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 »
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. 
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 
Klezmer Shpil is a collaboration between clarinetist Arkady Goldenshtein and accordionist Emil Kroitor. Its sixteen tracks were composed and arranged by Kroitor and performed by an ensemble brought together specifically for this album, which was released by OR-TAV Music Publications in 2007. Every track prominently features Kroitor and Goldenshtein, as well as violinist Isaac Kurtz, together playing impressive contrapuntal and ornamented lines. As an ethnomusicologist and klezmer enthusiast, I am intrigued by new klezmer music and the debates that surround it. With regard to this recording, my challenge is to appreciate its musical accomplishments while remaining critical of its presentation of an uncomplicated view of the lineage and heritage of klezmer. 
Ladino transliteration from the original in soletreo (Hebrew script of Ottoman Ladino dialect). Penned starting in 1881, the autobiographical account incorporates event descriptions and commentary on Jewish community life in Salonica (now Thessaloniki, Greece). Sa’adi’s motivations for writing his memoirs included a desire to record customs and events for future generations, and to voice his personal concerns and hopes for Jewish life in Salonica. Sa’adi’s primary occupations were as an editor and print-maker, but he was also respected within the Jewish community and city as a singer and composer of songs for synagogue and special occasions. It is this second occupation that makes A Jewish Voice a valuable resource for readers with interest in music and Jewish life.
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.
In the annals of Jewish music, is any genre as fraught as opera? In nineteenth-century Europe, this most elaborate of western art forms seduced and dazzled Jewish admirers from Theodor Herzl (whose visions of Zionism were inspired by Tannhäuser) to Emma Goldman (transfixed by a performance of Il Trovatore in Königsberg). The lure of opera for cantors became the stuff of legends (the story of Yoel-Dovid Strashunsky’s fall from grace when he abandoned the synagogue in Vilna for the opera house in Warsaw inspired works of fiction, theater, and film). Jewish opera composers became celebrities (Meyerbeer, Offenbach), and their musicianship the target of anti-Semitic attack (most famously, Wagner’s Das J
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