A talent agency advised DJ Raphi to hide that he's Israeli. He refused, then told WME he wouldn't perform a single Friday night or Saturday. They signed him anyway.
Raphael Nathan, the Israeli entertainer known to more than a billion YouTube viewers as DJ Raphi, sits down with Chani Kaplan for the Jerusalem Report podcast. He describes the Zoom call where a WME agent warned him that weekends are where kids' shows make their money, and his answer: "You've never seen a harder working Jew between Sunday and Thursday." The agent's reply revealed that only one shomer Shabbat artist had signed with the agency before him. Raphi also tells the story of a six-year-old boy who danced to his cleaning song between surgeries, and of a mother at Red Rocks who grabbed both his hands and told him her daughter had watched his videos through a fourth round of chemotherapy. "It's not entertainment. It's not dancing," she told him. "You're changing people's lives."
What makes this voice unusual: a South African-born, Jerusalem-based performer with severe ADHD and a childhood of bullying, who now sells out one of America's most storied amphitheatres for an audience of children, and who does it under his own Israeli name, at a moment when other creators are being told to hide theirs. He also speaks, for the first time in detail, about his mother, who cleaned his community's synagogue while raising four sons and was killed by a bus four years ago on her way to a shiva call.
Produced and edited by Gadi Zaig and Shifra Jacobs.
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