The idea, by her own admission, didn’t arrive with a lightning bolt. It came more like a phone call out of the blue.
Jim Dolan, from the cabaret club Blue Strawberry in midtown, reached out one day with a simple question. He’d heard that Rabbi Amy Feder of Temple Israel was an accomplished mezzo soprano. Would she ever consider doing a concert?
Feder laughed when she told the story. For one thing, her parents are regulars at Blue Strawberry, which means there’s a very real possibility they’d already planted the seed. For another, every time she’s been there, she’s noticed that a good chunk of the audience looks familiar.
“I feel like half the crowd is Jewish, and I know them,” she said.
As it turns out, Dolan heard about Feder’s singing talents not from her parents but from his friends Karen and Charlie Elbert. Feder still said yes to the two-night gig, May 27 and 28. When she learned a portion of the proceeds would benefit TI, that sealed the deal.
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What makes the upcoming show feel different — and a little thrilling — is that Feder has never quite done anything like this before. A full concert. Just her voice and a piano. No bimah, no service, no prayer book in sight.
“I always said that I either wanted to be a lounge singer or a rabbi,” Feder, 47, joked (kind of) when we spoke recently.
Preparation, she said, has been equal parts excitement and improvisation. She began by compiling a list of favorite musical theater songs by Jewish composers, which, as she put it, is “pretty much all of them” (think Gershwin, Berlin, Rodgers and Hammerstein). From there, she planned to sit down with pianist Zenobia Perry, TI’s longtime accompanist, to figure out what works best and how many songs they’ll actually need, with Perry as the sole accompaniment.
“I’d rather have too many than too few,” Feder said, hoping Perry might have a better sense of concert math than she does.
The path that led Feder to this moment winds back decades, to a youngster who fully expected music to be her life. According to the rabbi’s mother, Robin Feder, said Amy was a musical theater stalwart at Clayton High School, appearing in productions like “Into the Woods” and “Crazy for You.”
At 16, she was auditioning for conservatories when she had what she described as a crisis of faith — not just religiously, but vocationally. She wanted music, but she wanted more than music. The University of Michigan offered both: a place where she could study music alongside a full liberal arts education.
It was there that a mentor gave her advice she’s never forgotten: If you’re a singer, you’ll always find a way to sing. It doesn’t have to be your entire career.
She took that to heart.
After Michigan, Feder initially planned to pursue cantorial school. A coffee conversation with Susan Talve, Central Reform Congregation’s rabbi emerita, changed that trajectory.
“Why would you be a cantor when you could be a singing rabbi?” Feder remembered Talve asking.
That made sense. Feder took cantorial classes, kept music central, but followed the rabbinic path, finding ways to weave song into sacred moments.
“I really lucked out that I was able to have singing be such a big part of my life without having to have it be my full profession,” she said.
Music, after all, runs through her family. Her father is a skilled singer, her mother plays guitar, and her sister, a gerontologist, also sings well. The household leans musical and theatrical, even if Feder’s kids prefer attending concerts to being on stage.
As for what audiences can expect, Feder hopes for something familiar but freshly revealed. Most people, she suspects, will recognize nearly every song, even if they’ve never thought about who wrote them.
Between numbers, she plans to share stories about the composers, their Jewish backgrounds and the ways their music has found its way into Jewish life.
As a rabbi who regularly brings secular music onto the bimah or under the chuppah, she sees this as an extension of what she already does: letting something familiar become newly meaningful.
There’s a touch of vulnerability in it all. Feder said part of her feels a little silly — standing on a stage, just her and a piano, doing something she’s dreamed about her whole life. But that feeling is outweighed by something else: the recognition that some opportunities don’t come around twice. And when they do, you say yes.
What she’ll wear is still undecided. One thing she knows for sure is that she won’t have to cover her shoulders.
Rabbi Amy Feder will perform at Blue Strawberry, 364 N. Boyle Ave., on May 27 and 28 at 7:30 p.m. For more information and tickets, go to bluestrawberrystl.com/show/ticket/1969.
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