When I first became aware of the recording artist Matthew Miller, better known as Mattisyahu, I heard him described as a “hasidic reggae superstar,” and that is the apt phrase employed here by Akiva Schick in his examination of Mattisyahu’s career. Exposed to Judaism as a young adult via Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidism, Mattisyahu became a full-fledged member of that denomination while enjoying his greatest musical and commercial success. He later publicly left Chabad and Orthodoxy, although hasidic ideas continue to inform his lyrics. Schick writes:

The question swirling around Matisyahu’s career from the beginning was just how seriously to take him. In some ways that’s still the question, but his debut album was no gimmick. It was a thoughtful, winding yet cohesive work of self-reflection, dense with cryptic allusions. In the lead song, “Chop ’Em Down,” Matisyahu sings, almost in passing, “Six hundred thousand witnessed it, no you didn’t forget,” without explaining that he’s referring to the revelation at Sinai, the 600,000 Israelites who, according to tradition, were at the foot of the mountain, or the idea that all Jewish souls carry the memory.

Matisyahu’s days of stardom are behind him, but that was inevitable, given the nature of pop culture. Unfortunately, his artistic inspiration seems to have largely gone too. I don’t begrudge his religious transformation, but Chabad theology and the Bible were the wells he drew from for his best songs, and if there is an angry or melancholy song about how those wells are now closed to him, in the vein of modern Jewish artists from the maskilim and Yiddish poets to Yehuda Amichai, he has yet to sing it. Perhaps that’s because he’s not really angry. He’s even still fond of Hasidism.

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.