As some peppy ’70s soul-funk pulses through a beat box, a young man who looks like a cross between Shaggy of “Scooby-Doo” fame and a Latino Brad Pitt spins around on his head. His thin frame torques 180 degrees and his elbows flail out from his side. The dancer, Danny Ayala, a lecturer and performer in the art form of “B-boying,” appears to be upping the ante in a solitaire version of the game, Twister.
Across the room at San Francisco’s Cell Space, a group of women similarly crowd around two performers, shouting words of encouragement. Two women take center stage and begin playing what looks like a hip-hop version of Patty Cake. The two then separate, throw their legs up in the air, curl up in a ball and spin around until their legs lock again. One of the women, Eva Grady, sports a blond ponytail and looks like she jumped out of a Norman Rockwell painting. The other, Sarah Saltzman, has stringy brown hair and looks vaguely European.
In fact, Saltzman is Jewish, a circumstance that both is and isn’t germane when discussing her group, Sisterz of the Underground. The hip-hop group, a loose collective of more than 40 women, perform and lecture in what Saltzman calls the “four elements”: breaking, deejaying, emceeing and graffiti art.
Hip-hop has many origins: Afro-Cuban music, American jazz and Latin percussion. The style was percolating under the public’s radar screen in the late-’70s and early-’80s when acts such as the Sugar Hill Gang, Grandmaster Flash and Fab Five Freddy pioneered hip-hop. But the form experienced its breakthrough when blockbuster groups such as Run DMC and a group of three obviously Jewish kids for Brooklyn called the Beastie Boys brought it to the ‘burbs — where Saltzman grew up.
The fact that three white guys brought a traditionally “black” art form to the fore caused quite a ruckus. Some considered it the death knell of the art form, while others saw it as an evolutionary process in which other cultures could add their own spices to the rap stew.
But Saltzman is far from an anomaly. Besides the Beastie Boys, performers such as the Blood of Abraham, Danny Hoch and the Hip Hop Hoodios (a group of Latin Jewish rap artists) have very publicly traded on their Judaism. And although Saltzman doesn’t wear her Jewishness on her Fila sweatsuit, it’s inescapably present. So is the fact that she came from the San Fernando Valley.
Saltzman said that on many occasions, other hip-hop performers have questioned her “street cred,” given the fact that she’s white, comes from an affluent area and is a woman. Saltzman’s Judaism isn’t often held against her, but the 23-year-old Oakland resident nonetheless feels like she has something to prove.
“I try to disarm people’s stereotypes and expectations by putting it back on them,” Saltzman said after a particularly grueling maneuver she calls the “sliding knee thingy.”
“Usually if people say that a white girl from the suburbs can’t understand anything about hip-hop culture, I tell them ‘why don’t you help me out then, and teach in some of our programs?'”
One of the ways Saltzman connects with her Judaism is through the concept of “tikkun olam,” (healing the world). The Sisterz of the Underground do a lot of community-based outreach, allowing Saltzman the opportunity to dispel pernicious stereotypes about rap — and not coincidentally, an opportunity to dispel any stereotypes of why someone like her is involved with hip-hop culture.
The Sisterz, who have been together for two years, lecture and perform at spaces ranging from the San Francisco Public Library and the Mission Cultural Center to the Western Addition’s Hamilton Family Center. They also perform and lecture in various East Bay locations.
In addition to teaching the nuances of the “four elements,” the Sisterz emphasize the “one-love spiritually based hip-hop” (personified by local artists such as Mytsic, Blackalicious and Michael Franti), which focuses on messages of social justice and commonality, rather than the “bling-bling pimping and rolling” credo that was thought to personify mainstream rap of the past decade.
Saltzman and the Sisterz also try to instill some self-love in the young women they lecture and perform for, emphasizing positive role models in an arena that Saltzman said has been “traditionally male-dominated.”
Although Saltzman, who grew up in a Conservative household, claims to have strayed from her Jewish roots, she’s recently inched closer to her roots, thanks to an unlikely source — her boyfriend, an African American non-Jew.
When Saltzman saw her boyfriend’s commitment to exploring his heritage, she felt some stirrings of her own. The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, (“my grandfather never could talk about the Holocaust”) she has fond recollections of Jewish rituals that have become more “beautiful” with age.
“I remember my father davening with my grandfather, and there was something really profound and beautiful about that,” said Saltzman. (Ironically, Stan Getz, one of the avatars of the bebop jazz movement, which prefigured the scatology inherent in rap, said that the cadences of jazz often made him think of Orthodox men davening at the Wailing Wall.)
When talking about the urban art form commonly known as graffiti — which is differentiated from the hegemonic, disposable act of “tagging,” — Saltzman said she was planning to incorporate some new symbols: Hebrew lettering.
“When I write my name out in Hebrew, I can’t believe how beautiful the lettering is,” said Saltzman. “It’s got culture, history and style all wrapped up in it — which is just what hip-hop is all about.”