Blackface White Faces

A friend alerted me to this the other day:




It’s an Israeli group called Kleibedik (it's a pun on Klezmer and leybedik [lively]) doing a “klezmer” medley. In blackface. With fake neon payes. The whole video is like a seven layer pie where every layer is “WTF.” I mean, the terrible arrangements of Barry Sisters and My Yiddish Mame and and and COTTON EYED JOE? Guys, shit goes deep and that’s BEFORE we even get to the blackface 
.

Which… I have no explanation for. Do you? It seems to be their shtik, as you can find videos online of Kleibedik performing live in the same get up. And the sad thing is that the audience is eating it up. It makes my heart hurt. It’s like multi-level minstrelsy. The blackface goes with the blackhat.. face. Oysh.

Israel has so much amazing Jewish culture, but when it comes to eastern European/Ashkenazi stuff too often it’s just a big box full of cringe wrapped up with a bow of horrible. I mean, is this truly how young Israelis process and relate to Yiddish? Don’t answer that.

It makes me wonder… why is blackface still so compelling to artists? And not just American artists or Jewish artists.  I’m not sure there’s one answer, but it gives me an excuse to talk about some of my favorite examples of modern blackface, both Jewish and non.

(For a really great, though academic, exploration of the history behind American pop culture, Jews and blackface, please read Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Melting Pot of Hollywood by Michael Rogin.)

But we're staying mostly in the recent-ish past and present now...

1980s

Taco, Puttin’ on the Ritz

Apparently this video had the blackface parts removed when it was first released, but you can find the original now on YouTube. What could blackface possibly have to do with anything here?

Two thoughts. First, when Irving Berlin originally wrote the song in 1929, apparently the original lyric referred to young fashionable Harlemites strutting up and down Lenox Avenue. According to Wikipedia, when it was recorded for the film Blue Skies in 1946, the lyrics were changed to “Park Avenue” and a whiter kind of image.

Second, Taco isn’t just Dutch, he’s Dutch-Indonesian. Perhaps Taco was attracted to the idea of first, reminding us of the original racial dynamics of the time and place where Puttin’ on the Ritz was written. And/or, as a bi-racial artist, perhaps he was intrigued by the ambiguity of blackface as a way of playing with race. Or, maybe, the video is directly referencing some movie I’m not familiar with. This is always a possibility. Feel free to educate me in the comments. 

So, I think I finally figured out what the deal is with Taco. Or at least, part of the deal. It's so obvious I can't believe it didn't occur to me when I first wrote this piece. But here's the thing: there's a Dutch tradition of blackface called Zwarte Piet. It goes back to the mid-19th century and is influenced by and parallel to our own. This is a National Geographic Article from 2018:

The character was popularized in a mid-19th century children’s book written by a man who was very interested in the Dutch royal family members, “one of whom bought a slave in a slave market in Cairo in the mid-19th century,” says Joke Hermes, a professor of media, culture, and citizenship at Inholland University. This slave, Hermes suggests, may have helped inspire the character of Zwarte Piet.

Before the Netherlands abolished slavery in 1863, the country was deeply involved in the transatlantic slave trade. It grew prosperous by selling enslaved people to the United States or sending them to work in Dutch colonies, and some nobles “gifted” each other with enslaved black children, who are shown in paintings wearing colorful, Moorish clothing 

The exaggerated appearance of Dutch Zwarte Piet costumes may have also been influenced by American blackface minstrel shows, which toured throughout Europe in the mid-19th century. “The Dutch tend to argue that Black Pete is a Dutch thing, and other people outside the Netherlands don’t understand our culture,” says Mitchell Esajas, co-founder of New Urban Collective and Kick Out Zwarte Piet. “But it is part of an international tradition of racial stereotyping.”

Culture Club, Do You Really Want To Hurt Me

Boy George is on trial and a whole jury of black face Jolsons are there to render a verdict? Again, Boy George strikes me as an artist who is playing with sexuality/gender and perhaps is attracted to blackface as akin to his own trademark ‘drag.’ I’m not sure. What do you think?

1970s

Two icons of Jewish male sexuality: Elliott Gould and Neil Diamond. Both Diamond and Gould were very conscious of their Jewishness and never shied away from it, though Gould, being a much more talented actor, has played a much wider variety of parts.  Nonetheless… it makes sense that even in the 1970s, the shadow of Al Jolson crept behind both performers- both as products of American pop culture and as out Jewish men in the public eye.

