The song that popped up was “20 Seconds,” a tune for a “disconnected generation” caught up with iPhone apps, Prozac, Internet porn, and cruising for sex: “Twenty seconds, you only get one first impression … I’ve got twenty seconds to sell what I got.” (And you thought Madonna had it tough when she only had 4 minutes to save the world.) It’s upbeat, electronic dance pop, utterly brazen about its use of Auto-Tune. Catchy, but nothing revolutionary. Yet there was something about the melody that was vaguely Middle Eastern, giving it a hint of flavor to distinguish it from its American and European cousins. A bit of musical za’atar.

The video played up the East-West tensions further: There were belly dancers, but they were dancing like club kids on Ecstasy. A group of burka-clad women encircled the two motionless male singers—or maybe they weren’t women at all, once we got a peek behind the veil. What the hell was going on here?

The Young Professionals, I soon discovered after some Googling, is the latest side project from Ivri Lider, one of Israel’s biggest pop stars. I’d liked his earlier work as a singer and songwriter—in Hebrew and English—but it had never been this much fun. “D.I.S.C.O.,” another track from the new band, for example, was all heavy beats and froth, what a former editor of mine might have dubbed “an entertainment,” something not to be taken too seriously. That song’s video, however, proved that the band was taking silliness extremely seriously, mixing in a cross between Robert Palmer’s robotic dancing girls and Kylie Minogue’s headgear-heavy club kids, and costumes seemingly designed by whoever got auf’d any given week from Project Runway. Lider and bandmate Yonatan Goldstein appeared again in their roles as the stiff singers from “20 Seconds.” And the mustachioed man behind the burka (Uriel Yekutiel) was there again, too, only this time he was twirling a glittering hula hoop in slow motion, wearing black spandex right down to his high heels. The video was like the Cliffs Notes to Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes on ‘Camp.’”

Lider came out years ago. He’s one of Israel’s highest-profile gay celebrities. But there’s out, and there’s out there. Ivri Lider is out. The Young Professionals are out there.

A lot has changed in Israel since I visited Tel Aviv in 1995, hoping to snag an interview with Dana International, a transgender pop star whose infectious dance song “Layla Tov, Europa” came in second in the race to represent Israel in the Eurovision Song Contest. (This was two years before she’d try again, successfully, with “Diva”—which topped the Israeli competition, arousing all sorts of vitriol from the political right, before going on to win the international contest, bringing the coveted pop prize to Israel for the first time since “Hallelujah” did in 1979.) I had approached Ofer Nissim, the DJ and producer who was handling such requests for Dana, and explained that I was reporting for the Washington Blade, a gay newspaper. “A gay newspaper?” he asked, baffled. My Hebrew was mediocre, but I repeated myself: a newspaper for gay people. “Ah,” he said, “you write about dicks.” The editor of the buttoned-down Blade—the oldest gay paper in America, and strictly PG-rated—would have fainted, hearing something like that. But at the time, it wasn’t even imaginable in Israel that gay culture involved anything but sex, not even to a DJ who hosted huge gay dance parties in Tel Aviv and produced disco music by Israel’s biggest transgender celebrity.

In my dark apartment, the music was doing its job. I had forgotten about my Amazon ranking, and had bought the band’s new album, 9:00 to 17:00, 17:00 to Whenever. While it was downloading, I replayed the video for “D.I.S.C.O.” and danced around in my boxer shorts—very softly, so my downstairs neighbors could foolishly get their sleep.

The rest of the album mixes often-raunchy lyrics with a melancholy take on intimacy. In “Bad Blood,” Lider intones “White skin, white skin/ you don’t know the state I’m in/ red blood, sweet cherry/ and off to Canada to marry.” In “Deserve,” the fierceness yields to something more tender: “You deserve someone stronger than me/ who doesn’t need a drink to tell you that he wants to … And when you’re gone that’s who I wanna be/ but I don’t really know if I can.” And there’s sex, woven into the songs without hesitation or de-gaying. As Lider sings in “Family Value,” “Shame is not something I dance to.”

I listened some more. “With Me” echoed old Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark. “Wake Up” sounded vaguely like Orbital. “Young Professionals” had some Pet Shop Boys pedigree, and “Angry Alone” shared lineage with Madonna in her Mirwais phase, circa American Life. I was in Tel Aviv one minute, Berlin the next. Or New York, very late at night. Which, in fact, was exactly where I was.

Then I got to the song that hooked me: a coverof Suzanne Vega’s pumping “Blood Makes Noise.” Lider has often been smart about his covers. When he recorded Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” for the 2006 Israeli movie The Bubble, he turned a classic on its head with the greatest of respect. And when he covered Katy Perry’s cheeky, flirty pop song “I Kissed a Girl” a few years ago, morphing it into a wistful, melancholy, acoustic meditation—all while taking a queer song and queering it up a notch, singing, “I kissed a girl and I liked it, hope my boyfriend don’t mind it”—he completely won me over as a fan. (This didn’t work as well with Lady Gaga’s “Telephone,” proving that even a gay man can’t out-gay Gaga.)

