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Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture. Edited by Rachel S. Harris and Ranen Omer-Sherman. Detroit, MI: Wayne State Press, 2012. ISBN 9780814338032.
Reviewed by Mili Leitner Cohen
The edited volume Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture brings together analyses of post-1980s cultural texts that address conflict, war, and violence in Israel. Its nineteen chapters are divided into three parts that approximate disciplinary boundaries: Private and Public Spaces of Commemoration and Mourning, Poetry and Prose, and Cinema and Stage. The extensive range of arts and culture with which the authors grapple includes not only those named in these section titles, but—especially in the first and most disciplinarily varied section—also music, television, radio, monuments, and online communication.
Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation. By Amy Lynn Wlodarski. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2015. ISBN 9781107538849.
Reviewed by Samantha M. Cooper
Musicologist Amy Lynn Wlodarski’s debut monograph contributes a tremendous intervention to Holocaust witness, memory, and trauma studies. Responding to philosopher Theodor W. Adorno’s famed pronouncement, “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” Wlodarski chronologically traces the compositional techniques and reception histories of five, postwar Western art music pieces and the aesthetic, contextual, and ethical-political realms of what she calls “secondary musical witness” (1). Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation responds to a paradox she sees in how musical witness compositions can function as “important cultural vehicle[s] for memory and empathy” while enacting “aesthetic trauma against historical memory and the actual victims” (8). Though these representations offer only “textures” of fact and memory for audience consumption, Wlodarski demonstrates that they nevertheless serve as crucial cultural-historical objects of study (6).
A Season of Singing: Creating Feminist Jewish Music in the United States. By Sarah M. Ross. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2016. ISBN 9781611689600.
Reviewed by Rachel Adelstein
Sarah Ross’s carefully researched ethnographic study introduces the reader to a powerful, yet under-studied sub-genre within the world of contemporary Jewish music. Beginning in the 1960s, American female Jewish singer-songwriters composed and performed music that addressed questions of gender inequality in Judaism using themes and characters from Jewish liturgy. Ross tells the story of this feminist Jewish music through extensive interviews with composers and performers, as well as a thorough, detailed analysis of music and lyrics. She explores a variety of ways in which several of the more prominent female singer-songwriters in this genre have used music to reconcile feminist philosophies with the rituals and traditions of an historically patriarchal religion. For many readers, this may be either an initial introduction to this repertoire, which has received little scholarly attention to date. For others, it may broaden their appreciation of feminist Jewish music beyond the handful of the most popular songs (many by Debbie Friedman) that are sung in progressive synagogues. Read the rest of this entry »
Experiencing Devekut: The Contemplative Niggun of Habad in Israel . By Raffi Ben-Moshe. Yuval Music Series 11. Jerusalem: Jewish Music Research Centre, 2015. ISBN-10 96592000021; ISBN-13 978-9659200023.
Reviewed by Gordon Dale
One of the most important contributions that ethnomusicology has made to the broader study of music is an insistence that music analysis be conducted from a culturally-informed perspective. Through gaining a deep understanding of a music-culture (“a group’s total involvement with music: ideas, actions, institutions, material objects—everything that has to do with music” [Titon et al. 2009:3]) ethnomusicologists frequently think critically about how to best use the tools of music analysis to identify the ways that sound expresses and shapes the beliefs, values, and social dynamics of a group of people. An intriguing example of this approach to music analysis can be found in Experiencing Devekut: The Contemplative Niggun of Habad in Israel by Raffi Ben-Moshe. Read the rest of this entry »
Robert Lachmann, The “Oriental Music” Broadcasts, 1936–1937: A Musical Ethnography of Mandatory Palestine. Edited by Ruth F. Davis. Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, Inc, 2013. ISBN 978-0-89579-776-6.
Reviewed by Michael A. Figueroa
Over the past fifteen years, there has been something of a fascination with the life and career of Robert Lachmann (1892–1939), the German Jewish comparative musicologist who made the first attempt to formalize the study of “Oriental music” at the fledgling Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Mandatory Palestine. From Ruth Katz’s 2003 monograph, “The Lachmann Problem”: An Unsung Chapter in Comparative Musicology— a “docudrama” about “a lone scholar having to missionize for his profession in an alien culture and in an impossible organizational context” (Katz 2003: 16)—to Jumana Manna’s 2015 documentary film A Magical Substance Flows Into Me—which criticizes the scholar’s efforts to collect/catalog musical traditions among ethnic groups in Palestine (review by this author here)—Lachmann’s legacy has been open to interpretation for a variety of intellectual and political projects in the twenty-first century. Read the rest of this entry »
A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany: Musical Politics and the Berlin Jewish Culture League. Lily E. Hirsch. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-4721-1710-9
Reviewed for Musica Judaica Online Reviews by Barbara Milewski
During the last two decades a formidable number of excellent studies have appeared in English and German that have given us an ever fuller picture of the compromised, politicized reality of Germany’s musical culture during the National Socialist period. Lily Hirsch’s book, A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany: Musical Politics and the Berlin Jewish Culture League, is a valuable contribution to this body of knowledge.
