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Conversations: Words & Music from the American Jewish Experience

An Introduction to "Conversations: Words and Music from the American Jewish Experience"
An Introduction to "Conversations: Words and Music from the American Jewish Experience"
“Conversations” aims to open a dialogue about the persistence of memory and change in Jewish music and the use of the sounds of the past to address keenly felt needs in the present.
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Conversations: The Kwartin Project
Conversations: The Kwartin Project
In the narration of his life story, Kwartin presents a serious childhood illness as an emotional pedagogy that trained him to communicate the traumas of the Jewish community.
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Conversations: Dispatches from Brooklyn: Ira Temple and the Williamsburg Senior Center
Conversations: Dispatches from Brooklyn: Ira Temple and the Williamsburg Senior Center
Working with elder Chassidic women, musician and activist Ira Temple encountered transcendent possibilities and complicating limitations in attempting to construct a community centered on female musical desires and homosocial flourishing.
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Conversations: The Malavskys, a family portrait
Conversations: The Malavskys, a family portrait
A hair-raising gender riot in a synagogue in Brooklyn helped drive the Malavsky’s out of the pulpit and onto the borscht belt circuit, creating new opportunities for female leadership in prayer and new settings for ritual in the late 1940s.
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Dispatches from Brooklyn: Rokhl Kafrissen’s Yiddish Utopia
Dispatches from Brooklyn: Rokhl Kafrissen’s Yiddish Utopia
In a surprising new reworking of a pop song in Yiddish, Rokhl Kafrissen illuminates the losses of memory implicated in Jewish American life and showcases her practices of reclamation centered on the sounds and stories of Yiddish culture.
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Dispatches from Brooklyn: Selichos in Borough Park
Dispatches from Brooklyn: Selichos in Borough Park
In the context of prayer leading, a cantor’s vulnerability and the susceptibility of the body to injury can become sources of strength, lending the cantor tools to interpret supplicatory prayer texts.
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The Kwartin Project: Mayn Lebn, Chapter 6
The Kwartin Project: Mayn Lebn, Chapter 6
The story of Kwartin’s first performance draws surprising connections between anti-Jewish violence, inter-faith cooperation and liturgical music performance.
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Heritage, Archives and Spirit Visitation: two old/new artefacts from the musical world of Eléonore Biezunski
Heritage, Archives and Spirit Visitation: two old/new artefacts from the musical world of Eléonore Biezunski
With two new-old musical artefacts, musician and archivist Eléonore Biezunski bridges the phenomenon of constructing musical heritage, with its undercurrent of consumerist choice and fantasy fulfilment, to thornier structures of family history and personal experience.
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The Kwartin Project: Mayn Lebn, Chapter 7
The Kwartin Project: Mayn Lebn, Chapter 7
Zawel Kwartin portrays the musical life of his childhood hometown as having offered a paradigm of Jewish art that shaped his music and later career.
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Dispatches from Brooklyn: Noah Schall: Part One
Dispatches from Brooklyn: Noah Schall: Part One
A conversation with elder cantorial pedagogue Noah Schall unfurls a parade of images and ideas about Jewish liturgical music, stemming from a lifetime immersed in the music.
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The Kwartin Project: Mayn Lebn, Chapter 8
The Kwartin Project: Mayn Lebn, Chapter 8
A visit from a traveling cantor and choir ignites a world of fantasy in the mind of an artistic small-town boy.
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Borrowed Melodies
Borrowed Melodies
American Sephardic immigrants created new Ladino lyrics for melodies from sources in Turkish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Greek and Arabic, recreating the multi-lingual atmosphere of their Ottoman homeland.
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Shoko Nagai’s Tokala: Mythologies and fantasies in the construction of a global music scene
Shoko Nagai’s Tokala: Mythologies and fantasies in the construction of a global music scene
Shoko Nagai’s musical involvement with the culturally intimate space of the synagogue resonates in her fantasies about mythic pasts and their uses in constructing desired futures.
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The Kwartin Project: Mayn Lebn, Chapter 9
The Kwartin Project: Mayn Lebn, Chapter 9
In a fanciful vignette, Kwartin describes how one of the best-known cantors of the 19th century predicted his future greatness.
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The Malavskys: A Family Portrait – The Horowitz’s and the Malavskys
The Malavskys: A Family Portrait – The Horowitz’s and the Malavskys
In an apparently unproduced radio drama, the Malavsky Family present an allegory for the trials and successes of Jewish music in the American marketplace.
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Treasures From the Oral History Project of American Jewish Music: Freydele Oysher and the voice of the khazente
Treasures From the Oral History Project of American Jewish Music: Freydele Oysher and the voice of the khazente
A new multi-media offering from the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience draws attention to forgotten strands of history.
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Italian Opera for the Yiddish-Speaking Masses, Part 1: Ivan Abramson, the Italians, and the Jews
Italian Opera for the Yiddish-Speaking Masses, Part 1: Ivan Abramson, the Italians, and the Jews
Yiddish-speaking immigrants in early twentieth-century America might seem an unlikely audience for grand operas in Italian.
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A vignette from the Jewish music of the Civil Rights Movement in Los Angeles
A vignette from the Jewish music of the Civil Rights Movement in Los Angeles
For some cantors in mid-century Los Angeles, seeking labor rights for synagogue clergy went hand in hand with broader social justice issues of the day.
