HARGITTAI, Esther: Jewish-Israeli Music – Jewish holiday songs, easy choral pieces and dances for all ages.

This recent publication of the Kodály Institute of the Liszt Academy of Music is a unique collection of curated Jewish songs, dances and easy choral pieces. Recommended for classroom music teachers and choral conductors who are constantly looking for new, multicultural repertoire, to get true inspiration from this book.

Not only does the exotic repertoire make Hargittai's book attractive, but the fact that it was written according to the Kodály Concept, each piece comes with teaching tips, thorough methodology guidelines and games to help teachers deliver the songs in a meaningful and engaging way to students, makes it a valuable professional textbook as well.

Let the author speak about her book and her inspiration: 
This book is a great collection of Jewish-Israeli songs, dances, and easy choral pieces. It can be a colourful addition to your teaching material, helping with multicultural repertoire, which is interesting and even exotic. Nowadays part of our teaching repertoire became unsuitable due to some songs being potentially hurtful or offensive. Therefore, we need fresh, new singing material, we need to expand our song bank. We all know the pain of finding any random foreign song on the internet, not knowing if it is appropriate, unsure about the background and the meaning. These songs come with explanations about the Jewish Holidays and the background is provided for every song. The words are written phonetically in English, the meaning is explained.