L ifestyle /C ulture
Langhorne Slim’s New Album Inspired By
Singer’s Jewish Grandparents
M USIC
SOPHIE PANZER | JE STAFF
ANYONE WILL TELL YOU
that 2020 was a tough year, but
Langhorne Slim’s 2019 was no
picnic, either.

The Jewish singer-songwriter
was unable to make music due
to his struggles with clinical
anxiety disorder and prescrip-
tion drug abuse. Slim battled
and beat addiction in the form of
drinking years ago, but couldn’t
shake the need to escape feelings
of anxiety and depression.

“That’s my experience since
I was a kid in Becky Horowitz’s
parents’ basement in Villanova,
when I drank a six-pack of
Yuengling and I knew that it
was going to be a long road
Philadelphia neighborhood
where both sets of his Jewish
grandparents grew up. As a child,
Slim visited them regularly,
and they provided him and his
brother with love and support
when his parents separated. He
idolized his grandfathers, Jack
Scolnick and Sid Cohen, and
meditated on their lives as he
wrote the new songs.

“They were incredibly sweet,
loving, kind, generous and also
badass and tough. I don’t mean
tough like violent, but tough
like you have to be because
this world ain’t easy, as we all
know,” he said.

Slim, 40, was raised Jewish,
attended Hebrew school and
became a Bar Mitzvah, but
struggled to connect with the
religion through rote memori-
When I drank a six-pack of Yuengling ... I
knew that it was going to be a long road of
drinking.” Langhorne Slim
Strawberry Mansion album cover
Courtesy of All Eyes Media
LANGHORNE SLIM
of drinking,” said Slim, who
was born Sean Scolnick in
Langhorne. He knew he would
have a similar experience when
he started using drugs, and
addiction felt inevitable.

A friend intervened and
urged him to seek help, so he
checked into a program in
December 2019.

A few months later, a
tornado swept through his
neighborhood in Nashville.

A few weeks after that, the
pandemic hit in full force and
led to widespread shutdowns.

In quarantine, Slim used
the newfound sense of quiet
and his recent healing experi-
ences in therapy to write a song
a day at the suggestion of a
close friend. Three months and
many songs later, he had the
22 tracks that form his new
album, “Strawberry Mansion.”
The album is named for the
24 FEBRUARY 18, 2021
zation and recital. He felt more
connected to Judaism through
family, traditions and music.

He calls his grandfathers
“Jewish Buddhas” for the wisdom
and guidance they provided him,
teaching him to treat everyone
with respect and value people
from all walks of life.

“I do think of them as men
that had deep, deep wisdom,
and an intelligence that goes
far beyond an academic one.

I don’t know that either one
graduated high school and, like
a lot of people from that genera-
tion, they just had street smarts.

But they mixed that with a huge
heart and taught us to be cool
and kind to our fellow brother
and sister,” he said.

It was a powerful message
to teach a child, he added, and
one he has come to appreciate
even more as society becomes
increasingly fractured and tribal.

His family continues to be
a strong source of support.

During the pandemic, he
has traveled to Pennsylvania
to visit his mother, Robin
Scolnick, and his surviving
grandmother, Ruth Cohen.

In his song “The Mansion,”
Slim mentions his grandparents
by name in a tribute to his family,
their neighborhood and their
love of music. In “Red Bird,”
he shares one of Jack Scolnick’s
favorite parables, which involves
a lot of horse excrement.

The other songs on the
album, like Slim’s grandparents,
are a mix of tough and sweet.

Although many address dark
topics, the music itself is consis-
tently lighthearted, even playful.

Tracks like ”Mighty Soul” and
“Alright to Hide” explore finding
the strength and hope to face
the fear and uncertainty of the
current era. “Panic Attack” is a
JEWISH EXPONENT
catchy, toe-tapping account of
Slim’s experience with mental
health issues.

He said he turned inward to
find a sense of optimism when
faced with pain and suffering.

“It’s what we do with the
suffering and the pain, and
how we figure out a way to
have a lighter step, perhaps, to
be more graceful, to be more
kind to ourselves,” he said.

