Vampire Weekend's Surprising Jewish Stories

Few bands have captured the hearts of fans of indie rock and pop like the versatile, genre-bending group Vampire Weekend. With their rich instrumentation and preppy but lightly debauched look, they first burst onto the scene with massive indie hits like “A-Punk” and “Oxford Comma.”

Lead by songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Ezra Koenig, a Jewish-American hailing from New Jersey, the band has released its highly anticipated fifth album “Only God Was Above Us” this past week, delving deeper into the important questions they've been asking since their debut over 15 years ago. In honor of the latest release, it here’s a retrospective on the most Jewish moments in the band's career.

Jewish Upbringing

Ezra Koenig's relationship with his Jewish identity has long been a point of contention and introspection for him. As a child he was one of only a few Jewish kids at his school in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. Koenig still recalls throwing a fit in first grade when his teacher made the class color pictures of the Easter Bunny, feeling ignored and alienated due to his religion. Despite not growing up religious, tradition was held dearly in the Koenig household. When time came to celebrate his Bar Mitzvah, Koenig decided against inviting his friends, feeling it was “too embarrassing” to have them there.

At just two years old Koenig saw an advent calendar he wanted. But after his mom saw that it was a Christmas themed calendar with candies, she explained that as Jews, “We don't use calendars that count the days until Christmas.” After being rejected, baby Koenig shouted out, “I hate Jews!” as loud as he could in the supermarket. When she asked Ezra if he hated Jews or was just fiending for candy, he sheepishly responded that he was really just after the sweets. She bribed him with some non-Christmas flavored candies.

As a high schooler Koenig turned this dissonance into an aesthetic. “I used to think Polo was really lame,” he said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 2010. But it was after he learned that Ralph Lauren was born Ralph Lifshitz, the son of working-class Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in the North Bronx, that Koenig began to wear the posh country club outfits that took on a subversive touch and became a way to portray his own Jewish identity.

“If you pay no attention to history and you’re any kind of minority then it can all get wiped out and washed into a mono-culture,” Koenig once explained.

Roots in Jewish History

Bringing Jewish history to the forefront has always been buried deep in the DNA of Vampire Weekend’s music and Koenig's songwriting. Meeting during their time studying at Columbia University in the mid-2000's the band bonded over a love of African music and punk rock. After a brief stint as a middle school English teacher, Koenig brought the band back together as they began to gain some traction on internet blogs. Their Ivy league attire and hyper literate lyricism were out of sync with much of the late 2000's indie rock wave and immediately brought attention to the band's idiosyncratic musical styling.

Koenig's way of channeling his deepest spiritual questions into relatable and catchy songs found an audience that was similarly searching for meaning and purpose. Some lines referencing his Jewish heritage are cheekier than others. In the song “Horchata” for instance he sings his praises of the Mexican beverage, “In December, drinking horchata, you’d still enjoy it with your foot on Masada.”

On other tracks we see him grappling with his faith more explicitly. On one of the highlights of their third album “Ya Hey,” Koenig sings “Through the fire through the flames/You won’t even say your name/Only ‘I am that I am’” (A direct quote from Moses’ first encounter with God in the burning bush)

“It’s a song about God. Over hand claps and plinking pianos, Koenig seems to address God directly, wondering why, if He’s there, He doesn’t reveal himself,” Forrest Whickman noted in an article for Slate.

Rashida Jones and Ezra Koenig

On another single, “Finger Back” off that same record, Koenig tells the tale of an Orthodox Jewish girl falling in love. And on their fourth album “Father of the Bride” the lead single “Harmony Hall” featured a lyric that had Jews everywhere up in arms: “Beneath these velvet gloves I hide/The shameful, crooked hands of a moneylender/’Cause I still remember.”

In an interview with Times of Israel, Koenig explained: “I wouldn’t say the song’s particularly about being Jewish, but because… I’m Jewish and I’m American… I’m gonna think about American history and I’m gonna think about Jewish history.”

When he wrote about money lending he was referring to his own Jewish ancestry. How once Jews were reviled and social outcasts but now that they have established a state for themselves they are “the powerful ones…in the driver's seat.”

“When I think about that phrase, the moneylender, it just makes me think about the past and shame, and how sometimes people in power, regardless of what their background is, or their ethnicity, even though they have more power than they used to, because of trauma or shame sometimes make decisions that are based in fear,” he said in an interview. “In some ways that’s one of the drivers of these kinds of vicious cycles that we have as people.”

“Jerusalem, Berlin, New York” is another song with roots in Jewish history. “Obviously, for a Jewish person, those are three particularly significant cities, but I think for anybody, those are world-historical cities that have affected many people’s lives and make you think about money, power, violence, civilization — the big questions,” Koenig shared in a 2019 interview with Coup De Main magazine. He went on, “When I first wrote [‘Jerusalem, New York, Berlin’], I was thinking about the struggle of identity. What does it mean when you identify with something bigger than yourself? As big as an ethnic group? Or religion? Or even as small as a family?”

The song as a whole is a lamentation on how the birth of an Israeli state hasn't yet brought world peace. Calling back to the Balfour declaration with lyrics like: “A hundred years or more/It feels like such a dream/An endless conversation since 1917.”

Koenig's connections to his roots go even deeper when you look at his personal life. Koenig has been in a relationship for several years with fellow Jewish celebrity Rashida Jones. Koenig has also collaborated with Jewish artists like Danielle Haim and Ariel Reichtstad and Jenny Lewis and celebrities like Jerry Seinfeld.

On their new album, Koenig dives deep into his well of theological quandaries. He tells the story of his Jewish great uncle and his immigration from Russia on the song “Pravda,” and grappling with growing old and coming to terms with our place in a world that's rejecting tradition and moving away from old world heritage on the song “Ice Cream Piano”, singing, “We’re all the sons and daughters/Of vampires who drained the old world’s necks.”

Koenig hasn't lost his touch at writing eloquent existential poetry and for him to go at it from such a Jewish angle is a special thing to see from such a prominent band.

Fifteen years into their career, when they're not filming music videos at Jewish delis or reenacting Passover seders for album trailers, the band is still crafting some of the most innovative indie pop around and doing it with a Jewish flair, and that certainly deserves a l'chaim.

In the final song on their latest album the band treats us to an 8-minute musical opus called “Hope” that finishes with the chant “I hope you let it go.” Koenig's self-assured melodies show his realization that though there will always be negative forces in our lives and they can’t always be defeated, we need to let our anxiety and fear go.

Listening to Vampire Weekend's music is a deeply therapeutic, cathartic experience. As Jews, we're constantly confronted with questions about God's existence and His role in our lives. Through Koenig's spiritual writing and self-reflection, we are able to find some peace knowing we don't always have all the answers but that God is still above us.