Hirsch draws on previous scholarship published in Germany—notably Henryk Broder and Eike Geisel’s Premiere und Pogrom: der Jüdische Kulturbund 1933-1941, and Geschlossene Vorstellung: Der Jüdische Kulturbund in Deutschland 1933-1941 published in conjunction with a 1992 exhibit at Berlin’s Akademie der Künste, which houses the Kulturbund archives—and significantly expands on this material through interviews with League members and subsequent archival investigations. In so doing, she makes available to Anglophone readers for the first time a comprehensive and nuanced telling of the origins and activities of the Jüdischer Kulturbund, or Jewish Culture League, the self-imagined, Nazi sanctioned, Jewish cultural organization that staged musical and theatrical performances for Jewish audiences in Nazi Germany between 1933 and its disbanding in 1941. As Hirsch’s study makes clear, the League’s history remains one of the more poignant examples of the complex, ever-narrowing field of choices Germany’s Jews were forced to navigate after the Nazis assumed power and enacted anti-Jewish exclusionary legislation (intended to protect the purity of Aryan culture) that restricted all aspects of their public and private lives.
The Song is Not the Same: Jews and American Popular Music. Josh Kun, ed. Vol. 8 of The Jewish Role in American Life: An Annual Review, Bruce Zuckerman and Lisa Ansell, eds. ISBN 978-1-5575-3586-3.
Reviewed by Gabriel Solis
Volume eight of the annual review The Jewish Role in American Life, published by the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life at the University of Southern California, is a welcome addition to the general literature on music and Jewish identity. It presents seven short articles collected by guest editor Josh Kun, all relating broadly to the topic of “Jews and American popular music.” The song is not the same, as the title of the volume says. Most readers who will turn to this little collection will approach it already feeling they have some handle on the topic of Jews and popular music, whether that means the cadre of Jewish songwriters from Irving Berlin to Stephen Sondheim who wrote nearly the entire “Great American Songbook,” singer-songwriters like Carole King and Paul Simon who more or less made music in the 1960s what it was, or the Jewish hipsters from Mezz Mezrow to Lieber and Stoller to the Beastie Boys who made more than incidental contributions to black musical genres from early jazz to hip hop. Though these sorts of high points and familiar names provide points of reference throughout the essays, most readers will likely come away seeing things differently than they had. The great strength of the volume is in Kun’s editorial vision, having solicited a set of articles on topics that move beyond received expectations for the area of the Jewish contribution to American music. If there is a weakness, it may also be seen in Kun’s approach to editing the volume: there is a level of unevenness common to edited collections, and this one is no exception.
To Broadway, To Life! The Musical Theater of Bock and Harnick. Philip Lambert. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-1953-9007-0
Jews on Broadway: An Historical Survey of Performers, Playwrights, Composers, Lyricists and Producers. Stewart F. Lane. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. ISBN 978-0-7864-5917-9
Reviewed by Alisa Solomon
Like those Broadway musicals that are driven by deep emotion and a social conscience, intellectual books about Broadway musicals face a dilemma: how to be serious and popular. Indeed, books may have a harder time. From Showboat to Rent, musicals have managed to challenge audiences with questions about such issues as racism and AIDS even as they have filled the coffers of investors. But to whom is a book on Broadway addressed—to academic specialists or to die-hard show fans? Not that these categories are mutually exclusive (the best scholarship is typically driven by passion, after all), but they can represent vastly different cultures and interests. As publishers increasingly look for “crossover” projects—and as the academic study of musical theater expands—the clashing expectations of these disparate audiences can put some authors in a bind. Read the rest of this entry »
Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. K. N. Knittel. Surrey: Ashgate, 2010. 218 pp. ISBN 978-0-7546-6372-0
Reviewed by Karen Painter
Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna expands upon K. N. Knittel’s pathbreaking work on the reception of Mahler’s conducting, published in 19th Century Music in 1995 and 2006. The book’s trajectory has a clear rhetorical strategy, moving from explicit and offensive accounts of the Jew’s body to, in my view, speculation on how musical discourse served the cause of antisemitism, while concluding with ruminations on anti-Jewish prejudice in the United States today. Ironically, the resistance Mahler faced as a Jew (or merely perceived that he faced, Daniel Jütte has recently argued in a paper on Jews at court) in aspiring to become director of the Court Opera, is all but ignored. Rather, Knittel moves into the important but murky subject of criticizing music because it sounds Jewish. Read the rest of this entry »
Cantos judeo-españoles: Simbología poética y visión del mundo [‘Judeo-Spanish Songs: Poetic Symbolism and Worldview’]. Silvia Hamui Sutton. With a prólogo by Vanessa Paloma. Santa Fe, NM: Gaon Books, 2008. 297 pp. ISBN 978-0-9820657-0-9 (hardcover) and 978-0-9820657-1-6 (softcover).
Reviewed by Israel J. Katz
When I was invited to review this book, I was under the impression that it was written by an ethnomusicologist, given that it was advertised by its publisher under the categories Judaica, Ethnomusicology, and Spanish Traditions, and by a bookseller under Ethnomusicology, Sephardic songs, and Jewish music. To my surprise, I learned that its Mexican-born author obtained her university degrees in the fields of Latin-American Literature (Licenciatura from the Universidad Iberoamericana)[1] and Comparative Literature (earning both her masters degree and doctorate from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México). Even the title of her masters thesis, “Los símbolos de la naturaleza en los cantos judeo-españoles: una visión de la lírica popular hispánica [‘The symbols of nature in Judeo-Spanish song; a view of the Hispanic popular lyric’],” completed in 2003, and that of her doctoral dissertation, “Simbología poética y visión del mundo en los cantos judeo-españoles [‘Poetic symbolism and worldview in Judeo-Spanish song’],” submitted in 2006, clearly indicate that both deal solely with the lyrical/ poetic content of the songs she examined.[2] And, whereas both furnished the material for the monograph under review, one can only surmise that the confusion caused by referring to the book under review as an ethnomusicological work arose from commencing its title with Cantos Judeo-españoles. Read the rest of this entry »
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