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Ezra Furman

b. September 5, 1986

by JWA Staff
Our work to expand the Encyclopedia is ongoing. We are providing this brief biography for Ezra Furman until we are able to commission a full entry.

Songwriter and musician Ezra Furman, 2022. Photograph by Guy Gooch.

American songwriter and musician Ezra Furman is perhaps best known for composing parts of the soundtrack for the Netflix series Sex Education. Furman’s music career started in 2006 at Tufts University when she formed the band Ezra Furman and the Harpoons. She started solo touring after the band broke up in 2011, and in February 2012 she used funds from Kickstarter to self-release her first solo album, The Year of No Returning. That spring she formed a touring band: Ezra Furman and the Boy-Friends. In October 2013 she released the positively reviewed Day of the Dog. The positive press continued through the band's subsequent UK tour. In 2017 the Boy-Friends came to an end but the same members re-emerged as a new band, the Visions. In 2021, Furman came out as a transgender woman, completed a semester of rabbinical school before realizing motherhood took priority, and started a Jewish queer podcast named “2 Queers 4 Questions” with her friend Agnes Borinsky. Adulthood has brought her a newfound freedom to create the life she wants, something she longed for growing up Jewish and queer and lacking spaces where she could embody both at once. Furman’s ninth album, All of Us Flames (2022), draws connections between transphobic oppression and Jewish exile, sustaining the Jewish influence found throughout her work; she is quite observant and believes learning the Torah for her bar mitzvah influenced her musical journey. In 2023 she announced a hiatus from touring, ascribing the exhaustion and pressure she felt to COVID-19, transphobia, motherhood, "some unsettling audience encounters,” and “increasingly corporate-owned music venues.” She will continue pursuing music and performing in her hometown of Boston, and she believes this break will allow her to explore what lies ahead musically. 

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How to cite this page

Jewish Women's Archive. "Ezra Furman." (Viewed on August 18, 2024) <http://qa.jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/furman-ezra>.