Neil Diamond, The Jazz Singer

Neil Diamond tackles the Jolson legacy, straight on, by remaking the Jazz Singer in 1980. (I'm counting this as 1970s. Too bad.) Was The Jazz Singer 1980 a disaster on pretty much every level? Yes. Was it so bad it’s good kinda bad? I’d say yes. And that’s exemplified by the way Diamond works blackface into the modern setting. See, Neil and his band are playing at an uptown club and they can’t have no white man on stage. Hence the need for black face. It's so gloriously cheesy you can't help but enjoy the appalling spectacle.

For comparison, here's some Jolson:

Elliott Gould, The Long Goodbye

A modern (1973) remake of Raymond Chandler's LA noir. I can’t find a clip of the scene I’m thinking of, so you will have to see the movie yourself. You’ll thank me. 

But here’s an image of Elliott Gould in the scene I want to talk about. He’s playing detective Philip Marlowe and he’s been brought in for booking at the police station. After being finger printed he smears ink on his face and breaks into a sardonic version of Jolson’s ‘Swanee’. It's his way of expressing his contempt for the corrupt police who know they've arrested an innocent men.   According to Gould, the whole thing was improvised on set, which only adds another layer of intensity to his performance. 

(He was a damn good looking man, right?) And some more Jolson, for good measure. What do you think about contemporary blackface? Do you see it around? Is it ever appropriate? Can it be a legitimate part of American-Jewish culture?

Weekend Links

Couple interesting things popped up in the feed this weekend:

• A new blog by an African-American Jewish man living in Crown Heights called 'Zein Shver.' He only has one entry so far, about his decision to participate in a project exploring his experience around the word 'shvartse.' It's an interesting read and I hope he'll continue to write more about life as Black Jewish hasid.

• What exactly does 'Ladino' refer to? I wasn't aware that this was in question, but an interesting post over at the University of Washington Stroum Center for Jewish Studies lays a little knowledge on us.

• And there's only five days left to contribute to the IndieGogo campaign to bring The Megile of Itzik Manger back to the stage via Motl Didner and the Folksbiene. DO IT!!!

New York Klezmer Series Returns Next Week With Miryem-Khaye Siegel and the Dave Levitt Trio!

Exciting news, klez fans. The New York Klezmer Series returns to the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue next Tuesday. It's curated by the only Seattle grunge style Klezmer poyk master in New York- Aaron Alexander- and it's the hottest spot for Jewish music and dance. 

Now, I'm not biased at all, but you'd be crazy to miss this rare feature appearance by the Dorot Division's most famous Yiddish chanteuse (and accordionistke) Miryem-Khaye Siegel.

Here's the details:

Miryem-Khaye Seigel and the Dave Levitt Trio
Tuesday, Jan. 28th, 7:30pm
Stephen Wise Free Synagogue
30 W. 68th St. NYC (bet. Central Park W. & Columbus)

$15 admission
Christina Crowder will lead the Klezmer Workshop before the show! 5:30-7:00pm $25
$35 for Full Night pass
Klezmer Jam session to follow the show



And the rest of the season's schedule:

Feb. 4 - CTMD -Tantshoyz featuring Avia Moore
Feb. 11 - OFF
Feb. 18 - Dmitri Slepovitch's 'Litvakus Trio'
Feb. 25 - Jake Marmer's Hermeneutic Stomp, featuring Greg Wall, Frank London, Uri Sharlin, & Eyal Maoz 

Mar. 4 - A Night of Montreal Klezmer! featuring Julien Biret's 'Ichka' and Yoni Kaston's 'Siach Hasadeh"
Mar. 11 - Tantshoyz, Featuring Steve Weintraub, and Alex Kontorovich's German Goldensthteyn Memorial Orchestra, with special guest, Naum Goldenshteyn 
Mar. 18 - OFF
Mar. 25 - OFF

April 1 - Inna Barmash's Hindele - Yiddish Lullabies & Love Songs
April 8 - Brian Glassman's Klez/Jazz Alliance 
Apr. 15 - OFF
Apr. 22 - Isaac Sadigursky 
Apr. 29 - Susan Leviton Band, w/Michael Winograd MD

May 6 - OFF
May 13 - OFF
May 20 - Allen Watsky's "Djangle Box Project"
May 27 - CTMD Tantshoyz w/Steve Weintraub, Music by Amy Zakar's Fidl Kapelye

June 3 - OFF
June 10 - Pete Sokolow's Klezmer Plus, with Ken Maltz 
June 17 - Student Concert, & Aaron Alexander's Klez Messengers

Vos Vet Blaybn - Reflections on Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman

(This is a guest post by Asya Fruman, in honor of the memory of Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, z"l. Asya is a young translator from Kharkov, Ukraine. She's been studying Yiddish, and immersing herself in yiddishkayt, since she fell in love with klezmer music in 2009.)

