Judah M. Cohen

Whither Jewish Music? Jewish Studies, Music Scholarship, and the Tilt Between Seminary and University

In this essay, I explore the history of what has conventionally been described as “Jewish music” research in relation to parallel developments in both ethnomusicology and Jewish studies in the American academic world during the twentieth century. As a case study, I argue, the issues inherent in understanding Jewish musics historical trajectory offer a complex portrait of scholarship that spans the discourses of community, practice, identity, and ideology. Subject to the principles of Wissenschaft since the second half of the nineteenth century, Jewish music study has constantly negotiated the lines between the scholar and practitioner; between the seminary, the conservatory, and the university; between the good of science, the assertion of a coherent Jewish narrative in history, and the perceived need to reconnect an attenuating Jewish populace with its reinvented traditions; and between the core questions of musicology, comparative musicology, theology, and modern ethnomusicology.

Hip-hop Judaica: the politics of representin’ Heebster heritage

In this essay, I explore the use of rap and hip-hop conventions as they have developed within the self-consciously contemporary American Jewish ‘hipster’ scene between c. 1986 and 2006, framed particularly around the way these genres have addressed the discourses of masculinity within Jewish culture. By exploring the works and actions of such artists as Matisyahu and the Hip Hop Hoodios within the context of both American Jewish masculinity discussions and the historical relationship of Jews with commercial hip-hop performance, I attempt to explore how a population’s attempts at musical ‘change’ act as a crucial part of the religious and ethnic transmission and preservation process. Although outwardly seen as based on mimesis and even novelty, ‘Jewish’ hip hop, I suggest, instils a deep sense of identity into a population often characterised as iconoclastic, dynamic, politically inclusive and culturally mutable. Masculinity therefore serves largely as a vessel for young Jews to fashion a sense of self into a conversation from which they had previously been largely absent: one of several strategies used both to unmoor and to redefine what it means to be a ‘new’ Jew.

Modes of Tradition? Negotiating Jewishness and Modernity in the Synagogue Music of Isadore Freed and Frederick Piket

This article examines the discourses surrounding musical constructions called the ‘synagogue modes’ in post-Second World War America. After providing a historical account of the modes in Jewish musical thought, the article looks at the writings and compositions of Isadore Freed (1900–60) and Frederick Piket (1903–73), two prominent Reform movement composers with opposing viewpoints on modal usage within modern synagogue composition. Through this comparison, I show that the modes were a site for negotiating many of the same issues of Jewish continuity, American identity, and the relationship with ‘Tradition’ that pervaded American Jewish life at the time.

Embodying Musical Heritage in a New–Old Profession: American Jewish Cantorial Schools, 1904–1939

Current scholarship on music in Jewish life generally views American cantorial training as a postwar process of transplantation, translating a culture decimated by the Holocaust into a higher education program in the United States. Recently available digital repositories of historical materials, however, show at least five organized efforts to establish American cantorial schools between 1904 and 1939. I closely examine these efforts here, which reveal during this period a complicated and active negotiation surrounding the role of the cantor—and music more generally—in American Jewish life. Organizers of these schools engaged in active dialogue with cantorial colleagues in central and eastern Europe, subsequently creating institutional training models that imbued the cantor with a character, history, musical repertoire, and professional lifecycle compatible with the United States’ religious marketplace. Understanding the urge to establish these schools in the first half of the twentieth century, and the tendency to forget or minimize these efforts after World War II, offers insight into the flexibility of musical tradition as it sought to reassert itself on American soil.

The Music Libel Against the Jews

modernity, as strangers and as shrewd and sharp businessmen. however, the most frequent danger Jewish peddlers met was unrelated to their Jewishness: travelling the roads alone with money and goods, they often became victims of robbery and sometimes of murder with robbery as a motive. despite these threatening experiences, most of the peddlers succeeded in their business. Very often, after saving enough money, they quit peddling in order to settle down and start a more reputable, lucrative, and comfortable business. however, the end of peddling did not only open the way for another chapter in the economic life of peddlers. it also meant the chance to start a family by marrying or bringing their wives and children to the new world. Roads Taken tells an important story that is of great significance for historians interested in Jewish history. with her sensibility towards categories like race, gender, or religion, diner develops a complex and rewarding narrative which presents an essential topic of Jewish history in a well-structured and accessible way. although the book is a little repetitive at times, Roads Taken is very well and empathetically written. the book is thus not only of high relevance for historians, but also for other people interested in Jewish history.

