Kid Kosher putting ‘the man’ in Manischewitz

BY KARL VILACOBA
Staff Writer

SEAN BRADY Glen “Kid Kosher” Fuchs rocks the mic at Jenkinson’s, Point Pleasant, on Saturday.

As Glen Fuchs got ready to take the stage for a July talent show at Jenkinson’s, Point Pleasant, event host and radio personality Big Joe Henry had some doubts. This was an all-ages, family-friendly event, hardly the typical venue for rappers.

But Fuchs assured Henry the topics of his songs were safe –– safe enough, in fact, to have been passed down through families for thousands of years. For Fuchs, aka "Kid Kosher," the raps aren’t about gangstas and guns, but menorahs and Manischewitz.

The crowd joined Kid Kosher in a hand clap and call-and-response segment in which he yells, "Where my Hebes at?" and they shout back "Shalom!"

"When I was done, Big Joe came over to me and said, ‘OK, now I think I’ve seen it all,’ " said Fuchs, a 32-year-old computer programmer from Brick.

Fuch’s “Hip-Hop Hanukkah” album contains three tracks. He’d like to expand it to eight by next year –– one song for each day of the holiday.

Fuchs became Kid Kosher after he and a friend, jazz musician Chris Colaneri, glanced over a store display of Christmas albums.

"Chris said it was all the same stuff, but it sells every year. With the exception of Adam Sandler, there’s nothing out there about Hanukkah," Fuchs said.

Colaneri challenged Fuchs to pen lyrics about Jewish holidays and traditions while he worked on the musical hooks. Fuchs hit the books hard, and learned a lot about Jewish history along the way.

"You have no idea how hard it is to find something that rhymes with Manischewitz," Fuchs said.

The men recorded three songs in Colaneri’s garage and mixed them on a computer. Those tracks, "Light the Menorah," "Spin the Dreidel" and "Hip Hop Hanukkah," comprise Kid Kosher’s first EP, which is equal parts party music and history lesson (a sample lyric is "Hanukkah, the festival of lights, you see/In essence was a military victory"). By next year, Fuchs hopes to have eight songs ready –– one for each day of Hanukkah.

Musically, Fuchs prefers "the clean stuff" like Will Smith, Heavy D and the most famous Jewish rappers of all, the Beastie Boys. Other than their musical genres and religions, Fuchs said he and the Beasties have little in common.

"They’re Jewish rappers, but they’re not rapping about anything particularly Jewish," Fuchs said.

Fuchs describes his stage persona as closer to a hard-core rapper’s –– loud and serious –– than the comedian Sandler’s. He raps over Colaneri’s recorded instrumentals, which in one song mix the traditional "Hava Nagila" over a booming beat and baseline. He doesn’t deliberately write funny lyrics, but when people hear hip-hop music combined with Jewish history lessons, they can’t help but find it entertaining.

"It’s not every day that you go the beach and see a white, Jewish rapper," Fuchs said of the Jenkinson’s talent show.

He returned to that same venue Saturday afternoon to perform at the Holiday Extravaganza, again hosted by Henry. Fuchs said he is also playing at a private party Dec. 21 for a Hebrew school in Marlboro Township, where he is a member of Temple Rodeph Torah.

"The whole goal of this, first and foremost, is that we want people to have fun. The idea is to entertain people, teach people and show them a fun time in the process," Fuchs said.

Samples of Fuchs’ album, "Hip-Hop Hanukkah," can be downloaded at his Web site, www.anglefire.com/hiphop3/kidkosher.