VOS VET BLAYBN

Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman.

Of course I had heard of her before and knew some of her songs, but only this year did I really start to listen to Beyle’s songs, not just hern but aynhern zikh. My past several months have been infused with her music, her poetry, her voice.

There’s a thing about old songs — especially folk ones — sung by elderly people. I usually come across it in field recordings. It’s something very subtle and, I think, irreproducible. They sing out every single word with — how should we call it — reverence, feeling of value? As if they were weaving tapestry, knowing how important every thread is.

This has nothing to do with pomposity. No, it’s rather deep awareness; not a single sound is optional. It’s kavone, yes, but a very gentle kind of kavone.

Here it is, I’ve found the word: they sing with care.

And there is something else: the performer might have a beautiful voice or no voice at all, but in any case the manner of performance is not so vocal as it is narrative. By that, I don’t mean that they talk instead of singing, not at all; again, I am speaking of awareness. Their singing is always storytelling, even if it’s a nign (song without words.)

All of the above absolutely applies to Beyle.

I love her intonation: calm and reserved, full of dignity. Lyrical without being sentimental. 

Hers is not a stage voice — and yet she is a great singer.

In mid-November, having failed to make out a few words in a song from the Bay mayn mames shtibele CD, I sent an email to Itzik Gottesman to ask for help — but also to tell how Beyle’s songs resound in me, how charmed and moved I am by her poetry, music and manner of singing.

He answered the very next day, explaining the words I didn’t understand, and told me that he had read the letter to Beyle and that she thanked me.

It was a miracle.

Internetized as I am, I still feel amazed about the fact that one can send a letter to a great person on the other side of the  Earth, and the addressee will receive it instantly, and read it, and answer.

And what is even more miraculous is the connection between countries and generations, the honor and joy to share this language, this culture, to sing Beyle’s songs — because I sing them almost every day, when doing the dishes, when walking up the stairs, they are a part of me now. 

The opportunity to thank the author.

We’ve had a similar happy opportunity when Arkady Gendler came to our  Kharkov Klezmer Teg festival in the beginning of November, and we talked in Yiddish and sang together. Priceless moments of connection, a goldene keyt.

***

I watched Beyle’s funeral online and sang with everybody, so in a way I was present at the ceremony.

It was so much unlike the funerals I had attended here in Kharkov: oppressing, gloomy rituals that had nothing to do with the person gone. They left an aftertaste of senselessness.

Beyle’s memorial was full of her, as if it were not a funeral but her own concert. It was all about continuity and life: life going on with Beyle, not without her. And the ceremony didn’t leave an awkward feeling, only warmth and gratitude. I’ve realized how vital yidishkayt has become for me, how I want to live within it and transmit it.

What kind of person one must be to make even one’s own funeral inspiring!..

To leave behind oneself not a gap but a garden and a wish to be a gardener.

This is what remains. "Iz dir nit genug?” 

Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman koved ir ondenk

Thursday night we lost a treasure of the Yiddish world, poet, artist, songwriter Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman. She was 93.

Beyle survived the war in the Czernowitz ghetto and, a few years later, moved to New York City with her family.

(from Wikipedia) After the war, Schaechter-Gottesman lived several years in Vienna, where her husband had a chief position ("Chefarzt") in the DP camps in the area. Their daughter Taube was born there in 1950; the family moved to New York in 1951, where the Gottesmans had two other children, Hyam and Itzik. In New York the Gottesmans took part in an experimental Yiddish community in the Bronx, centered around Bainbridge Avenue. There a half-dozen Yiddish-speaking families bought adjacent houses and reinvigorated the existing Sholem Aleichem Yiddish School. Schaechter-Gottesman became an important member of this community, writing classroom materials, plays and songs for the school as well as editing a magazine for children ("Kinderzhurnal") and a magazine of children’s writings ("Enge-benge").

