How ‘Glee’ and ‘Pitch Perfect’ Paved the Way for a Jewish Music Tradition

The true story of how a non-Jewish producer from Ohio teamed up with Jewish artists to revolutionize the Jewish a cappella scene.

There’s an obscure old song from 2006 that starts like this:

There’s a funky bass line
Could really tear the roof off the place
But it would sound much funkier
If you played it with a bass

They’re singing all of the background
Rocking as hard as they can
The harmonies are tight, the rhythm is alright
The only thing they need is a band!

The song is called “I Hate A Cappella,” and the joke is that it was composed and performed by an a cappella group, The Richter Scales.

The group, comprised largely of Ivy League tech workers in San Francisco, is now defunct, but their pointed parody lives on. “Here Comes Another Bubble,” their 2007 satire of Silicon Valley’s excesses set to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” not only predicted the tech-stock collapse of 2022, but anticipated the antics of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk with the rhymed riposte, “Build yourself a rocket ship, blast off on an ego trip.”

For its part, “I Hate A Cappella” is both a hilarious send-up of the genre’s conventions and an apt encapsulation of the challenges facing vocal music in the mainstream. “Nine Inch Nails, Frank Sinatra, Prince, and John Coltrane—they’re singin’ songs in every style, but they all sound the same!” Without instruments to vary and enliven the production, lesser a cappella risks feeling repetitious and homogeneous.

At its best, though, the genre is a gateway to vocal virtuosity that spans communities and continents. Take one of my favorite Irish folk groups, The High Kings, who typically include an a cappella track on each album:

Or listen to this contemporary spin on Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” by Pentatonix:

Or this arresting performance by the Finnish group Rajaton:

Still, the genre can be a tough sell outside the college-campus context, where student groups proliferate. But when it comes to the Jewish community, a cappella has a built-in competitive advantage.

To begin with, many observant Jews do not play instruments or use electronics on the Sabbath, which means that their synagogue music is a cappella by necessity. The term a cappella literally means “in chapel or choir style” in Italian, hearkening back to the form’s religious roots in churches, synagogues, and mosques. Some of the best a cappella groups today come from faith communities, like the six-man Mormon ensemble Eclipse, whose work ranges from choral hymns to dance-pop reimaginings of Christmas standards.

For my forthcoming Jewish music album, I actually adapted one of their songs—“Evening Prayer”—and set it to the biblical verses sung in synagogue on Friday nights to welcome the Sabbath.

This is just a sneak peak; the longer album version features a full instrumental arrangement. You can pre-save it on your favorite music service here.

Beyond the Sabbath, the Jewish calendar offers an additional boost to a cappella aficionados. Over the centuries, many observant Jews have adopted the custom of abstaining from instrumental music during two periods of mourning. The first, Sefirah, covers the days between Passover and the holiday of Shavuot. The second is happening right now, and spans the so-called Three Weeks before Tisha B’Av, a day that commemorates historical tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people. For some, instrumental music is seen as overly celebratory for such a solemn time, leading many to avoid it during this period.

Given this background, one would think that the Jewish community would have a thriving a cappella scene. But for a long time, this was not the case. There were some notable forerunners, ranging from simple yet elegant religious music albums to Beatachon, a more modern group founded by the artistic overachiever Jordan Gorfinkel, a DC Comics editor known today for his exceptional Passover Haggadah Graphic Novel. By and large, though, the Jewish a cappella scene had not caught up to the contemporary one.

Until relatively recently, that is.

Ed Boyer is not Jewish, but he has had a front-row seat to this Jewish vocal renaissance. You may not know Boyer’s name, but you know his work. He has produced, arranged, and mixed music for the biggest names in a cappella, from the Pitch Perfect movies to NBC’s The Sing-Off to Fox’s Glee to groups like Pentatonix. Hailing from Ohio, he told me that he “grew up in a place where there were some Jewish people, but not very many.” But in the early 2000s, he was approached by a recent college graduate who wanted to change the Jewish a cappella world.

Mike Boxer had been a star soloist for the Binghamton Crosbys, helping them win the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella in 2003. He was also the musical director of Kaskeset, the Jewish group on campus. Upon graduating, he and his friends hoped to carry their a cappella enthusiasm into the Jewish world. “Nobody had really brought the contemporary style and its production techniques to Jewish a cappella just yet,” Boxer told me. He and his collaborators set out to change this.

They founded a six-man group called Six13, a play on the number of commandments in the Torah, and enlisted Boyer to help craft their debut album. Released in time for the Sefirah season, the album’s printing quickly sold out, and the group soon produced a sequel. Both received rave reviews from the general a cappella music press, with one critic dubbing Six13 “the most accessible, enjoyable and talented Jewish a cappella group I’ve ever heard.”

This was only the beginning. Jewish a cappella would soon be catapulted from a fringe fad in its own community to the halls of the White House.

