#Milken Center – Conversations

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

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

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

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

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.

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

What are the implications of promoting Italian opera among a largely uneducated working-class population, the questions of assimilation and acculturation raised by these endeavors, the parallel English-language opera scene, and the complicated yet symbiotic relationship between the high and popular cultural spheres.

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

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