“And for me, getting started
to get myself healthy again,
which happened right before
the tornado in Nashville and
right before the pandemic, I
was able to start to recognize
myself more.” l
spanzer@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0729
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM



L ifestyle /C ulture
Video Project Explores Asian Jewish Identities
CULTURE GABE FRIEDMAN | JTA.ORG
WHEN MAYA KATZ-ALI saw
the ad on Facebook recruiting
Asian Jews to participate
in a new video project about
identity, she scrolled through
her list of friends to figure out
who might be a good fit.

The daughter of a Jewish
mother from New York and a
Muslim father from India, it
didn’t occur to Katz-Ali that
she fit the bill herself. Though
she grew up connected to both
parents’ cultures — especially
the food — she always saw
them as distinct. When her
mother wanted to hire Indian
dancers for her bat mitzvah,
she shot the idea down.

“I remember
specifi- cally saying, ‘Mom, no, that’s
Name: Secure comp
Width: 9.25 in
Depth: 5.5 in
Color: Black
Comment: -
Indian. That’s not Jewish,’” said
Katz-Ali, who now works for the
Shabbat programming organi-
zation OneTable. “So obviously,
in my head, I had this big kind of
divorce of these two identities.”
After her epiphany that
she would be a good candi-
date for the video initiative she
saw advertised on Facebook,
Katz-Ali reached out to its
founders. That’s how she ended
up in “Taste of Connection,”
the food-focused first episode
of Lunar: The Jewish-Asian
Film Project, a series of videos
of young Asian American Jews
in conversation with each
other that launched this week,
to coincide with the lunar new
year, a holiday celebrated in
multiple Asian cultures. The
series — which is on YouTube
and also lives on the website
of Be’chol Lashon, a group
promoting Jews of color that
helped support the project —
will tackle a new theme in each
episode. “[It’s] really fun to break
the stereotype of ‘You want
Jewish food? Ok, it’s a bagel,’”
Katz-Ali says in the video,
after describing how she blends
Indian cuisine with Jewish
tradition. The series is the brain-
child of two recent college
students who found themselves
craving a way to get to know
other people whose identities
overlapped with their own.

One of them is founder
Gen Slosberg, who was raised
without religion in China and
moved with her Ashkenazi
father and Chinese mother to
the U.S. as a teenager. As an
undergraduate at the University
of California, Berkeley, she
joined multiple groups for
students of color — where to
her surprise she discovered Jews
of color like herself.

“Everybody I knew who
was Jewish was white,” said
Slosberg. But even after
learning from those student
groups, she had never been in
or heard of a space for Asian
American Jews in particular.

“I would for example hear
one of the people at one of my
JOC [Jews of color] Shabbats go
‘Oh yeah, my Chinese grand-
mother, this, this and this,’”
Slosberg said. “And I’m like,
what if we were in a space and
we could all understand what it’s
like to have an Asian grandma.

Wouldn’t that be cool?”
So last spring Slosberg
reached out to a few other
Chinese Jews through connec-
tions and social media, hoping
to create that space for herself.

She found Jenni Rudolph, a
Berklee College of Music
graduate who was featured in
a widely viewed YouTube video
about interracial identity.

Rudolph had grown up in
Huntington Beach, a predom-
inantly white city in southern
California’s Orange County,
where she struggled to feel at
home in white, Asian or Jewish
spaces. She had attended a
Jewish preschool, but after it
closed, her two younger sisters
didn’t get the same Jewish
foundation, and her family
wasn’t very religious.

“That was just a really
exciting moment for me,”
Rudolph said of her initial
virtual meet-up with Slosberg’s
group, “of meeting others and
See Identities, Page 34
Upgrade your MASKS to NIOSH* APPROVED N95
*The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
100% GUARANTEED AUTHENTICITY
Now available
to the public.

https://securecomponents.com/n95-masks/ or call Carol @ 484-556-2125
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM JEWISH EXPONENT
FEBRUARY 18, 2021
25