Reader covers Oranges on Seder Plates

The Reader's Peter Margasak covers Girls in Trouble, KFAR

Girls in Trouble, from Brooklyn, is the solo project of Alicia Jo Rabins—perhaps best known as the manic fiddler in Golem. On her group's recent self-titled debut album for JDub she adds guitar to her arsenal, playing catchy indie-rock originals.

The Baltimore native is a Torah scholar—she earned a master's at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, spent two years studying ancient Hebrew and Aramaic texts in Jerusalem, and tutors bat mitzvah students—but she's also been playing violin since she was three, after her mother learned about the Suzuki method by watching the Phil Donahue show.

Rabins studied classical music at first, but after moving to New York (to attend Columbia) her horizons broadened and she took an interest in klezmer, learning from the great violinist Alicia Svigals, formerly of the Klezmatics—who recommended her to the founders of Golem.

There's little that sounds Eastern European or Jewish in the music of Girls in Trouble, which features Rabins's husband, Aaron Hartman (of Old Time Relijun), on bass,but the people in her lyrics are all based on female characters from the Torah—the "girls in trouble" of the band's name.

Her retelling of their often scandalous, murderous tales usually distills them to a universal essence, so that they work as reflections of contemporary life, not just as fables. The touring version of the band, a four-piece, plays Sunday afternoon as part of Oranges Rock the Seder Plates, an event organized by KFAR Jewish Arts Center at Evanston's BooCoo Cultural Center.

Read the article:Reader-OrangesKFAR.pdf