In 2007 I wrote about Enge-benge for Jewish Currents:

Back in the 1960s, a few dedicated families of Yiddishist activists were trying to figure out where to live and faced similar issues. Three families, the Schaechters, the Gottesmans and the Fishmans, made a decision to move to Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx. There was nothing particularly wonderful about Bainbridge Avenue; in fact, the families looked at other possible places for their Yiddishist colony, including Roosevelt, New Jersey. But on Bainbridge Avenue they could get spacious houses near parks and transportation, and the men could commute easily to their jobs in Manhattan.

These families made a conscious decision to provide a Yiddish infrastructure for their children. Producing the next generation of Yiddish speakers, in a country and a time where Yiddish was less than a minority language, would take planning, dedication, and the will to leave nothing to chance. Even if the parents spoke Yiddish at home, the children would need peers, activities, and a school — a Yiddish culture of their own.

Many Yiddish-speaking families from the surrounding neighborhood already sent their children to Shul 21 on Bainbridge Avenue, part of the Sholem Aleichem Folksinstitute (SAFI), one of the oldest Yiddish school systems and the one that was apolitical, focused on culture rather than on any particular ideology. But as a supplement to five days a week of Shul 21, poet and painter Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman and her brother, Mordkhe Schaechter, a Yiddish linguist and scholar, decided to started a children’s svive -— an informal club that would give their kids more opportunities to speak Yiddish and do activities in Yiddish. The svive was called Enge Benge, after a counting rhyme made popular by Sholem Aleichem: Enge benge/stupe stenge/artse bartse/gele shvartse/eygele feygele khik. (The words are mostly nonsensical, to be used rythmically for choosing, like ‘eeny meeny miney moe.’)

Never more than a small, local playgroup for a handful of families (with names like Weinreich, Mlotek, Hoffman, Kramberg and others), Enge Benge was nevertheless politically and culturally influenced by the large, vibrant network of Yiddishist youth groups that flourished in interwar Poland. In the pages of the Enge Benge journal (1966-72), written by the kids and edited by Beyle Schaechter Gottesman, you can see traces of di bin (the Bee), a youth group founded in 1927 Vilna by Dr. Max Weinreich, the leader of Vilna’s YIVO. 

Though it seems like a quaint mimeographed relic, Enge-Benge represented a truly heroic task: the struggle for cultural continuity against the ravenous maw of American assimilation. 

With the loss of Chane Mlotek a few weeks ago, and now Beyle, the Yiddish world is that much poorer, that much further from the vibrant multi-lingual world of Jewish Eastern Europe. We are lucky, though, that both Chana and Beyle didn't just transmit that culture personally, but both worked to sustain the Yiddish institutional world in a multitude of ways. 

And as inadequate as I feel to carry on their work, I am inspired by my peers who have invested themselves in the project of Yiddish cultural continuity. They have worked closely with both Beyle and Chana and have taken inspiration, and spiritual nourishment, from both of them. I am hopeful that they can, and will, make Chana, and Beyle, and all our spiritual grandparents, proud.  

Lou Reed's Red Shirley

You've probably all heard by now that legendary poet/musician/downtown icon Lou Reed has passed away. 

Others will be praising and remembering Lou Reed the musician in the days to come. What a lot of people don't know is that in the last few years Reed had branched out into filmmaking. In 2010 he made a short, experimental documentary about his elderly cousin, Shirley Novick. Novick was the widow of Paul (Peysakh) Novick, the long-time editor of the Morgn Frayhayt (the Yiddish language, American Communist newspaper.) Not that you'd learn that from the film. While I have enormous love and respect for Lou Reed, (and the Novicks), the film was a disappointing mess. (You can watch the whole movie here)...

Lou Reed's Red Shirley  

(January 2011) 

On January 15, the audience at the New York Jewish Film Festival caught a glimpse of a different side of rock legend Lou Reed. He was not there as the eminence grise of punk provocation, but as an utterly respectable director and documentarian, there to show his new short film, Red Shirley.

