Conversations – Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience

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Since launching in 2020, the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience has initiated numerous academic projects that further our mission of increasing knowledge of the Jewish experience in America.
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The Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience works with academics, performers, and our local community to develop an array of exciting initiatives accessible to the general public and experts alike.
As a university-based Center, we are committed to providing opportunities for students to explore and participate in Jewish music in a multiplicity of ways.
The music of American Jewish experience has its first permanent dedicated academic home with the establishment of the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience. It unites the academic and the artistic, showcasing scholars, artists and educators to share their sounds and stories.
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Conversations
Words & Music from the American Jewish Experience

Jeremiah Lockwood Research Fellow at  Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience

Tkhines on Record: Women’s Prayers and Men’s Voices

Saying tkhines was a part of the daily ritual life for many Jewish women but was especially associated with the graveyard and the month of Elul preceding the new year, when many Jewish people performed the ritual of kever oves, pilgrimage to the graves of one’s ancestors.

Jeremiah Lockwood

Transylvanian Souvenirs, and a Welcome Back to Conversations!

Reflections on a recent trip to Jewish heritage sites in Romania, a place of musical vitality and memory.

Simone Salmon Ph.D. candidate, The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music

“Farewell Beloved” : The Holocaust in Ladino Music (Part 1)

Sephardic Jewish music of the Holocaust in Yugoslavia and present-day Greece

Daniela Smolov Levy

Italian Opera for the Yiddish-Speaking Masses

5 chapters

Jeremiah Lockwood Research Fellow at the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience

The Malavskys, a Family Portrait

2 chapters

Jeremiah Lockwood Research Fellow at Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience

Dispatches from Brooklyn

11 chapters

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.

By Jeremiah Lockwood Research Fellow at  Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience

The Kwartin Project

6 chapters

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.

By Jeremiah Lockwood Research Fellow Lowell Milken Center for Music of 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. Jeremiah Lockwood authored these articles during his time as Research Fellow at the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience for academic year 2021-2022. Other posts are written by Dr. Daniela Smolov Levy and UCLA Ethnomusicology Graduate Student Simone Salmon.

Jeremiah Lockwood Research Fellow at the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience

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.

Jeremiah Lockwood Research Fellow at the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience

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.

Jeremiah Lockwood Research Fellow at the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience

Bas Sheve: Joshua Horowitz Elevates an Interwar Yiddish Classic

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

Simone Salmon PhD Candidate, The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music

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.

Jeremiah Lockwood Research Fellow at the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience

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.

Jeremiah Lockwood Research Fellow at the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience

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."

Jeremiah Lockwood Research Fellow at the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience

Memories of Khazente Perele Feig

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

Jeremiah Lockwood Research Fellow at the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience

In Celebration of the Life of Jewlia Eisenberg

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

Jeremiah Lockwood Research Fellow Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience

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.

Simone Salmon Ph.D. candidate, The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music

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.

Jeremiah Lockwood Research Fellow Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience

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.