But “Blood Makes Noise” was already dear to my heart—and one of the best pop songs ever about AIDS. (It doesn’t particularly matter to me that Vega was vague on what she was talking about in the song; when it came out in 1992, a lot of gay men heard it as an AIDS-inspired song, and that resonance endures for many of us.) In the song, a patient talks to a doctor: “I think that you might want to know the details and the facts/ but there’s something in my blood denies the memory of the acts … Blood makes noise/ it’s ringing in my ear/ and I can’t really hear you in the thickening fear.”

This is heavy stuff for The Young Professionals, but they handle it in a most wonderful way: They turn it into a driving electronic dance song. This isn’t a camp, but it’s not a reverential homage, either. It’s defiant in its insistence on dance-floor legitimacy; yes, it’s a heavy song, but the beat is throbbing and irresistible, so get up and dance, dammit. In a flash, “Blood Makes Noise” becomes something different from what it was before. No longer the cousin to other well-crafted, obliquely referenced pop songs about AIDS—think of Pet Shop Boys’ “Being Boring” or the Blow Monkeys’ “Digging Your Scene”—this dance tune was more a descendant of “Hit That Perfect Beat,” the only memorable track that gay trailblazers Bronski Beat recorded after the departure of their falsetto-voiced founding vocalist Jimmy Somerville. That 1986 disco anthem touched on AIDS in its lyrics—“boys in the back room/ their house destroyed/ touch and kiss a stranger if all else fails/ hiding from the danger that’s been sent from hell”—but there’s nothing mournful about it. The unrelenting beat was the important thing, as I understood from the single’s rainbow-colored poster, featuring rows of identical boys beating drums, that hung over my bed in high school.

And there, as this new version of “Blood Makes Noise” pushed out of my computer in the middle of the night, I was taken back to that moment 25 years ago. A moment when dance music wasn’t afraid to take up the occasional heavy subject—think of earlier Bronski Beat (with Somerville still at the mike) addressing anti-gay violence in “Why?”—as long as everyone remembered what dance music was all about: staying up late, having a good time, and forgetting your worries—“smiling through our tears,” as Marc Almond once put it, “in these darker times.”

It was after 3 a.m. when I finally decided to turn off the music and try to get some sleep. I almost forgot to check Amazon for sales. Almost, but not quite. My ranking was suddenly up: Some other night owl must have bought a copy. How could I sleep now? I called up The Young Professionals album again and clicked on “Blood Makes Noise” one more time. To help me stay up until 4.

In the midst of all these hip new offerings, though, you’ll find something (at least partly) old and traditional: The Mad 7, a one-man show inspired by The Seven Beggars by Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, the legendary Hasidic storyteller who died in 1810 (and whose biography, by Rodger Kamenetz, is due out this fall from Nextbook Press).

“Nachman was definitely a Fringe performer in his time,” Yehuda Hyman, who wrote and performs The Mad 7, told The Scroll. “He went against the establishment. He was untraditional, adventurous, and somewhat outrageous. Besides all that, he would occasionally disappear from his followers and show up in another town in costumed disguise, pretending to be someone else. What could be more Fringe?”

Nachman’s story has been updated somewhat. In Hyman’s version, it’s about a San Francisco-based administrative assistant named Elliot Green who embarks on a “mystical quest,” complete with song and dance; on his journey, Elliott meets the characters from the original tale. “The characters of The Seven Beggars are timeless and I have not updated them,” Hyman explained. “It is Elliott’s interaction with them, as a person living in 2010 and his struggle to live a life of meaning in the context of today’s world, that is the updating part. I have tried to be faithful in spirit to Rabbi Nachman’s tale.”

Of course, the whole thing is somewhat abbreviated, because the original tale took Rabbi Nachman 10 days to tell. Hyman had to fit Nachman’s “wild tour of the mysteries of the universe” into a single evening, so he had to be “selective” about what he kept.

“Rabbi Nachman’s essential teachings are about the absolute necessity of finding joy in one’s life and fighting against sadness and depression,” said Hyman. “How do we find and nurture our souls? The Seven Beggars appears to me to be a sort of recipe book for how to achieve this. My hope is that I can pass on some of this beautiful teaching and do it in a way that is easy and entertaining for people.”

The Mad 7 plays through next weekend at the East Village’s 4th Street Theatre.