The subject of Red Shirley is his 101 year old cousin (his grandfather was her uncle), Shirley Novick, but the aesthetic is pure Reed. Shot in beautiful hi-def video, the film flows easily from black and white to color, from still to motion. The soundtrack is Reed’s project, Metal Machine Trio, a hauntingly spare piece of industrial chamber music. Reed’s aesthetic is definitely anti-nostalgic. No sad violins or weepy clarinets straining to approximate some kind of ersatz  Lower East Side authenticity. As a filmmaker, Reed is confident enough to know not to try to bring the audience to a place its subject wouldn’t even recognize.

The  trajectories of the two cousins, Shirley Novick and Lou Reed, couldn’t be more different. Novick was born in 1909 in a largely Jewish town in Poland. She spoke Yiddish at home, but attended a Tarbut Ivrit school where students learned Hebrew and were encouraged to move to Palestine. Two of Novick’s siblings, Rachel and Rosa, did emigrate to Palestine, but she took another path. First to Montreal,  in 1928, and six months later, mandolin in hand and longing for the ‘hustle and bustle of the city’, she made her way to New York and five decades of tireless union agitating in the workshops of the garment industry. After 80 odd years in New York, Shirley still speaks English with a heavy Yiddish accent.

Aside from the whole junkie/poet/rock god thing, Lou Reed's trajectory as an American Jew -- born in Brooklyn and  raised on Long Island-- is far more banal.  He grew up in a middle class, conservative Jewish environment where English was the language of both American and Jewish life. 

Like Shirley, though, Lou was also bound for the ‘hustle and bustle’ of New York City. As most people know, Reed formed the Velvet Underground, was discovered by Andy Warhol and the rest is rock and roll legend.

At 68, he’s done it all- been a rock star, a published photographer, written music for the theater, and just possibly changed the course of world politics (Vaclav Havel calls him when he’s in town). And though he shows no signs of mellowing, it's tempting to read Red Shirley as Lou Reed’s Jewish roots project. 

John Zorn has his Masada, so why shouldn’t Reed find a way to  redeem his own Jewishness from the waste of suburban mediocrity? After all, Shirley Novick, Reed’s onetime babysitter, is everything his parents weren't: urban, working class, a genuine radical. She’s the exotic alien (Novick was smuggled illegally into the country and never took American citizenship on principle) who defiantly continued to live her life in Yiddish, a 'fuck you' to mainstream American and Jewish culture that a contrarian like Reed has to appreciate.

Despite the cutting edge cinematography and music, Red Shirley is, at the end of the day, not unlike a movie that might be made by many American Jews  about a favorite relative from the ‘old country’. As Reed told the Wall Street Journal, “This was an act of love, I realized that if I didn’t do this, a connection to a lot of things would be lost forever.” 

Recording device at the ready, Reed was finally ready to record the colorful stories and native wisdom of a vanishing generation. Novick’s career as union activist, of course, is at the heart of the film. But Reed’s lack of interest in details and gee whiz incredulity keeps Novick’s story from ever really coming into focus. As the on-screen interlocutor,  he can’t seem to think of much of a response beyond ‘Get out of here’ or ‘You can’t be serious.’  

Novick tells us that despite being a young, immigrant girl, she quickly became a leader among her fellow rank and file union members. But why exactly was she in conflict with her union leadership? Why was she attacked in the press? What kind of beliefs kept her fighting for her fellow workers for 47 years? In short it's beyond puzzling that, given the title of the film, we never really learn what made Red Shirley red. 

What we don't learn in the film is that Shirley was married for decades to Paul Novick, the longtime editor of the Yiddish communist daily the Morgn Frayhayt. Though there’s a brief shot of a photo of marchers with an IWO banner, it's never explained that the IWO, a fraternal organization established as the Communist analog to the social democratic Arbeter Ring/Workmen’s Circle, was at one time the largest left-wing membership organization in American history. The IWO and the Morgn Frayhayt were just two parts of a vibrant network of radical, Yiddish oriented institutions, all of which negotiated the complicated territory between Jewish nationalism and internationalism. 

Those institutions, and that network, are essentially gone now, whether the victim of state sponsored anti-Communist frenzy (as with the demise of the IWO) or they died with their elderly leaders (as with the Morgn Frayhayt which finally ceased publication in 1988.) In Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers, the popular (and purportedly comprehensive) standard work on the Jewish labor movement, Paul Novick and the Morgn Frayhayt are essentially written out of history. The triumph of anti-Communism was so thorough that even in a movie like Red Shirley, the word Communist is never uttered.

