Jill Sobule performs as part of Wesley Stace’s Cabinet of Wonders at City Winery on Oct. 19, 2018, in New York City.(Al Pereira\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The cause of death was a fire at her home outside Minneapolis, her publicist announced late Thursday. Sobule had been due to perform in Colorado on Friday.<\/p>\n
Sobule, who grew up as the only Jewish student at her Catholic school in Denver, broke new ground when she released \u201cI Kissed A Girl\u201d in 1995. The song chronicled a same-sex flirtation between two women and arrived at a time when queer narratives were rare in pop culture. Sobule, who later came out as bisexual, said it was the kind of song she wished she had been able to hear when she was a teen.<\/p>\n
The same year, her song \u201cSupermodel,\u201d satirizing teen culture, found success after it was included in the hit movie \u201cClueless.\u201d (The movie, focused on a Jewish teenager in Beverly Hills, is getting a new life now with a TV series.)<\/p>\n
Sobule grew up as what she told Lilith Magazine was as a \u201cDenver Jew, third generation from the Old Country,\u201d saying that her family practiced a secular and perhaps sanitized version of Judaism. \u201cWe were to Judaism,\u201d she told the magazine in 2023, \u201cwhat Olive Garden was to Italian restaurants.\u201d<\/p>\n
She also recalled that her first stage performance was as \u201cMiss Chanukah and Queen Esther\u201d in a school production when she was in first grade. After her turn atop the pop charts, she would return to Jewish themes in a wide array of musical and stage projects.<\/p>\n
She was a repeat participant in the Downtown Seder, a musical Passover performance held annually in New York City.<\/p>\n
She performed in a revue of \u201cFiddler on the Roof\u201d songs at a Jewish music festival in New York in 2007 alongside the Klezmatics and Theodore Bikel, who was synonymous with the lead character Tevye.<\/p>\n
And in 2016, she made headlines by composing the music for a new staging of \u201cYentl,\u201d the Isaac Bashevis Singer story about a gender-bending yeshiva student propelled into the popular consciousness by the 1986 movie of the same name starring Barbra Streisand.<\/p>\n
Sobule said she valued \u201cYentl\u201d as a depiction of transgenderism but had been struck by learning that Singer was unhappy with the movie and sought to address his objections by having the music come from \u201ca Jewish chorus\u201d instead of being sung by the characters.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think he would approve of my music,\u201d she told NPR at the time. \u201cI really do, because it keeps the spirit of the play, and it has a sense of humor. I think he actually would like it because it doesn\u2019t feel intrusive.\u201d<\/p>\n
And in 2022, she played both a cantor and the rabbi\u2019s wife in \u201cA Wicked Soul in Cherry Hill,\u201d a staging of the true story of the New Jersey rabbi convicted of arranging the murder of his wife. In a play abhorred by the family of the real victim, she delivered the \u201cstandout performance,\u201d according to a review in the Los Angeles Times. (The rabbi died last year.)<\/p>\n
Sobule\u2019s latest project was \u201cF\u2013k 7th Grade,\u201d an autobiographical musical about being queer in middle school that was well reviewed during its off-Broadway run in New York City. She had been scheduled to perform songs from the musical in Denver on Friday, in a venue that will now host an informal memorial service.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/GettyImages-1052573272-scaled-e1746183174831.webp\")