Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth-Century America: Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack. Judah Cohen. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. ISBN: 978-0253040206.
Reviewed by Jeremiah Lockwood
In his latest monograph, Judah Cohen offers a first deep dive into the overlooked music of a period in American Jewish history that has been the focus of increasing historic attention in recent years. In the brief summation of the period offered by A.Z. Idelsohn in the classic Jewish Music in its Historical Development, Idelsohn asserts that Jewish immigrants lost their sonic identity by adopting the musical norms of their new home. In contrast, Cohen reaches past reductive debates about “tradition versus modernity” to demonstrate why and how Jewish liturgical musicians made the stylistic choices they did. Cohen explores how music offered Jewish Americans a means to express shifting social and economic identities through music. By looking at the music Jews made in their religious life, rather than comparing them to an imagined source of authenticity, Cohen challenges the monolithic paradigm of tradition that has bounded much of the classic scholarship in the field.
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