Introduction: Shlomo Carlebach (1925–1994) and the Stories We Tell"

This issue originated in a panel co-organized by Natan Ophir and me for the American Jewish Historical Society’s 2014 Biennial Scholar’s Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Ophir, whose recently published biography of Carlebach incorporated numerous interviews and media materials, keenly sought additional venues for expanding and deepening the conversation beyond the few, largely musicological, studies that comprised the current literature.1 Aware that I had given a paper on Carlebach at a Jewish music conference in 2004, and penned the Carlebach entry in the second edition of the Encyclopedia Judaica, he approached me bring the subject to the American Jewish Historical Society. My colleague Shaul Magid and journalist Ari Goldman signed on, as did Judaic artist and Carlebach student Shonna Husbands-Hankin. Non-traditional historians all, we each sought to fill the lacuna of Carlebach scholoarship in our own way. The panel prompted a mixed reaction, generating a series of questions about the contents and methods of historical scholarship. How could one speaker begin by describing the gathering as a “convocation” and encouraging everyone to sing a Carlebach nigun [melody] together? How might speakers’ personal recollections reinforce or subvert scholarly discourse? How did scholarship and personal narrative interweave, and what could be called reliable or meaningful? And could Carlebach’s relationships with women—a deeply sensitive topic that strikes at a fissure between spiritual and cultural elevation—pass with only a few brief comments intent on moving the spotlight back to music and ministry? Indeed, these responses, combined with a thriving insider literature and an active series of stakeholders, seemed to reinforce the compatibility issues of “Carlebach studies” with conventional scholarly history. What approaches and resources, then, could we use to integrate Shlomo Carlebach, a widely influential figure whose influences seem nearly ubiquitous in contemporary American Jewish life, but who left a shallow paper trail, into existing narratives of American Jewish history?

Amy Horowitz. Mediterranean Israeli Music and the Politics of the Aesthetic . Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010. xvii, 251 pp.

who embraces accent as a form of local color literature, and Antin, who effaces her Jewish accent in order to pass as an American, Roth reclaims both accent and multilingual wordplay as means of producing a work of high modernist fiction. Throughout this book, Wirth-Nesher grants exquisite attention to the many meanings of names. Her close reading of the operations of the Yiddish/Hebrew word tam in I. B. Singer’s Gimpel tam, which Saul Bellow translated into English, as well as in Bellow’s novella Seize the Day, in which the protagonist renames himself Tommy and consorts with a pseudo-mentor named Tamkin, and her analysis of all the other names in the novella are nothing short of masterful. The same obtains to her excavation of the German sources of the names in Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl, and her explanation of the ways name-choices signal a straddling of cultures and generations, as in the naming of the third-generation daughter, Merry Levov, in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. Wirth-Nesher also offers an incisive analysis of Merry’s pathological stuttering in the Roth novel, as indicative of a Jewish American neurosis about passing. The theme of stuttering also connects back to Antin’s account of passing and her choice to mold her story after the model of the biblical Moses, Judaism’s first stutterer. In this case, as in all of her readings of the eruptions of biblical, liturgical, or vernacular Yiddish sources into American Jewish literature, Wirth-Nesher shows how traces of the Jewish literary past enlarge the time frame of the work, situating it within a longer and broader global tradition. Given the expansiveness of this thesis and Wirth-Nesher’s insistence, like Baal-Makhshoves, on a broad Jewish literary multilingualism, the conspicuous absence in this study of any treatment of Sephardic/Ladino sources in American Jewish literature is somewhat lamentable. The Sephardic origin of the first major American Jewish poet, Emma Lazarus, and the recent work of such writer-scholars as Ilan Stavans to highlight Sephardic American literature both suggest that including this element might have been a rich, even organic addition. That said, the omission of Sephardic elements detracts only minimally from an otherwise illuminating and comprehensive study.