“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The story of Kwartin’s first performance draws surprising connections between anti-Jewish violence, inter-faith cooperation and liturgical music performance.

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.

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.

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.

A visit from a traveling cantor and choir ignites a world of fantasy in the mind of an artistic small-town boy.

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.

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.

In a fanciful vignette, Kwartin describes how one of the best-known cantors of the 19th century predicted his future greatness.

In an apparently unproduced radio drama, the Malavsky Family present an allegory for the trials and successes of Jewish music in the American marketplace.

A new multi-media offering from the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience draws attention to forgotten strands of history.

Yiddish-speaking immigrants in early twentieth-century America might seem an unlikely audience for grand operas in Italian.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

Part 1 exploring Sephardic Jewish music of the Holocaust in Yugoslavia and present-day Greece.

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.

In a discussion with an elder cantorial pedagogue, terms borrowed from Western musicology are transformed to suit the music of the synagogue.

One year since the loss of musician Jewlia Eisenberg, her musical legacy continues to grow.

Mikhail Medvedieff’s foray into the New York Yiddish scene both opera and Yiddish theater after a successful European career.

Cantor Jacob Mendelson offers personal testimony about the life and music of an unsung heroine of Jewish liturgical music.

What are the possibilities, potentials and limitations in the creation of new Israeli culture that challenges norms when geographically located in the Diaspora?

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.

A contemporary revivalist of Yiddish song draws on the legacy of the 20th century Yiddish “voice of the people”.

In an independent cantorial training studio, composer and cantor Judith Berkson invokes histories of sacred music.

Why promote Italian opera via mame-loshn? How much did the less assimilated Jewish public really engage with opera?

When the descendants of a legendary cantor heard of a research project celebrating their revered ancestor, a surprising treasure was revealed.

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.

A new concert series from the Milken Center will offer a promising glimpse into the musical life of contemporary Jewish America.

Composer and klezmer musician Joshua Horowitz brings new life to a forgotten Yiddish opera.

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.

After a year of writing weekly essays about music and American Jewish experience, the author offers some highlights.