"Pensive, compassionate… a voice full of tenderness." The New York Times

Performing a soulful blend of traditional folk and pop music, Chava Alberstein is Israel's most accomplished singer. Her nearly 50 recordings include numerous gold and platinum records. From tender songs of love and celebration to more melancholy and defiant songs about peace, oppression, loss and poverty, Alberstein's music is laden with the bittersweet tension between the national and the universal.

Chava Alberstein

Calling someone her country's greatest singer would be a huge compliment to most performers. In the case of Chava Alberstein, however, it only tells a small part of the story.

Alberstein is undoubtedly Israel's most accomplished singer, having released nearly 50 recordings since the late 1960's, many of them now gold or platinum. Alberstein is Israel; her development as an artist mirrors Israel's development as a country; her growing pains are Israel's growing pains. Alberstein and Israel are even the same age - both turned 50 recently - and they both share a tiny but powerful stature.

But Chava Alberstein sees herself as much as a singer of the world as just a singer of her beloved Israel. "Even though I have lived in Israel nearly my entire life, I am constantly questioning my place in the world," said Alberstein. "Maybe this searching comes from being an artist, maybe it comes from being a Jew. I'm not really sure." This bittersweet tension between the national and the universal is most evident in Crazy Flower: A Collection, Alberstein's recently released greatest hits. The 17-song Hebrew compilation ranges from tender love songs to defiant songs about peace and oppression. There are prayerful songs celebrating the beauty of the human form and more melancholy songs about loss, poverty, and solitude.

Alberstein has also lately released The Well, an album of Yiddish poems she has transformed into folk songs, with the renowned klezmer group the Klezmatics. "In Israel, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone today composing and singing in Yiddish," said Klezmatics lead singer Lorin Sklamberg. "Some people still see Yiddish as the language of soft Jews who can't protect themselves. But Chava understands the joy and depth of the language."

Yiddish was the mother-tongue of Alberstein's family in the small town in Szczecin, Poland, where Chava was born. Her family moved to Israel when Alberstein was only 4-years-old, but Chava says she has never totally lost the feeling of being a stranger. "No matter where I am, even if it's in my own country, I feel like a bit of a guest," she said. "People can appreciate this today, because they move around so much. Every country you go to in the world is filled with so-called foreigners."

Since the very first time she ever sang in public - a four-song set, which included songs in French, Spanish, Yiddish, and a gospel standard in English - Chava Alberstein has been a performer of "World Music."

Chava has released more than 40 albums in Hebrew, six of which have been awarded the Kinor David prize, Israel's Grammy. She has also released six albums in Yiddish, and an English album of standards ranging from Gershwin to Lennon and McCartney. A dozen of the records have gone gold, six platinum, and one triple platinum.

Alberstein's early Hebrew recordings, with names like Songs of My Beloved Country, Beaches, and Like a Wildflower, speak to Israel as a fledgling country. They are external, almost frontier. "Israel was like a little child in those days," Chava recalled. "Discovering all the parts of her body..."

But Alberstein's later work, and most of the songs on Crazy Flower, are inward looking and searching. On "You are a Miracle," the opening cut of Crazy Flower, Chava asks "And when you grow up, Can you then hurt another man, Who like you is a Miracle? He, too, is one of a kind, He, too, is a Miracle." Written during Israel's war in Lebanon, "Chad Gadya," is Alberstein's twist on the Passover song, in which the anguished singer asks, "Tonight I have one more question. How long will the cycle of horror last? The chased and the chaser. The beaten and beater. When will this madness end?" It's a question Chava leaves to her audience to answer.

"If we have a true folk singer, it is Chava Alberstein, Yediot Aharonot, Israel's largest daily newspaper said about Alberstein, naming her the most important female musician in Israel's history.

Crazy Flower is much more a recording about love than about politics. Alberstein's love is neither simple nor sappy. "A clock that stopped ticking is a sign; a mirror that cracked is a sign," she sings in "Signs," bemoaning that all signs are "secrets with no meaning."

With a half century of life and song under her belt, Chava Alberstein, like Israel, has come to understand that good art, like good statecraft, is best achieved by looking inwards and outwards.

"Everything is good only in the proper measure," Chava sings in a song from Crazy Flower. "Don't be too kind or too smart."

The Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Foundation Endowed Symposia in Jewish Studies are co-sponsored by UCSB Arts & Lectures, Department of Religious Studies, Hillel, and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. This event is put on in partnership with the Santa Barbara Jewish Federation.