Jewish American Heritage Month: Books

The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies by Tina ühauf (Editor) The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies is the most comprehensive and expansive critical handbook of Jewish music published to date. It is the first endeavor to address the diverse range of sounds, texts, archives, traditions, histories, geographic and political contexts, and critical discourses in the field. The thirty-one experts from thirteen countries who prepared the thirty original and groundbreaking chapters in this handbook are leaders in the disciplines of musicology and Jewish studies as well as adjacent fields. Chapters in the handbook provide a broad coverage of the subject area with considerable expansion of the topics that are normally covered in a resource of this type. Designed around eight distinct sections -- Land, City, Ghetto, Stage, Sacred and Ritual Spaces, Destruction / Remembrance, and Spirit -- the range and scope of The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies most significantly suggests a new framework for the study of Jewish music centered on spatiality and taking into consideration temporality and collectivity. Within each chapter, authors have selected what they consider to be the most important material relevant to their topic and, drawing on the most authoritative insights from historical and ethnomusicology, Jewish studies, history, anthropology, philology, religious studies, and the visual arts, have taken a genuinely inter- or transdisciplinary approach. Integrated chapter bibliographies provide material for further reading. Together the chapters form a first truly global look at Jewish music, incorporating studies from Central and East Asia, Europe, Australia, the Americas, and the Arab world. Together they span world history, from antiquity until the present day. As such, the Handbook provides a resource that researchers, scholars, and educators will use as the most important and authoritative overview of work within music and Jewish studies.

Sounding Jewish in Berlin by Phil Alexander How can a traditional music with little historical connection to Berlin become a way of hearing and making sense of the bustling German capital in the twenty-first century? In Sounding Jewish in Berlin, author Phil Alexander explores the dialogue between the city's contemporary Yiddish klezmer scene and the street-level creativity that has become a hallmark of the city's decidedly modern urbanity and cosmopolitanism. By tracing how klezmer music engages with the spaces and symbolic meanings of the city, Alexander sheds light on how this Eastern European folk music has become not just a product but also a producer of Berlin.This engaging ethnomusicological study of Berlin's dynamic Yiddish music scene evokes the sounds, atmospheres, and performance spaces through which klezmer musicians have built a dense musical network in the city. Transcending a restrictive framework that considers this music solely in the context of the troubled German-Jewish history and notions of guilt and absence, Alexander shows how Berlin's current klezmer performers - a diverse group of Jewish and non-Jewish performers - imaginatively blend the genre's traditional musical language with characteristically local tones to forge a distinctively twenty-first-century version of klezmer. Ultimately, the music's vital presence in Berlin is powerful evidence that if a traditional folk music is to remain audible amid the noise of the urban, it must become a meaningful part of that noise.

The Routledge Handbook to Music under German Occupation 1938-1945 by David Fanning (Editor); Erik Levi (Editor)

Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth-Century America by Judah M. Cohen In Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth-Century America: Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack, Judah M. Cohen demonstrates that Jews constructed a robust religious musical conversation in the United States during the mid- to late-19th century. While previous studies of American Jewish music history have looked to Europe as a source of innovation during this time, Cohen's careful analysis of primary archival sources tells a different story. Far from seeing a fallow musical landscape, Cohen finds that Central European Jews in the United States spearheaded a major revision of the sounds and traditions of synagogue music during this period of rapid liturgical change. Focusing on the influences of both individuals and texts, Cohen demonstrates how American Jewish musicians sought to balance artistry and group singing, rather than "progressing" from solo chant to choir and organ. Congregations shifted between musical genres and practices during this period in response to such factors as finances, personnel, and communal cohesiveness. Cohen concludes that the "soundtrack" of 19th-century Jewish American music heavily shapes how we look at Jewish American music and life in the first part of the 21st-century, arguing that how we see, and especially hear, history plays a key role in our understanding of the contemporary world around us. Supplemented with an interactive website that includes the primary source materials, recordings of the music discussed, and a map that highlights the movement of key individuals, Cohen's research defines more clearly the sound of 19th-century American Jewry.

Experiencing Jewish Music in America by Tina ühauf Experiencing Jewish Music in America: A Listener's Companion offers an easy-to-read and new perspective on the remarkably diverse landscape that comprises Jewish music in the United States. This much-needed survey on the art of listening to and enjoying this dynamic and diverse musical culture invites listeners curious about the many types of music in its connection to Jewish life. Experiencing Jewish Music in America is intended to encourage further reading about, listening to, and viewing of this portion of America's musical heritage, and provide listeners with the tools to understand and appreciate this body of work. This volume is designed to appeal to listeners of all stripes, regardless of ability to read music, and of religious or cultural background. Experiencing Jewish Music in America offers insights into an extensive range of musical genres and styles that have been central to the Jewish experience, beginning with the arrival of the first Jewish immigrants in the sixteenth century and the chanting of the Torah, to the sounds of pop today. It lays the groundwork for the listener's understanding of music in its relation to Jewish studies by exploring the wide range of venues in which this music has appeared, from synagogue to street to stage to screen. Each chapter offers selected case studies where these unique forms of music were--and still can be--heard, seen, and experienced. This book gives readers unique insights into the challenges of classifying Jewish music, while it traces its history and development on American soil and outlines "ways of listening" so readers can draw clear connections to Jewish culture. The volume thus brings together American Jewish history, the story of American and Jewish music, and the roles of the individuals important to both. It offers the reader tools to identify, evaluate, and appreciate the musical genres, and reflect the growing interest of the past decade in the academic study of Jewish music.

