The Jewish Monkeys

In the organizer's words:

The Jewish Monkeys
08.02.
Admission: 18:30
Genre: SKA, Folk-Punk
Advance booking: 24,-€ (plus 1,-€ fees + 7% VAT)
https://www.tixforgigs.com/Event/70815

The Jewish Monkeys, a band from Israel, are going on tour in Germany. Now of all times? How could that be?
At a time when the public perception of Israel is almost exclusively associated with Gaza, war crimes and moral polarization - and when
clubs and promoters shy away from inviting Israeli artists - the Jewish Monkeys are coming to Germany for four concerts over the first weekend in February.
The wild, witty and provocative rock band from Tel Aviv, rooted in the Yiddish musical tradition, will be performing in four German cities at the beginning of February. The impetus for this
mini-tour was prompted by an invitation from Professor Michael Braungart to his farewell party at Leuphana University Lüneburg.
The founder of the Cradle to Cradle movement and internationally renowned thought leader of the environmental movement is by no means blind to the suffering caused by Israel's policies and military actions. However, he considers the cultural boycott of an entire
society - its scientists, artists, writers, its sense of humor and its capacity for self-criticism - is a dead end.

The Jewish Monkeys do not claim to defend or justify, but do what they have always done: With sharp lyrics, they take aim at our all-too-human, neurotic, contradictory and often self-destructive
nature - especially that of men, including themselves - and unleash live concerts fueled by klezmer, punk rock and Balkan ecstasy.
After five years of corona, war and depression, they released a new song for the first time, also the title of the mini-tour: "Meet Me In The Middle" - a corruption of the widespread urge to make oneself comfortable in one's own mediocrity.
in their own mediocrity. Satire is resistance: against extremism, fantasies of purity and moral self-assurance. In times of seemingly insurmountable opinion and trench warfare
trench warfare, the Jewish Monkeys insist on irony, humility, love and laughter - and on the right to use their own inconsistencies to hold up a distorting mirror to those who are radicalized.
those who are stranded in radicalism and stubbornness.

Anyone who is fundamentally opposed to an Israeli band on a European stage
should take a look at the reel of their 2015 concert in Dresden on Instagram: one of the great moments of their career, when they performed a punk rock version of an old Yiddish song in front of an enthusiastic audience of Syrian refugees.
Yiddish song in front of an enthusiastic audience of Syrian refugees and, for a pleasant, brief eternity, the morbid clinging to hostile identities melted away.

The Jewish Monkeys have played at European festivals, at anti-fascist rallies, in refugee camps and on German television. Most of their 500 or so gigs between 2014 and 2020 took place in Germany - perhaps because
the local audience instinctively sensed how much the Jewish spirit that was liquidated "back then" in the brown thousand-year Reich was coming back to life before their eyes.
Maxim Biller once wrote about this band that Yiddish rock and pop would probably have sounded something like this if the Holocaust had not taken place.

See you in the concert hall.
Don't dress too warmly.
Musical ecstasy demands sweat - and tears.

https://www.jewishmonkeys.com/