Related: Burnt Books [Nextbook Press]

But most intriguing to The Scroll is a reference that comes early in the play. The young protagonist (Robbins) is writing a letter to his hero, the theater legend (Glover), hoping to secure a meeting:

“I read in the paper that you’re going to mount your musical Disraeli this summer in London … I did the show at my high school. I played Ben (in the original keys) and designed the sets … I was also the one who persuaded Mrs. Leach to do it when everyone else wanted to do Bye Bye Birdie.”

We don’t know of any actual musical about Benjamin Disraeli; nor do we know if the Disraeli of the maybe-nonexistent musical or the Disraeli of real life answered to “Ben.” But anyone interested in musicalizing the life of England’s first Jewish prime minister might want to check out the Nextbook Press biography by Tablet Magazine books critic Adam Kirsch.

Related: Benjamin Disraeli [Nextbook Press]
The Old ‘Coming Out’ Story Gets Twisted [Capital]

Lucas—a porn actor and director, and founder of the New York-based gay porn production company Lucas Entertainment—sees his new film Men of Israel as a tool, if you will, to promote tourism, at least among gay men. Before you laugh this off, know that it’s happened before, when the Bel Ami studio’s movies helped turn Prague into a major gay destination soon after the Iron Curtain fell, or when porn director Kristen Bjorn’s Australian trilogy put Sydney on the gay map nearly 20 years ago. The Russian-born Lucas has been ratcheting up the heat for weeks in anticipation of the film’s release tomorrow. His website—MenOfIsraelXXX.com—features still photos of the actors and excerpted video clips, as well as text explaining the performers’ biographies and Lucas’s Zionist motivations for making the film.

Journalists from The Atlantic to Out Magazine to Yediot Aharonot have taken notice, deeming the project a landmark because it is the first gay adult film to feature an “all-Israeli” cast. Fair enough. But they’ve missed the larger story: Men of Israel is a landmark because it is the first gay porn film to feature an all-Jewish cast.

Jewish involvement in the adult industry has been widely documented over the years. And even though that involvement usually happens behind the scenes, where viewers never notice, or gets erased when Jewish performers adopt deracinated porn names, there have been some openly Jewish stars in straight porn. Nina Hartley, Joanna Angel, Heather Pink, and other women have succeeded without hiding their backgrounds in interviews. A smaller number of Jewish men have done the same in straight porn, although they often play their parts with tongue in cheek. (Think of uber-nebbish Ron Jeremy, or Harry Reems—born Herbert Streicher—whose on-screen persona was as close to Groucho Marx as it was to fellow ’70s super-stud John Holmes.)

But in gay porn, where there’s less room for nebbishes and clowns, openly Jewish men have been virtually absent or invisible. In fact, the only one in recent memory is, well, Michael Lucas.

That’s not to say that there haven’t been Jewish guys in gay films. Just two years ago, for instance, Dror Barak made it big as a hirsute hunk making movies for Raging Stallion Studios; but Barak—who worked in the Israeli Consulate in New York until news of his other career broke—performed under the name Roman Ragazzi. (It seemed like not much has changed since I came out 20 years earlier and got this bit of advice from an older Jewish friend: If you want to date a guy, tell him you’re Jewish, but if you want to get laid, tell him you’re Italian.)

In Men of Israel, the guys are all Israeli, all Jewish, and they’re not hiding it. Sure, their names are probably fakes—no parents would name their son Morr Foxx unless they knew he’d grow up to be a gay porn star. But at least their names sound plausibly Israeli, plausibly Jewish: Matan Shalev, Avi Dar, Naor Tal.

So will Lucas’s self-proclaimed landmark film change things? For Israel, perhaps. The director’s goal is to help viewers realize that Israel is a place of unique beauty and history, he says, but also a place that’s not so different from Prague or Sydney or Palm Springs— all places where hot men have sex with each other on film, and all nice places to take a perfectly innocent gay-cation. To that extent, the project seems likely to succeed.

As for Jewish men, the question remains open. Will Jewish men become a religion-based fetish category for consumers of gay porn, who can already choose narrow types of men to watch based on their race or ethnicity (Latinos, African-Americans) or age (daddies, college boys) or body type (big bears, skinny twinks)? Will their Jewishness become a signifier for a certain type of sexual prowess or desirability? Will Italian guys start wearing mezuzahs and telling people they’re Jewish—and will that make them seem more virile, better endowed, hotter?

I’ll believe it when I see it. It’s possible that Men of Israel will herald a golden age for Jewish guys in gay porn, but it’s just as possible that the few “openly Jewish” performers who have made it in gay porn have gotten away with it because they are still somehow “exotic” foreigners—Israelis with unfamiliar names or, like Lucas, Russian born —rather than the Jewish boy next door. I’ll know that Jewish guys have truly arrived when I see a magazine called Jewish Inches, or a DVD titled Dirty Jews, or a blond, blue-eyed Midwestern performer who adopts a name like Lance Bornstein or Rod Horowitz.