For years, Boxer had been producing the early music of a talented new vocal group from Yeshiva University with a funny name: The Maccabeats. In 2010, they decided to make a Hanukkah parody of “Dynamite” by Taio Cruz, and turned to Boyer to produce it. The music video for “Candlelight” went viral, racking up millions of views, and the group achieved unexpected superstardom.

Soon, the word was out, and Boyer was in demand across the Jewish music world, as were fellow producers like Bill Hare and Dave Sperandio.

Learning a new tradition and culture was a challenge, but Boyer was equal to the task. “It was sort of a steep learning curve,” he acknowledged. “Definitely a crash course.” He gradually familiarized himself with the Jewish musical canon, realizing that it wasn’t so different from the Christmas standards he’d arranged in the past. “There were these sort of core songs that everybody knows that would crop up again and again, and eventually I’d be like, Alright, this is a song I’ve heard 15 times from all these groups, what’s the deal?” Boyer also picked up some Jewish jargon along the way, like sufganiyot, the Hebrew name for the fried jelly doughnuts that are traditionally consumed on Hanukkah:

Boyer’s client list grew to include traditional Jewish a cappella groups like the Y-Studs—another successful export of Yeshiva University—and less traditional ensembles like A.K.A. Pella, who mashed up Jewish and secular pop hits, and used vocal synthesizers to mimic instruments with uncanny results.

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Today, the Jewish vocal music industry is deep and diverse, and includes an impressive array of long-standing college-campus troupes—ranging from the New York-based Tizmoret, managed by choral impresario Daniel Henkin, to student-run groups like Rak Shalom at University of Maryland and Manginah at Brandeis. (Fun fact: Lin-Manuel Miranda was a soloist in his college’s Jewish a cappella group, the Mazel Tones.) The Maccabeats and Six13 have performed at the White House—multiple times. And alumni of these groups have begun promising solo careers.

Put another way, it has never been a better time to be a Jewish a cappella artist. This is partly because the Jewish a cappella world has benefited from the same cultural and technological forces that propelled non-Jewish a cappella to the forefront of the public consciousness.

“One of the major changes was YouTube,” said Boyer. “If you go to see somebody live and they’re there in front of you making the music—no track, no accompaniment, they’re just doing it right there—that makes it work in a way where just hearing it doesn’t. So you had decades and decades of recorded a cappella music, but when YouTube happened and social media happened, then all of a sudden people could do it and accompany it with a visual and get it in front of a wider audience.” Hearing a beatboxer imitate a drum set is just listening to another beat. Watching a beatboxer imitate a drum set is entertainment.

Like many Maccabeats videos, this one has millions of views.

Social media also allowed lesser-known artists to find their niche and cultivate devoted followings, without relying on industry help. “Before, you either broke into TV or you didn’t,” explained Boyer, “but now you could make videos and find an audience of a few thousand people, and that was a thing not just in Jewish a cappella or even a cappella, but in music in general.”

At the same time, across the country, a cappella was having a moment. “You had The Sing-Off on NBC, you had the Pitch Perfect movies, which did really well, and you had the show Glee, which had a couple of a cappella groups in it,” said Boxer, whose own Six13 almost made it onto NBC’s reality competition.

As one might expect, the music was also buoyed by the rhythms of the Jewish calendar. “In our early years, we would work with our distributor to release our CDs during the weeks leading up to Passover, so as to capture Sefirah sales,” Julian Horowitz, the musical director of the Maccabeats, told me. “More recently, when looking at Spotify or YouTube analytics, we always see a significant uptick in views and clicks in the days leading up to the Jewish holidays, but we’ll enjoy a sustained boost during the entire Sefirah and the Three Weeks.”

In some ways, a cappella music has become an American Jewish tradition, with new videos dropping around each major holiday. The vocal groups have also embraced pop-culture parodies as a way to combine Jewish themes with music that is familiar to a more general audience. “Jewish musicians have always borrowed modes and melodies from the surrounding culture, but the specific ‘holiday a cappella parody’ video and song have become a major part of the genre,” said Horowitz. “These videos can often garner media attention, and they’ve led to an expansion of the fan base beyond those who would typically listen to either a cappella or Jewish music.”

“We lean into it,” said Six13’s Boxer, “and I think it’s become part of the landscape of being Jewish in America.” This is not to say that Jewish a cappella artists don’t have grander ambitions. In fact, Six13’s first few albums were made up almost entirely of original compositions. But there is sometimes a tension between artistic and commercial success. “While I think we take greater artistic satisfaction out of writing our own things and creating our own homage to the parts of our religion that appeal to us, we’ve come to accept that it’s okay to do an Ariana Grande cover,” said Boxer. “We may feel a little bit cheaper about that than doing our own original song about Shabbat or something like that. But it’s that Ariana Grande cover that’s going to allow us to reach somebody that we didn’t before. And perhaps, ultimately, because of that, they will discover Shabbat itself.”

Along similar lines, Horowitz hopes to see a cappella help reinvigorate the place where it all began. “I think we’re well-positioned to revitalize synagogue music, which hasn’t really changed much in the past decade or two,” he said. After all, “the synagogue was where many members of our community got started.”

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