The Kol Retreat is Building a New Jewish Music Community

I’ve known both Eva and Atid for several years, and I’ve seen how they’ve made waves in the Jewish music world with their launch of Kol: A Retreat for Jewish Music Across the Diaspora. They’re both incredible musicians, organizers, and community builders in their own right, and I was stoked to sit down with them virtually, dig into the origins of Kol, and get their take on some of the most influential Jewish music that’s being made today.

Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Caroline: For folks who don’t know, what is Kol and when did it start?

Eva: Kol is a retreat for Jewish music across the diaspora, and we can break down what each of those words—Jewish, music, diaspora—mean to us. It’s a retreat/festival Shabbaton weekend in the Bay Area, where we highlight all sorts of music, from ancestral to newly-created music. “Jewish” is expansive—sometimes that doesn’t look explicitly like Jewish content but it’s by a Jewish musician.

Our purpose is to build community for anyone from music experts to brand-new musicians who want to be engaging in Jewish musical community together. We started in 2022.

Atid: I would add that part of the idea of Kol is that music is a way to access Judaism, and also Judaism is a way to access music. Both of those are ways to connect to oneself, to identity, and to community. We’re also co-creating the community with the people that come—it’s the energy and enthusiasm of people coming in that makes Kol what it is.

Half the workshops and experiences are led by participants who are either musicians themselves or learning in their musical journey. We’ve intentionally tried to bring in mostly teachers from the Bay Area and the West Coast to build a kind of inclusive and Jewish music community that can provide meaning to people here.

We know what those words mean on their own but what do you mean by “music” and “diaspora”?

Atid: A lot of the music is in Hebrew but a lot of Jewish music is in English or other languages that belong to the Jewish people, from Yiddish to Latino to Judeo-Arabic. Part of the joy of Jewish music is experiencing those different languages. There’s actually a lot of accessibility in everyone being a learner in a certain language.

Eva: My personal take on the diaspora—and I’m on a healing journey with it—is realizing how much I grew up with ‘Ashkenormativity’ that was just the air I breathe, thinking oh, everyone Jewish must be like me. My grandma’s a Holocaust survivor, we come from Poland and Lithuania, we eat challah and we sing this tune to the Sh’ma. Through exposure in the Bay Area and beyond, I’ve seen that there’s so much rich Jewish culture and music that I was missing out on when we assume that’s the norm. I think Kol is trying to do our little part and change that.

Atid: I would add the Yiddish word doykeit, this concept of hereness and being where you are. Part of what we’re saying with Jewish music across the diaspora is to say we are in the diaspora, and so what is Jewish music for us? 

The other thing is that across the diaspora, there’s such a diversity of Jewish culture and music, whether it’s from North Africa, Eastern Europe, new music being created in America or wherever it may be. There’s much more even beyond what we’ve kind of said, and Kol is trying to provide learning and opportunities for people to experience that.

Eva: We’re in an ongoing conversation of what is Jewish versus not? What do we all get to play and learn and claim, versus when it might veer into cultural appropriation of other cultures, or even within Jewish cultures. There’s no right or wrong answer, and we’re trying to be in integrity with this.

What was the inspiration behind starting Kol?

Eva: I was running Thrive Street Choir, which is a group of people who get together to sing justice-oriented songs and sometimes offer singing at actions for progressive causes. Atid was coming there, and then he was also running Nigun Collective [a group that meets monthly to sing nigunim, wordless melodies] which he still does, and I was sometimes going there.

We were getting to know each other’s music community already, often at Urban Adamah [an urban Jewish farm in Berkeley]. Then somehow I told him, I have a dream of starting a West coast version of Let My People Sing (LMPS) [a singing retreat established in 2016, based on the East Coast]. I pitched the idea to thefounders of LMPS, and they said, go, do your thing. 

Atid: Having gone to Let My People Sing before moving out to the Bay Area and just loving it—it really transformed my relationship to the things that I do now. Kol is influenced by that, so being able to bring that here and help other people access a similar space was really exciting. Some of the LMPS folks put me in touch with Elan [Loeb, one of the other co-founders] and the three of us became a trio. 

It sounds like Let My People Sing was a huge influence. Can you say more about that?

Eva: On Kol’s website, we say that “we sing and play for our love of healing, community and liberation and to ground and elevate ourselves.” That piece about liberation and healing is also inspired by Let My People Sing. They’re really clear on the liberatory power of singing, and we’re very much in that lineage, but ours is a bit less exclusively focused on singing and more on music generally and instruments. We’re always trying to push the boundaries of types of music that we bring in.

Eva, how did you get so into music? 

Eva: I grew up in Marin, where I did tap dancing for a bunch of years. There was a big world of tap dancing people in Mill Valley with this amazing teacher who was influenced by jazz and African American music and dance traditions and Irish music and all these cultural traditions—and that transferred into percussion. Then I started taking hand-drumming classes, and I dabbled in conga, cajon, doumbek, and other music styles.