Novick arrived in North America at 19, alone, with an already developed sense of class consciousness. She spent the next 80 years resisting the mainstream Jewish-American narrative of upward mobility and assimilation. Even at the Q&A after the movie, she wanted to talk about conditions for garment workers today. 

At 101 and living in the Chelsea Garment Workers Project in Chelsea, Shirley isn’t just a survivor. She is Zorn’s radical Jewish culture incarnate in a huggable elderly Jewish lady. It’s unfortunate that Red Shirley in complicit in silencing an important part of her story. 

The Answer is 'No'

Can Minimal Jewish Education Be Made Viable? 

by Leon A. Jick

(from The Education of American Jewish Teachers, a volume of essays on the state of American Jewish education, edited by Oscar Jankowsky, 1967)

"In light of the often-extolled Jewish concern for education, it is nothing less than shocking to review the negligible interest which the American Jewish community has shown in Jewish education. Compared to the enormous effort mobilized by the community to foster Americanization, or to prosecute the relentless multi-fronted war which has been and is being waged on anti-Semitism, the energies and resources allocated to Jewish education are inconsequential.

Perhaps this neglect was understandable during the years when a largely immigrant community was preoccupied with establishing itself. Unfortunately, the pattern has continued without any significant change. Within the past decade, a socially and economically successful American Jewry has built an impressive complex of hospitals, welfare agencies, and community centers; it has founded and financed a new university [Brandeis]; it has established a medical school and is planning a second. Its public relations agencies, undeterred by diminishing hostility, have mushroomed in scope and expertise. Jewish education remains a stepchild at the banquet table of Jewish generosity and concern.

In view of this neglect, all the more credit is due to the devoted band of public servants who have struggled to raise the standards of Jewish education, to innovate, to respond to the immediate and long-range needs of Jewish schooling, whatever its institutional form or ideological content.

During the decades when American Jewry relied primarily on immigration from Eastern Europe to provide teaching personnel for Jewish schools, a handful of farsighted educators established teacher-training centers, The decimation of European Jewry and the evaporation of the stream of immigration precipitated a crisis long in the making. Without the contribution of the existing teacher-training institutions, this crisis would have reached the proportions of a calamity.

The recent colloquium and the present book have reviewed the work of all segments of the American Jewish community in the field of teacher training. This review provides us with an opportunity to acknowledge the achievement of those who labored while the community as a whole slumbered. At the same time, the survey reminds us that what has been done in the past by all segments of the Jewish community is woefully inadequate to meet the minimal needs for teaching and administrative personnel in Jewish education. [emphasis mine]

The provisions for teacher education in the Reform movement indicate that this branch of American Judaism is probably in the most difficult straits of all. Even if we accept the improbable thesis that a one-day-a-week school can provide a minimally adequate Jewish education, we must ask how can such schools function properly without trained teaching and supervisory personnel?

The report presented in this volume spells out the particulars of a disastrously inadequate school system. According to the statistics cited, one-fourth of those currently teaching in Reform Jewish schools have not had any Jewish education at all. Less than a fifth of the teachers have had "a secondary Jewish education of any kind." Clearly, no educational system can be built with teachers who are so deficient in knowledge and experience and whose example seems to testify to the peripheral value of Jewish education. [emphasis mine]

......

For better or for worse, a substantial proportion of American Jewish children receive their Jewish education in schools which are conducted by the Reform movement. This movement, together with Bureaus of Jewish Education and Colleges of Jewish Studies, must intensify their efforts to provide competent Jewishly oriented teachers for Reform religious schools."

From the Back Wall - Yiddish Songs of Work and Struggle

Welcome to another installment of my series on out of print Jewish records. I'm working my way through a gorgeous stack of records gifted to me last summer. As I listen I'm going to share my favorite bits and pieces with you.

Today we have the Jewish Students' Bund Production of Yiddish Songs of Work and Struggle*, featuring the Yiddish Youth Ensemble (1971). Though you probably can't find this album (or cassette) today, many of the songs appear on In Love and In Struggle: The Musical Legacy of the Labor Bund. That CD was released in 1999 and features the incandescent vocals of Adrienne Cooper (z"l).

I picked one song to share with you today. It's listed as Vinterlid (Winter Song) on Yiddish Songs of Work and Struggle. This track features Susan Finesilver, Judy Gottlieb, Dina Schwartzman and Josh Waletsky.



