Jewish Music Resources
Jewish Music Research Centre
This website includes many useful resources for the study of Jewish music, such as a searchable bibliographic database of books, articles, and recordings. The website also hosts hundreds of biographies of major figures in Jewish music and an encyclopedia of notable concepts in Jewish music and Klezmer terminology.
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
YIVO’s collection of recorded Jewish music is one of the most extensive and frequently consulted in the world. The Max and Frieda Weinstein Archive of YIVO Sound Recordings houses over 15,000 recordings, including 78, 45, and 33 rpm discs; cylinder recordings; open-reel and cassette tapes; piano rolls; and compact discs. The collection includes both music and spoken word recordings, and also contains record catalogs, and other materials related to the history of recorded Jewish music.
The Ruth Rubin Legacy
The Ruth Rubin Legacy highlights the renowned vocalist and scholar’s collection of over 2,000 Yiddish songs performed by some of the most extraordinary traditional singers of the 20th century, including Rubin herself. The 78 rpm acetate discs, reel-to-reel tapes and cassettes recorded by Rubin between 1946 and the 1970s are in the process of being painstakingly re-assembled and are made truly accessible here for the first time. Ruth Rubin’s entire life’s work can be found on this site: field recordings, lectures, concerts, radio interviews, videos, manuscripts and published materials.
The Jewish Music WebCenter
The Jewish Music WebCenter hosts numerous research guides to Jewish music, and it includes: encyclopedias and dictionaries, academic journals, a listing of Jewish music bibliographies in print and online, and key primary source collections. These research guides are part of a larger site, http://jmwc.org.
Park Avenue Synagogue
Park Avenue Synagogue is one of the largest and most influential Conservative synagogues in the U.S, and it has a long history of musical innovation that continues in the present day. Their website includes information and audio of recent performances and cantorial recordings, and it also links to the Shapiro Audio Archives, which is a repository of recordings of religious services, lectures, and concerts that took place in Park Avenue Synagogue’s historic sanctuary between 1954 and 2004.
JMI
JMI is the home of Jewish music in the UK. We are dedicated to the celebration, preservation and development of the living heritage of Jewish music for the benefit of people of all ages and backgrounds. Our goal is to inform and inspire audiences with an exciting, original programme of live performances, educational events and collaborative projects and to support musicians playing Jewish music across the UK enabling them to preserve this traditional heritage, create new work and reach the widest audiences.
New York Public Library
This section of the New York Public Library’s website lists Yiddish music and dance resources organized by genre and format, linking to many different types of materials such as online resources, recordings, sheet music and archives of note. There are also two hour-long videos that provide introductions to researching Yiddish music. The specific NYPL holdings of Yiddish music are listed at https://libguides.nypl.org/yiddishresearch/musicatNYPL
Milken Archive
The Milken Archive was founded in 1990 when Lowell Milken perceived an opportunity to preserve and disseminate a body of music that had helped shape the American Jewish experience. After assembling an editorial board comprising experts from diverse fields, the Archive commenced recording a collection currently comprising over 600 pieces of music by roughly 200 composers. Along with the recordings, the Milken Archive has documented the history of Jewish music in America through more than 180 oral histories with composers, cantors, educators, and performers, and invested heavily in the creation of comprehensive essays and liner notes that examine the cultural and historical contexts in which this music has been created.
Klau Libraries of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion
The Klau Libraries of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion contains one of the most comprehensive Judaica collections in the world. Among its most significant holdings is the Eduard Birnbaum Collection. Born in Kraków, Birnbaum was a renowned cantor and ethnomusicologist who planned a comprehensive history of Jewish music, and over the course of his research and travels he amassed an immense number of liturgical manuscripts and other materials, making it one of the largest collections of Jewish music prior to 1840. These items are digitally available, making this collection an incredible resource for those researching Jewish music from this era.
Oxford Bibliographies
Oxford Bibliographies provides faculty and students alike with a seamless pathway to the most accurate and reliable resources for a variety of academic topics. Written and reviewed by academic experts, every article in our database is an authoritative guide to the current scholarship, containing original commentary and annotations. Edwin Seroussi’s bibliography of Jewish music offers the researcher an exhaustive list of relevant primary and secondary sources, archives, discographies, and more–all of which have been annotated to describe their importance and relevance, and how they can be accessed. (Note that this page is only available when logged in with appropriate institutional credentials).
Museum of the City of New York’s Yiddish Theater
The Museum of the City of New York’s Yiddish Theater collection includes over 1000 digitized, high-quality images of Yiddish stage productions, playwrights, performers, and promotional items. Most of the material dates from the first half of the twentieth century.
Second Avenue Online
This collection contains digital artifacts from “Second Avenue Online,” a web-based project created in 2000 by New York University’s Center for Advanced Technology, in conjunction with the NYU Libraries to commemorate the history of Yiddish theater. The collection’s contents include oral histories, music, photos, posters, manuscripts, scores and letters. Through oral history, video and audio recordings, photographs and a wide range of information about the institutions and the people that made Yiddish theater a living tradition, Second Avenue Online seeks to capture the memory and to convey the feel of 2nd Avenue as a living part of the history and culture of New York and America.
Digital Resource: Zavel Kwartin’s My Life (Mayn Lebn), translated into English
We are so pleased to share with you the memoir of a remarkable man.
As our Research Fellow, Jeremiah Lockwood, wrote in his article announcing the gift of this memoir to the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience, Mayn Lebn, (My Life), is an autobiography of a “revered cantor and early star of Jewish records, Zawel Kwartin (1874-1952). Mayn Lebn is a wonderful primary document of Jewish life in Europe and the United States in the early years of the twentieth century. The anecdotes Kwartin crafted offer a unique look into the development of a cantorial career, and the ascendancy of the gramophone era of “golden age” cantors. Kwartin’s eye for detail and his rich memory of the personalities that populated his world growing up in the Ukraine offer a fascinating cultural history of the lived experience of cantors and their audiences.”
We are immensely grateful to the Kwartin family for providing this translation of Mayn Lebn to share with scholars and the broader public alike. And we are confident that Kwartin’s story will educate, elucidate, and even entertain readers far and wide.
For those of you interested in the profiles of others who greatly influenced the development of music of the American Jewish experience, we encourage you to explore our Oral History Project of American Jewish Music. Zawel Kwartin is mentioned in a number of these interviews, and many other fascinating people share the stories of their lives.
—Mark Kligman, Director of the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience