2 Live Jews, Afula, Israel, 1988

Saul Korin writes: In 1988, I lived in Israel for the year in a town called Afula. The place was hardly a cultural hotbed so we had lots of downtime. We spent a huge amount of time listening to Run DMC’s Raising Hell, Whodini, LL Cool J, and of course, the Beasties. My roommate had a drum machine and we started to develop our MC personas – Captain Crunch and Kool Aid, who together became the 2 Live Jews ( a name we invented before the other band with that name who come out of Florida.) He was from LA, I was from Jersey so we had this West Coast-East Coast thing going on. It all felt so subversive as we pieced together an album – a cassette really – with a bunch of rewrites of Run DMC and Whodini songs which we were able to sell to the Israeli students. Everything was recorded on one cassette tape, and the album was then spliced together using a dual cassette tape. Our big ‘hit’ was "My Kipah" (A toast to the Jewish headcovering in the style of “My Adidas”) Our low point was an attempt to execute a rap cover of "Imagine."

Here is the first verse of “My Kipah.”

A lot of people ask me about
M-m-m-m-m—m Y (dragged out like LL's “I'm Bad”) kipah
I wear it on my head, I got one that's white and one thats red,

Got one that's grey and one thats blue and I like to wear it because I am
a Jew.

A Kipah is a symbol that shows that we, consider ourself gods
property. I wear it because I'm a Jew, and if you don't like it, FUCK
you. My Kipah.

The photo is from our one photo shoot in Tel Aviv. I am the one rocking the Dwayne Waynes. My brother ended up taping over the only copy of the cassette I had. If anyone has a copy out there, please be in touch or put it on eBay…