Jewish Monkeys

The wild, funny, and provocative rock band from Tel Aviv, rooted in the Yiddish musical tradition, will be performing as part of the Jewish Culture Days at the Zentrum Altenberg in Oberhausen.

With sharp lyrics, the Jewish Monkeys take aim at our all-too-human, neurotic, contradictory, and often self-destructive nature—especially that of men, themselves included—and unleash live concerts fueled by klezmer, punk rock, and Balkan ecstasy.

After five years of the pandemic, war, and depression, they’ve released a new song for the first time: “Meet Me In The Middle”—a play on the widespread urge to settle comfortably into one’s own mediocrity.

Satire is resistance: against extremism, fantasies of purity, and moral self-righteousness. In times of seemingly insurmountable battles of opinion and ideological divides, the Jewish Monkeys insist on irony, humility, love, and laughter—and on the right to hold up a distorting mirror to those stranded in radicalism and obstinacy by confronting them with their own contradictions.

The Jewish Monkeys have performed at European festivals, at anti-fascist rallies, in refugee camps, and on German television. Most of their roughly 500 gigs between 2014 and 2020 took place in Germany—perhaps because the local audience instinctively sensed how vividly that Jewish spirit, which had been eradicated “back then” in the brown Thousand-Year Reich, was coming back to life before their very eyes.

Don’t dress too warmly.
Musical ecstasy demands sweat—and tears.