“Hip Hop Hassid” by Francesca Pagani
by Chiara Spagnoli

Shneur Hasofer has chosen DeScribe as nome de plume.
He’s a very unique artist as he’s probably the only known rapper to be Jewish.
The Hasidic performer lives in Brooklyn, combining his music with his spiritual call, mingling with the Afro-Americans of Crown Heights, where it’s pretty unusual for these diametrically opposing ethnic groups to interact on easy terms. But art once again proves to break all kind of boundaries, as well as becoming the tool to vent out a smothered and vexing past, marked by a censored childhood and an adolescence characterised by the Israeli military service leading to the Second Intifada.

A young Italian film-maker, Francesca Pagani, has seeked out this incredible story and made the documentary ‘Hip Hop Hassid’, which has won an award for best short-film at the The Art of Brooklyn Film Festival.

In times where political, religious and ethnic conflicts are latently determining the world’s interaction, DeScribe spreads out a message that may seem a cliché by how long it has been reiterated and forgotten, re-proposed and never accomplished, hence crucially essential to achieving a brotherhood of man: “My music is about unity and we all have one God whether we are Jewish, Christian or Muslim. We are brothers and we share this world together,” is the Litany of the Hassidic hip-hopper.

Hip Hop Hassid ( sub ita ) HQ from Francesca Pagani on Vimeo.

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