PHOTO: Abraham Joseph Pal for Project Heroes
When is a concert more than just a concert? Portlanders have a chance to find out for themselves tonight.
Israeli singer-songwriter Gilad Segev will present Project Heroes at the Mittleman Jewish Community Center tonight at 7 pm.
Project Heroes was born in the aftermath of Oct. 7.
“I was shocked from the atrocities,” Segev said of that day, “but I was also in a very deep state of shock from the acts of heroism.”
Segev’s own brother had previously been killed during his service in the Israel Defense Forces. This combined with the heroism he witnessed on Oct. 7 to flip the script on Jewish identity.
“Our people tell their story from a victimized way, rather than the heroic story. It’s not only that the world is telling it this way, but also us,” Segev said. “Project Heroes is all about changing the narrative of the Jewish people from victimhood to heroism for the first time ever, because it was never done.”
Segev wrote 10 new songs for the project. When trying to reverse an entrenched historical narrative, sometimes it takes more than just songs. That’s why Project Heroes is more than a concert.
“It’s a concert that combines storytelling, music, AI, animation and documentary,” Segev said, “mixed together into a visual, multi-sensory project concept.”
There’s also a book with 40 more songs as poems, along with a forward by Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
Like many musicians, Segev played college campuses – a tough place to express Jewish identity in a post-Oct. 7 world.
“When [students] encountered the content of Project Heroes, something amazing happened,” Segev said. “It really helps them; it makes them stronger. It helps them deal with antisemitism. So, we created a program called The Hero Within, which is all about helping the students to connect to the hero within them.”
Segev has now launched a nonprofit to support all these efforts – thus a concert has become so much more.
It’s not the first time in his career that Segev’s music has become more than just music. Born to a Holocaust survivor family in the eastern suburbs of Tel Aviv, Segev broke onto the Israeli music scene in 2004 with the hit song “Achshav Tov,” written about his brother shortly after his death. It was the most-played song on Israeli radio that year. Four albums and 10 number-one hits later, Segev created his Passerby project, which “stands for music without borders, shared creativity, cultural exchange and self-expression,” according to his website. Passerby is still active, Segev explained, but he feels the moment global Jewish community is experiencing demands of him a singular focus.
“Since [Oct. 7], my passion is to share this light, to reflect this light. I’m still Passerby; I still have the thing I developed. I’m still an active musician in Israel, but Project Heroes took me over,” he said. The heroism of our people, and not only of our people, the values of this heroism that are shared with other people, kind of made it impossible for me to do anything else but reflect this light.”
The Portland concert comes at the tail end of a North American tour that has ventured from Florida to Alberta, Canada, with stops seemingly everywhere in between. Bess Butterworth, the Development Events and Community Programs Manager at the MJCC, heard about Project Heroes from a colleague at another Jewish Community Center and started working with the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland and their Community Shlichah.
“We really haven’t hosted anything quite like it before,” Butterworth said. “It is a musical performance, but it’s so much deeper than that.”
Tickets are $15 per person, $25 for families, and available at jewishportland.org/community-calendar/heroes-music-show.