[WARNING I AM ABOUT TO TALK ABOUT MUSIC THEORY AND I AM BOTH UNLICENSED AND UNQUALIFIED]  I first heard this in my living room with a friend visiting from England. She happens to be both a master klezmer fiddle teacher as well as an early music professional. It was her observation about this particular recording which really struck me. She noted how the spare setting (just voice, no piano) sounded more like early church music than Eastern European Jewish folk music. The whole album, she noted, used diatonic or church modes, as opposed to what we in 2013 think of as Jewish music (freygish) mode.

I should note, though, that this is a product of late 20th century America. And, of course, Jewish music in Eastern Europe reflected both ancient Jewish liturgical traditions as well as shared Western musical traditions. My visiting friend told me of a project right now exploring the connections between Yiddish and German folksong.

Authenicity, you're soaking in it.

In any case, I am in love with this unusual setting of Vinterlid. I hope you enjoy it, too.

(Apologies for the not great photos. If there's something you'd like to see more clearly let me know and I'll try to take a better picture.)

The liner notes for Yiddish Songs of Work and Struggle are great because they include the Yiddish lyrics (in Yiddish oysyes and YIVO standard transliteration) as well as English translation. All Yiddish music should come with such beautifully thought out materials.

Vinterlid - Avrom Reisen

hulyet, hulyet beyze vintn
fray bahersht di velt!
brekht di tsvaygn, varft di beymer
tut vos aykh gefelt

traybt di foygl fun di velder
un faryogt zey fort
di vos kenen vayt nisht flien
toyt zey oyfn ort!

Frolic, frolic, you angry winds;
Freely rule the world.
Break the branches, hurl the trees,
Do whatever you please.

Drive the birds from the woods,
And keep on chasing them away;
And those that cannot fly too far-
Kill them on the spot!

There are many, many recorded versions of Vinterlid. Some have recorded it as Beyze Vintn. One of my absolute favorites is this very different interpretation by Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird. It appears on his CD Dos tsebrokhene loshn/The Broken Tongue. (A must-have for any Jewish music collection.)

Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird doing Beyze Vintn.



*Many thanks to Lorin Sklamberg and the Max and Frieda Weinstein Archives of YIVO Sound Recordings for making Yiddish Songs of Work and Struggle available to share.

Let's Listen to Dirty Yiddish Comedy Records, For a Change

This was supposed to be a post about serious Yiddish music. The idea was to continue my From the Back Wall series on out of print Jewish LPs, this time with the Jewish Students' Bund Production of Yiddish Songs of Work and Struggle. However, I don't yet have those sound files available for sharing.

In the meantime, I thought I'd share something that more closely reflects my own personal mishegas. This is the brilliant Patsy Abbott singing, circa 1965. The upshot is, it's tough being a lady who knows what she wants. Er Hut Nisht Vus Ich Darf*/ He Doesn't Have What I Need.

ער האט נישט וואס איך דארף
ער האט נישט וואס איך דארף
ווײַל וואס ער האט דאס דארף איך ניט
און וואס איך דארף דאס האט ער ניט
און וואס ער קען דאס וויל איך ניט
און וואס איך וויל דאס קען ער ניט
ער האט נישט, ניין ער האט נישט וואס איך דארף

(Neither of these women is Patsy.)

*Spelling reproduced as it appears on the LP jacket. This is obviously not YIVO orthography, the preferred standard for my blog.

Speaking of strong women; for another point of view, here's Sinead O'Connor singing I Do Not Want Have I Haven't Got. I'm not sure if Patsy would approve, though...

The Limits of American Jewish Sociology And Why We Should Just Turn The Whole Thing Over To The Anthropologists To Avoid Further Embarrassment

Rachel Gross has an excellent piece on the Pew survey today in Religion and Politics.

She makes the point, as others have, that the survey is deeply flawed because it reflects a religious bias:

From outside the field of sociology, I find the Pew study’s approach to the age-old question of “Who is a Jew?” admirable but incomplete. By necessity, it makes the category of religion appear rigid, implicitly prioritizing belief where a variety of practices and identities may be at least as important to how people conceive of themselves religiously.

And the writers of the Pew survey rely on unexamined assumptions about American Jews rather than unpacking old narratives and uncovering new ways of understanding:

The story being told here is one of secularism, or, in clichéd American Jewish terms, “assimilation,” a move from an imagined, essentialized religious Judaism that is threatened by American culture toward watered-down Jewish identities or, in more catastrophic imaginings, the disappearance of American Jews altogether. 

