Rapping to an Orthodox beat
AMERICAN Sam Kalnitz isn’t your typical rapper. The 19-year-old student at Yeshiva University just got back from 18 months of study in Israel, but he has never lost sight of his real love: hip-hop music.
Yeshiva University student Sam Kalnitz’s dream of being a mainstream rapper is starting to come true, reports Amy Spiro.
AMERICAN Sam Kalnitz isn’t your typical rapper. The 19-year-old student at Yeshiva University just got back from 18 months of study in Israel, but he has never lost sight of his real love: hip-hop music.
And since his latest video, featuring him clad in a traditional black hat and suit and rapping on the streets of New York, has gone viral, his dreams seem closer than ever.
“This one is bigger than everything else to date combined,” he says.
Kalnitz, who goes by Sammy K, says that many people have reached out to him since that video was posted, and he’s hoping to build relationships and collaborations from that.
A native of Atlanta, Kalnitz recognises that he comes from an unusual background for a rapper, but he doesn’t see it holding him back.
“Hip-hop music is an expression and reflection of who you are, and what you stand for,” he says.
“The fact that I’m a religious Jew means I’m not going to curse in my music and I’m not going to talk about inappropriate things, but I’m still going to make mainstream music because that’s what I want to do.”
While Kalnitz is dressed in the traditional yeshivah garb in his viral video – which he says he wears on Shabbat – his weekday clothes are decidedly more casual.
“The theme was to get people to recognise me as a Jewish person, so the general public … when they think of someone who’s Jewish, they think of someone who’s dressed like that.”
Kalnitz says he fell in love with music and hip-hop at an early age. “I started writing my own stuff in sixth grade,” he says.
By high school he was recording songs on his home computer, and by his senior year had professionally produced a few tracks. While Kalnitz says that his bubba is his No. 1 fan, his parents took a little more convincing.
“At first my parents were very sceptical … obviously hip-hop does have somewhat of a negative stigma and rightfully so,” he notes.
But once they realised he was producing music in line with his beliefs, and getting positive feedback, he got their full support.
Until now, the most attention Kalnitz received was for Alone, the music video tribute he produced with his friend Yaakov Galen for Ezra Schwartz, the American teenager who was killed in a terrorist attack in Israel in 2015.
“I met Ezra a few times,” says Kalnitz, who studied in yeshivah in Mevaseret Zion the same year Schwartz was learning in Beit Shemesh.
“I was very close with his friends from yeshivah and I felt it was appropriate to make a tribute.”
The majority of the music Kalnitz has released so far has Jewish themes, including his latest song, Negatives, also with Galen, which features clips of people speaking about what they will be praying for at the Western Wall.
Another of his music videos, Manischewitz, features him rapping around the Machane Yehuda shuk.
While most of his published work has Jewish themes, Kalnitz says he also has a lot of mainstream music that he’s recorded.
The Jewish-themed works “are the ones that are really influential and inspirational,” he says. “Those songs are the ones that had the biggest impact on people and the ones I decided to put out first.
“Hip-hop is a reflection of who I am and what I do. Israel is obviously a big part of my life, so it does reflect that.”
THE JERUSALEM POST
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