Breakthrough Jew - Ilan Zechory

By: Sarah Bauder for ShalomLife

Name: Ilan Zechory
Age: 29

Hometown: Detroit, Michigan

Breakthrough Cred: One of the co-founders of annotation website, Rap Genius

Ilan Zechory, at least by conventional standards, could be characterized as an “odd egg”. He attended Yale University with a focus on religious studies, graduating in 2006. For his senior thesis, Zechory chose to discuss a hermit who created his own religion in the ‘80’s.

Ivy league diploma in hand, Google came calling, where he worked as a project manager. Fast forward to July 2009, where Zechory found himself in an East Village apartment with two Yale pals, Mahbod Moghadam and Tom Lehman. The former was attempting to explain to the uninitiated latter, the complexities and metaphor of rapper Cam’ron’s lyrics. What spawned from that evening’s discourse, was the concept for Rap Genius.

“Rap Genius is... a lot of things. It's a Wikipedia of annotated texts that started out as a side project for annotating rap lyrics. It was just a few friends talking about rap lyrics and throwing out interpretations, interesting historical information, and poetic analysis. It quickly grew and expanded to music beyond rap, music in other languages, non-musical texts like poetry. Before we had 15 songs on the site, there was a Bob Dylan song. Before there were 50 songs, there was an Emily Dickenson poem. We started noticing that people interested in annotating rap were really interested in annotating lots of different stuff, not just rap. Rap was obviously a fruitful place to start for annotation because it is so dense - there's a lot of wordplay and reference and whatnot. So Rap Genius has grown and expanded into a platform for annotating all sorts of texts,” Zechory explained to Education Week.
 
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