Klezmer by Hankus Netsky Klezmer presents a lively and detailed overview of the folk musical tradition as practiced in Philadelphia's twentieth-century Jewish community. Through interviews, archival research, and recordings, Hankus Netsky constructs an ethnographic portrait of Philadelphia's Jewish musicians, the environment they worked in, and the repertoire they performed at local Jewish lifestyle and communal celebrations. Netsky defines what klezmer music is, how it helped define Jewish immigrant culture in Philadelphia, and how its current revival has changed klezmer's meaning historically. Klezmer also addresses the place of musicians and celebratory music in Jewish society, the nature of klezmer culture, the tensions between sacred and secular in Jewish music, and the development of Philadelphia's distinctive "Russian Sher" medley, a unique and masterfully crafted composition. Including a significant amount of musical transcriptions, Klezmer chronicles this special musical genre from its heyday in the immigrant era, through the mid-century period of its decline through its revitalization from the 1980s to today.

German-Jewish Organ Music by Tina Frühauf (Editor) This anthology traces the main phases of the history and stylistic development of organ music in the Reform Jewish communities in Central Europe, as well as in the German-influenced communities of Königsberg (Kaliningrad) and Odessa, and works by German-Jewish composers who emigrated to the United States and Israel after World War II. The small but respectable body of compositions for the organ in the synagogue is represented by fourteen exemplary works; the pieces span the period beginning with the Reform movement in the early nineteenth century to post-Holocaust works in the mid-twentieth century. Initially oriented predominantly toward Christian models, a specifically Jewish style of organ music emerged in the late nineteenth century, made up from elements of both Jewish and Western musical cultures. The selected repertoire featured in the anthology, although all emanating from the same cultural milieu, is based on a wide variety of musical thematic material, including biblical cantillation, nineteenth-century synagogue song, Yiddish folk song, and the musical traditions of various Jewish cultural groups (Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Yemenite).

A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany by Lily E. Hirsch "The book presents a lucid and carefully researched picture of [the Jewish Culture League], revealing the many challenges---practical, intellectual, and moral---faced by its leaders and members amidst the increasing tensions of life in Nazi Germany." ---Shirli Gilbert, Journal of the American Musicological Society "Offers a clear introduction to a fascinating, yet little known, phenomenon in Nazi Germany, whose very existence will be a surprise to the general public and to historians. Easily blending general history with musicology, the book provides provocative yet compelling analysis of complex issues." ---Michael Meyer, author of The Politics of Music in the Third Reich "Hirsch poses complex questions about Jewish identity and Jewish music, and she situates these against a political background vexed by the impossibility of truly viable responses to such questions. Her thorough archival research is complemented by her extensive use of interviews, which gives voice to those swept up in the Holocaust. A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany is a book filled with the stories of real lives, a collective biography in modern music history that must no longer remain in silence." ---Philip V. Bohlman, author of Jewish Music and Modernity "An engaging and downright gripping history. The project is original, the research is outstanding, and the presentation lucid." ---Karen Painter, author of Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900-1945   The Jewish Culture League was created in Berlin in June 1933, the only organization in Nazi Germany in which Jews were not only allowed but encouraged to participate in music, both as performers and as audience members. A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germanyis the first book to seriously investigate and parse the complicated questions the existence of this unique organization raised. Why would the Nazis promote Jewish music when, in the rest of Germany, it was banned? What exactly is Jewish music? Who qualifies as a Jewish composer? And, if it is true that the Nazis conceived of the League as a propaganda tool, did Jewish participation in its activities amount to collaboration?

Music in Jewish Thought by Jonathan L. Friedmann (Compiled by) With the nineteenth century came new freedom for European Jews. Enjoying an integration that had been denied since the Middle Ages, they now wrestled with the form and degree of that integration in all areas of their lives, including in their creation, appreciation, and criticism of music. The writings focus on Jewish musicology, biography, historical surveys, secular music and songs performed in the synagogue.