But beyond the door of the synagogue or Jewish communal center, American Jews’ spiritual lives are rich, complex, and hard to pin down. Divisions between Judaism (the religion) and Jewishness (the culture) are no longer useful, if they ever were. Simplistic “religious” and “secular” Jews no longer accurately describe the diversity of American Jewish practice, if they ever did. 

Omeyn! If you ask me, the false division of Jewish life into 'religion' and 'culture' lies at the heart of however you want to name our present crisis. 

Gross has her own research methods which aim to undo this unnatural division:

In my own qualitative ethnographic research, I examine the quotidian activities of American Jews across and beyond denominational structures, divisions that have become increasingly fluid. I have found that American Jews with a broad array of religious affiliations and no affiliation engage in the ostensibly nonreligious activities of Jewish genealogical research, attending Jewish historic sites, consuming markedly Jewish food, and purchasing books and toys that teach Jewish heritage to their children. These are mundane activities, yet engagement with them may provide a core emotional connection to a Jewish identity. 

For my own research purposes, I am still waiting for a national survey to ask about attendance at Jewish museums, as the 2000 Jewish Community Study of Greater Baltimore did. That study found that 59 percent of its respondents reported visiting a Jewish museum in the past three years. Sixty-five percent of Orthodox Jews had visited a Jewish museum; 57 percent of “non-denominational and secular Jews” had visited one. These mundane activities are deeply meaningful to American Jews and form the basis of religious identities. As many American Jews have grown increasingly distant from traditional communal structures, they find Jewish meaning in unconventional ones, such as restaurants and museums. The Pew survey tells us some important things about Jews. But it does not come close to revealing the range of everyday American Jewish practices, which continue to fall outside the recognized boundaries of religion. 

If she's waiting for another national survey to ask the real questions, well, she's gonna be waiting approximately a decade, if not longer. That's the real scandal here, that we got a shot at getting some good data, and we blew it. That's a multi-million dollar mistake.

Rachel Gross is hardly the first person to suggest that the whole approach toward surveys needs to be examined. These concerns have been coming from inside the Jewish sociological establishment for decades.

In his 1949 (updated in 1955) landmark study of a Chicago suburb he called "Park Forest," Herbert Gans, the grandfather of American Jewish sociology, noted a significant gap in his own data:

"...however, it should be remembered that there are many Jewish families in Park Forest who, as the 1949 study showed, do not participate in any formal activities, although they maintain some relationship with the Jewish community through Jewish friends. Because there is no public evidence of their affiliation, they are often overlooked in the concern with formal organizations. The Jewish life of these people, who constitute close to half the Jewish population of Park Forest, was not studied in the 1955 revisit, and leaves a gap in the description of the total Jewish community." [emphasis mine]

(The Origin and Growth of a Jewish Community in the Suburbs: a Study of the Jews of Park Forest, 1949, 1955)

In 1992, esteemed Jewish sociologist Egon Mayer wrote a paper called The Coming Reformation in American Jewish Identity. In it he tried to assess our ability to predict the Jewish demographic future. It just so happens the future is here, and it doesn't look that different, all for the worse.

At the end of his paper he points out that his peers in Jewish sociology are stuck within the model of Jewishness they were raised in, one heavy on membership and belonging:

“...the associationalism that had come to characterize modern Jewish identity in the experience of the typical American Jew of the postwar era found its social scientific adumbration in Jewish community surveys that have come to measure "Jewishness" by means of behavior and attitude scales and other social yardsticks pegging identity to belonging. We have been far less adept at picking up the quiet signals of the invisible Judaism that con­tinues to animate Jewish identity alongside or independently of formal affilia­tions or the public and private acts that are generally considered the appropriate operational expression of one's Jewishness.” [emphasis mine]

Yep.  

Consequently, any attempt to peer into the future, whether 20 or 50 years hence, to imagine the shape and nature of Jewish identification, must grapple with both the factual implications of the current measures of Jewishness and the question of what those measures may have missed hitherto in conceiving of Jewish identity.

I don't see a lot of grappling going on, do you? Jewish sociologists have had more than 20 years since Mayer's cri de coeur in which to reckon with their own prejudices and preconceptions.  And what do we have to show for it?

But hey, let's talk about that intermarriage crisis...