Conversations Archive - Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience

Upcoming Events
On-Demand
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.
- Featured Milken Center Academic Programs
- Academic Calendar
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.
Donate

Conversations
Words & Music from the American Jewish Experience

Jeremiah Lockwood Research Fellow

From the Archive: Gershon Sirota’s First Recording Session

In an article published on March 4, 1938 in the Warsaw daily Yiddish newspaper Haynt (Today), critic and musician Menachem Kipnis (1878-1942) offered a firsthand account of the first recording session of Cantor Gershon Sirota in Warsaw in 1902. I offer a translation of this article from the original Yiddish.

Jeremiah Lockwood Research Fellow

Khazonisdiker Hesped: A Handful of Memories for Cantor Benzion Miller (1947-2025)

3 chapters

The late Cantor Benzion Miller’s imprint on the world of Jewish music was profound, admired by peers and presented in concerts around the world. His legacy is represented by a cohort of younger cantors he inspired, including members of his own family. In this brief tribute, I rejoice in the memory of the life force he shared generously with the world while reflecting on the ceaselessness of change and loss as perpetual aspects of culture.

Jeremiah Lockwood Research Fellow

The Twin Cantors: Khazones and Community in 20th Century Brooklyn

3 chapters

Maurice and Bernard Epstein, professionally billed as The Twin Cantors, were performers of a populist style of khazones (Yiddish, cantorial art music) that crossed boundaries of ritual and popular culture in the early years of the twentieth century. Over the course of a career that spanned four decades, the brothers performed on stages, pulpits and in elaborate life-cycle celebrations, drawing together Jewish communities through their brilliant music. In a wonderful and meandering conversation with members of their family, I had the privilege of getting a window into the history of the Twin Cantors through the lens of intimate family memory.

Jeremiah Lockwood Research Fellow

Jewish Music Journal: The legacy of bildung and the American Cantorate

3 chapters

Jacob Beimel (1875-1944) founded his short-lived Jewish Music Journal in 1934. Beimel’s vision for the Journal was shaped by a highly selective approach to assessing the musical life of Jewish Americans that dismissed signs of the persistence of Yiddish culture and instead focused on the production of new forms of American Judaism, rooted in European art music.

Jeremiah Lockwood Research Fellow

The Charitonow Greatest Hits: Laura Melnicoff and the Gendered Aesthetics of Chabad Nigunim

Through an exploration of cellist Laura Melnicoff's recent Chabad nigunim project, I touch upon some of the issues around gender and music in contemporary Orthodox culture, while drawing attention to the beautiful and important work of musical performance and preservation that Melnicoff and her colleagues are pursuing.

Jeremiah Lockwood Research Fellow

Voices of the Magid: Jewish Musical Speech

In a field recording and two comedic parody records, sounds of the magid (Yiddish-language preacher) are preserved. These records offer testimony about Jewish musical speech—vocal performance that falls somewhere between recitation and song and that was a part of Jewish men’s and women’s customs and ritual life. These records raise question about what constitutes speech, in distinction from music, and about what elements of popular culture are retained or rejected in the framing of modern ethnic identities.

Jeremiah Lockwood Research Fellow

Ian Nagoski’s Canary Records and the Digital Post-Ottoman Diaspora

Since 2009, Ian Nagoski's Canary Records has released 165 compilations of music focusing on “early 20th century masterpieces (mostly) in languages other than English." In this brief essay, I consider how digital archive projects like Canary Records harness affects of retrospection, melancholy and wonder to push back against the inevitability of social isolation and consumerism as the primary affordances of the digital media environment.

Jeremiah Lockwood Research Fellow

Minkovsky, Blumenthal, Lazarus, and the dangers of Jewish music

A handwritten essay in the archive shows a link between 19th century German philosophy and Jewish liturgical music, but rather than providing an affirmation of the close relationship of synagogue musical reform and the Jewish Enlightenment, this document throws a monkey wrench in the story of cultural affinity between modern Jewish philosophy and music.

Jeremiah Lockwood Research Fellow

Zoë Aqua’s Transylvanian Fantasy

Klezmer musician Zoë Aqua has just released a brand-new video, the second in a series documenting her 2024 Transylvania Synagogue Tour. In a recent interview, Aqua discussed her new video with me and how it fits in to her larger project as artist and activist in new Yiddish culture.

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!

This welcome back post to Season Two of Conversations (2024-25) offers reflections on a recent trip to Jewish heritage sites in Romania, a place of musical vitality and memory.

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.

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.

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.

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 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

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

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

In Celebration of the Life of Jewlia Eisenberg

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

Daniela Smolov Levy

Italian Opera for the Yiddish-Speaking Masses

5 chapters

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

Bas Sheve: Joshua Horowitz Elevates an Interwar Yiddish Classic

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

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 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.

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