Ford because she was Jewish,
right? And being women, whose ‘job’ was
to stay home and have babies, they had to
work double hard.
“So, as a Jewish woman who has a young
daughter now, and with women’s rights
being challenged and the incredibly high
rise in antisemitism, I felt like this is the
time to do something
positive and celebrate and
honor these women and
give them the recognition
they probably never got.
”
Orshalimy’s own
music journey began
in Tel Aviv, though her
mother (maiden name
Beth Ann Fishman)
was born in Detroit,
attending Mumford High
School; the singer and
her family spent summers visiting family,
many of whom are still in the suburbs. “My
mom’s entire family is very, very musical,
”
Orshalimy says. “Family time would usually
involve sitting at the piano, testing each
other’s ear — who can get the right chord to
which song. Some people watch sports, this
is what we used to do.
”
A musical career trajectory “wasn’t even a
choice,
” she adds. “It was just kind of always
there. I studied music, took piano lessons,
started singing in children’s choirs and sing-
ing groups. I was always pretty good at it. I
don’t think I ever made a decision — ‘OK,
this is what I’m going to do for the rest
of my life.
’ It’s just what I lived and what I
wanted to do all the time, and it just was the
thing that guided me.
”
Orshalimy served in the IDF, including
a summer assignment at a youth camp in
Wisconsin, where she first met her future
husband. She began
college studies in Israel
but transferred to the
Berklee College of Music
in Boston during August
of 2004, where she recon-
nected with Low, and
continued to “put one
foot in front of the other”
on her career path. Along
the way, Orshalimy, who
moved to New York in
2006, refined her philos-
ophy toward music as a vocation — and a
business.
“
At some point, I realized I was in it for
the music and the love of music and the way
it made me feel when I would create and
perform and collaborate,
” she explains. “I
realized it wasn’t about the fame, and I didn’t
really care about pursuing a record deal or
a publishing deal — I did at the beginning,
but I realized it wasn’t about that.
”
ARTS&LIFE
MUSIC
Hadar
Orshalimy
Hadar Orshalimy’s new album “Witchcraft”
is a tribute to the women artists who did not
necessarily get their due.
GARY GRAFF CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Celebrating
Jewish Women