Conversations
Words & Music from the American Jewish Experience
Words & Music from the American Jewish Experience
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
Memories of Khazente Perele Feig
Cantor Jacob Mendelson offers personal testimony about the life and music of an unsung heroine of Jewish liturgical music.
Read more
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.
Read more
In Celebration of the Life of Jewlia Eisenberg
One year since the loss of musician Jewlia Eisenberg, her musical legacy continues to grow.
Read more
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.
Read more
Bas Sheve: Joshua Horowitz Elevates an Interwar Yiddish Classic
Composer and klezmer musician Joshua Horowitz brings new life to a forgotten Yiddish opera.
Read more
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.
Read more
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."
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
“Farewell Beloved” : The Holocaust in Ladino Music (Part 1)
Sephardic Jewish music of the Holocaust in Yugoslavia and present-day Greece
Read more