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Dispatches from Brooklyn: Yiddish New York: between archive, performance and community
Dispatches from Brooklyn: Yiddish New York: between archive, performance and community
This first of two posts on Yiddish New York highlights one of the evening concerts hosted by the festival, titled “Oy, I Like They…A Queer Tribute to Aaron Lebedeff.”
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Dispatches from Brooklyn: Yiddish New York: between archive, performance and community
Dispatches from Brooklyn: Yiddish New York: between archive, performance and community
Part-2 about Yiddish New York highlights a new online archival research project which has garnered success in fostering musical community and new art projects.
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Italian Opera for the Yiddish-Speaking Masses, Part 2: The One and Only Oscar Hammerstein: Bringing Downtown Uptown
Italian Opera for the Yiddish-Speaking Masses, Part 2: The One and Only Oscar Hammerstein: Bringing Downtown Uptown
An indefatigable democratizer, Oscar Hammerstein wanted to provide opera for the masses – in his words, to “give first-class opera at prices within the reach of everybody.”
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“Farewell Beloved” : The Holocaust in Ladino Music (Part 1)
“Farewell Beloved” : The Holocaust in Ladino Music (Part 1)
Part 1 exploring Sephardic Jewish music of the Holocaust in Yugoslavia and present-day Greece.
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Dispatches from Brooklyn The Sauler Sisters: Gayna Kieval and Bianca Bergman
Dispatches from Brooklyn The Sauler Sisters: Gayna Kieval and Bianca Bergman
Daughters of a renowned cantor, these remarkable women worked within the parameters of their social world to create a lasting contribution to multiple musical communities.
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Dispatches from Brooklyn: Noah Schall: Part Two: “Development” in the cantorial recitative
Dispatches from Brooklyn: Noah Schall: Part Two: “Development” in the cantorial recitative
In a discussion with an elder cantorial pedagogue, terms borrowed from Western musicology are transformed to suit the music of the synagogue.
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In Celebration of the Life of Jewlia Eisenberg
In Celebration of the Life of Jewlia Eisenberg
One year since the loss of musician Jewlia Eisenberg, her musical legacy continues to grow.
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Italian Opera for the Yiddish-Speaking Masses, Part 3: The Russian Bear: Mikhail Medvedieff's Geographic, Linguistic and Theatre Crossover
Italian Opera for the Yiddish-Speaking Masses, Part 3: The Russian Bear: Mikhail Medvedieff's Geographic, Linguistic and Theatre Crossover
Mikhail Medvedieff’s foray into the New York Yiddish scene both opera and Yiddish theater after a successful European career.
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Memories of Khazente Perele Feig
Memories of Khazente Perele Feig
Cantor Jacob Mendelson offers personal testimony about the life and music of an unsung heroine of Jewish liturgical music.
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Dispatches from Brooklyn: Hadar Ahuvia and the Possibilities of Prayer
Dispatches from Brooklyn: Hadar Ahuvia and the Possibilities of Prayer
What are the possibilities, potentials and limitations in the creation of new Israeli culture that challenges norms when geographically located in the Diaspora?
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Bringing Everyone Together: The Zuro Opera Company
Bringing Everyone Together: The Zuro Opera Company
In her 4th part of the “Italian Opera for the Yiddish-Speaking Masses” series, Daniela illuminates how the impresario and educator, Josiah Zuro, finds innovative ways of attracting Italians, Jews and Americans to attend opera performances, uniting these groups through a common love of the genre.
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Anthony Russell: Echoes of Sidor Belarsky
Anthony Russell: Echoes of Sidor Belarsky
A contemporary revivalist of Yiddish song draws on the legacy of the 20th century Yiddish “voice of the people”.
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Cantorial Pedagogy in the Wild: Judith Berkson’s online khazones class
Cantorial Pedagogy in the Wild: Judith Berkson’s online khazones class
In an independent cantorial training studio, composer and cantor Judith Berkson invokes histories of sacred music.
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Italian Opera for the Yiddish-Speaking Masses, Part 5
Italian Opera for the Yiddish-Speaking Masses, Part 5
Why promote Italian opera via mame-loshn? How much did the less assimilated Jewish public really engage with opera?
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The Kwartin Project: A happy surprise ending
The Kwartin Project: A happy surprise ending
When the descendants of a legendary cantor heard of a research project celebrating their revered ancestor, a surprising treasure was revealed.
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20th Century Events in Salonica Retold in American Sephardic Song
20th Century Events in Salonica Retold in American Sephardic Song
Sephardic Americans sing about Jewish participation in the countercoup (1909) following the Young Turk Revolution (1908) and lament the disaster following the Greek Revolution that spelled the beginning of the end of the Jewish community in Greece.
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Secret Chord Concerts: a new music series launches in June
Secret Chord Concerts: a new music series launches in June
A new concert series from the Milken Center will offer a promising glimpse into the musical life of contemporary Jewish America.
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Bas Sheve: Joshua Horowitz elevates an interwar Yiddish classic
Bas Sheve: Joshua Horowitz elevates an interwar Yiddish classic
Composer and klezmer musician Joshua Horowitz brings new life to a forgotten Yiddish opera.
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The Beth El Choir: singing against lost time
The Beth El Choir: singing against lost time
Over the course of a year of participation in a cantorial choir the author has sought insight into a historical form of prayer leading, a nearly lost art of improvised Jewish vocal music.
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Conversations: a year in words and music
Conversations: a year in words and music
After a year of writing weekly essays about music and American Jewish experience, the author offers some highlights.
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