The Youth
Jerusalem
Shabab Music JLM has spent ten years making hip-hop across the lines that divide Jerusalem.
Shabab Music JLM is a Jerusalem-based Arab-Jewish hip-hop collective, founded in 2014. Their members come from East and West Jerusalem, and from the Arab-Jewish cities of Acre, Ramle, and Jaffa. The collective is led by Muzi Raps and DJ Ramzy Al Spinoza, close friends and long-time collaborators. How do two rappers, one from East Jerusalem and one from West, build a decade-long collective in a city that keeps people on their own sides? For Muzi and Ramzy, it started with music. It’s kept going through festivals across the world, a mini-album in 2021, a feature in The New York Times, and evenings like this one, where they told their story to us before performing.
They talked about how they met, about the artists they’ve pulled into the collective across Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities, and about what it takes to keep something like this going.
Then they performed for our group. Arabic and Hebrew traded back and forth through the mic, and the dancing began. By the end of the set nobody was sitting down.