Then I started bringing hand-drumming into Jewish spaces—I would try to appropriately fit different cultural drums into Shabbat services and High Holidays. At this point, most people know me for being a percussionist in alternative, Jewish, earthy communities, but I still try to play with teachers who are from the traditions I learned in. 

I didn’t think of myself as a singer for a really long time. But then I realized—through my experiences like Adamah [a Jewish farming fellowship at Isabella Freedman in Connecticut], and singing in synagogue, in Hebrew school, in youth groups, in summer camp, all these things I was privileged to do, that I love singing. I started getting exposed, through Thrive East Bay, to a whole network of song circles. I realized the more you sing, the better you get, which made me more confident.

And Atid, how did you become so involved in these different music communities?

Atid: My mom is a music therapist and a music teacher, so I grew up with a lot of music. If you were ever to go to our home in New Jersey, you’d see our living room has 25 drums and lots of instruments. That was the water I swam in. I started playing viola and clarinet when I was in elementary school, in the school band and orchestra, and I also sang in a Jewish choir in high school and in a Jewish a capella group in college.

Part of what was special about Let My People Sing—and connecting to music there—was seeing the full breadth of Jewish music across a wide range of different cultural experiences of Judaism, and being exposed to the much deeper way that I had in the past, and then also connecting it to to that liberatory potential and the potential for healing and community. That was exciting to me. 

I also play guitar. I’ve always kind of thought of myself as a musician—not a professional, but someone who does a lot of music. Connecting to people who were both more skilled and experienced than myself, and also much less so, has been really great. I also was involved with a monthly song circle through the New Synagogue Project, and helped start the DC Nigun Collective. When I came out here, I transitioned into helping facilitate the Nigun Collective in the Bay Area.

Eva: I’ll just say Atid inspired me a lot with music and everything he’s done to build Jewish community. I consider myself very much a ‘middle of the road’ musician and I’m always learning. I think ofmyself more as a music community organizer—one of my roles is ‘drum doula-ing’ where I help people come into drumming and singing. I feel like Kol is a way of getting people into music.

Atid: I think Eva undersold herself, but that’s okay.

I love the synergy of you two working together! What might people get excited about in the coming year, related to Kol?

Eva: Kol 2025, which is May 8-11! The schedule is going to be similar in the bones to the other years, but different in terms of which teachers we’ll be highlighting—both faculty teachers who are professional musicians and do this full time, and then participant-teachers, who are folks who would already be attending but want to share something they’re passionate about. 

Throughout the year, we do occasional get-togethers like song circles. In July, we had aLet My People Sing Shareback.

How are you thinking about building Kol out?

Atid: One thing that we’re trying to do is build connections with other synagogues and informal groups—we want to build this and spread it to others that haven’t yet gotten involved.

I’m really grateful that Klez California [a local organization that connects people and communities to Yiddish culture] has supported us twice with pretty significant grants last year and this year. Being part of the broader right Jewish community and Jewish musical community in the Bay Area is really, really critical to the success of Kol and also to what it becomes. 

Eva: Something new that we’re going to do in 2025 is more community organization sponsorships, meaning they help plan it with us to whatever extent they want. In the past, we’ve just planned it internally and then invited folks from all the different groups to participate, as well as individual invitations. 

Now, we’d like to continue with individuals inviting people who aren’t affiliated with any institutions, but also go through partnerships with organizations we know have their own communities, including synagogues.

If people want to get involved in Kol, how might they do that?

Eva: It’s a very scrappy project, and while it is a program within Urban Adamah, we do take donations. If people have connections to financial resources, they can talk to us. Also, if people are passionate about helping organize or bring a particular skill, or they want to teach at Kol, they can be in touch with us.

Atid: Yes—people should feel free to reach out to us at kolretreatbayarea@gmail.com. I would add that we just barely get in terms of being able to do what we’ve done. To be able to make it even better and to continue to do more, the financial contributions do help.

To close, who do you think are doing really exciting things in the Jewish music world?

Eva: Some folks I’ve learned about through the Let My People Sing network are  Dodie Whitaker, Dr. Koach Baruch Frazier, and Anat Hochberg, who recently performed at Urban Adamah. Kohenet is also an influence, and they’ve spread music in the world—they have a great siddur. 

Atid: The truth is, we’re blessed with a resurgence of Jewish music at this moment. I think a lot of the credit for that goes to Joey Weisenberg and the Hadar’s Rising Song Institute and the amazing resources that they’ve poured into that site—providing teaching and community and recording for so many artists. I would direct people to Rising Song, and all the amazing artists who are recording and working with them. Also, the Let My People Sing website has resources with lots of musicians who taught there in the past, and also their SoundCloud is great. You can go down rabbit holes learning about that. And check out Kol’s past teachers, as so many of them are in the Bay Area.

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