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Artist
Y-Love
12+ albums
Chabad Raphip hopjewishHip-Hop
about
Yitzchak Jordan (Also known by his stage name Y-Love) is an orthodox Jewish rapper. He used to attend occasionally at a baptist church when he was young, but later converted to Orthodox Judaism. Born to Black and Puerto Rican parents, he found understanding for his early stirrings of faith from his maternal grandmother, Clara Lopez. Named after the matriarch of a Jewish family that once gave her father a job, Lopez had served as a “Shabbos goy” as a child, and wasn’t shocked when Jordan donned a kippah to observe Passover. “As I started separating myself from the rest of the family, she acted as my interpreter,” recalled Jordan, in an interview with the Forward. Soon after that, as a child, he began to give his Jewish classmate his lunch money in exchange for teaching him Hebrew. Now Y-Love's music fills that role, translating his faith into freestyle rhymes and danceable beats for diverse audiences. Y-Love’s devotion to music is tempered by a religious fervor that precludes him from performing on Jewish holidays or until 72 minutes after the Sabbath’s end. An early fan of heavy metal and punk rock, he first became interested in hip-hop while studying in Israel. At Ohr Somayach yeshiva in Jerusalem, Jordan met a fellow student, David Singer, and the two began memorizing Talmudic texts via rap. “I called him Y-Love, because it has a double meaning, like the question, ‘why love?’” Singer remembered. Singer said he advised Jordan not to hide his identity or try to pass as a Y