Translations and Anotations of Choral Repertoire, Volume IV by Ethan Nash, with Joshua Jacobson This book provides English translations and IPA transliterations of a large amount of Hebrew texts used in the works of various composers. An entire chapter is devoted to the texts of Ernst Bloch's Avodath Hakodesh. With prefaces, notes on using the book, and indices. The CD contains spoken examples of the texts.

And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl by Josh Kun; Roger Bennett This illustrated history of Jewish culture in America as told through music includes a collection of amazingly kitschy, truly unforgettable album covers and insightful essays that highlight the funniest, most influential contributions to the musical canon. Full color throughout.

Jewish Identities by Klara Moricz Jewish Identities mounts a formidable challenge to prevailing essentialist assumptions about "Jewish music," which maintain that ethnic groups, nations, or religious communities possess an essence that must manifest itself in art created by members of that group. Klára Móricz scrutinizes concepts of Jewish identity and reorders ideas about twentieth-century "Jewish music" in three case studies: first, Russian Jewish composers of the first two decades of the twentieth century; second, the Swiss American Ernest Bloch; and third, Arnold Schoenberg. Examining these composers in the context of emerging Jewish nationalism, widespread racial theories, and utopian tendencies in modernist art and twentieth-century politics, Móricz describes a trajectory from paradigmatic nationalist techniques, through assumptions about the unintended presence of racial essences, to an abstract notion of Judaism.

Klezmer! by Henry Sapoznik In his quest to trace the roots of klezmer, the traditional instrumental music of Yiddish-speaking Jews, author Henry Sapoznik tells a fascinating story of survival against all odds, of a musical legacy so potent it can still be heard. This expanded second edition also includes a CD of klezmer music from Dave Tarras, Andy Statman, Naftule Brandwein, The Klezmatics, and others.

Music in Jewish History and Culture by Emanuel Rubin; John H. Baron The book surveys the broad sweep of music among Jews of widely diverse communities from Biblical times to the modern day. Each chapter focuses on a different Jewish cultural epoch and explores the music and the way it functioned in that society. The work is structured as both a college text and an informative guide for the lay reader.

Music in the Holocaust by Shirli Gilbert In Music in the Holocaust Shirli Gilbert provides the first large-scale, critical account of the role of music amongst communities imprisoned under Nazism. She documents a wide scope of musical activities, ranging from orchestras and chamber groups to choirs, theatres, communal sing-songs, and cabarets, in some of the most important internment centres in Nazi-occupied Europe, including Auschwitz and the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos. Gilbert is also concerned with exploring the ways in which music - particularly the many songs that were preserved - contribute to our broader understanding of the Holocaust and the experiences of its victims. Music in the Holocaust is, at its core, a social history, taking as its focus the lives of individuals and communities imprisoned under Nazism. Music opens a unique window on to the internal world of those communities, offering insight into how they understood, interpreted, and responded to their experiences at the time.

American Klezmer by Mark Slobin (Editor) Klezmer, the Yiddish word for a folk instrumental musician, has come to mean a person, a style, and a scene. This musical subculture came to the United States with the late-nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Although it had declined in popularity by the middle of the twentieth century, this lively music is now enjoying recognition among music fans of all stripes. Today, klezmer flourishes in the United States and abroad in the world music and accompany Jewish celebrations. The outstanding essays collected in this volume investigate American klezmer: its roots, its evolution, and its spirited revitalization. The contributors to American Klezmer include every kind of authority on the subject--from academics to leading musicians--and they offer a wide range of perspectives on the musical, social, and cultural history of klezmer in American life. The first half of this volume concentrates on the early history of klezmer, using folkloric sources, records of early musicians unions, and interviews with the last of the immigrant musicians. The second part of the collection examines the klezmer "revival" that began in the 1970s. Several of these essays were written by the leaders of this movement, or draw on interviews with them, and give firsthand accounts of how klezmer is transmitted and how its practitioners maintain a balance between preservation and innovation.

Music in Ancient Israel/Palestine by Joachim Braun This book contains the first study of the musical culture of ancient Israel/Palestine based primarily on the archaeological record. Noted musicologist Joachim Braun explores the music of the Holy Land region of the Middle East, tracing its form and development from its beginning in the Stone Age to the fourth century A.D. This is not a study of omusic in the Bibleo or music in obiblical timeso but a unique, in-depth investigation of the historical periods and cultures that influenced the music of the region and its people. Braun combines significant archaeological findings u musical instruments, terra cotta and metal figures, etched stone illustrations, mosaics u with evidence drawn from written (mainly biblical) texts and anthropological, sociological, and linguistic sources. The portrait Braun assembles of this past musical world is both fascinating and innovative, suggesting a reconsideration of many views long accepted by tradition. Enhanced with numerous illustrations and photographs that bring the archaeological evidence to life, this exceptional work will be a valued resource for scholars, students, and general readers interested in the history of music, biblical studies, Jewish studies, and the cultures of the ancient Near East.