When my wife and I were planning our wedding, we thought it might be cool to hire a klezmer band. This was during the first wave of Klezmer’s revival, when groups like The Klezmatics and the Klezmer Conservatory Band created a Jewish wedding that had been popular in Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe for centuries. It was around the time I was rediscovering the genre of music.

Of course, we wanted to dance to rock and roll, and we also needed musicians who could handle Sinatra for our parents, so we opted for the more conventional wedding band. Modernity triumphs over tradition.

Keeping old and new traditions alive

Or did you? Musician and musicologist Uli Schreter believes that since the 1950s, the music heard at Jewish weddings in America has become a tradition in itself, especially as Old World traditions coexist with modern pop. claim. In a paper in progress on the politics of Jewish music in the early postwar period, Schletter notes that the Jewish musical tradition in America, particularly among secularized conservative and reformed Jews, was notable for the events such as the Holocaust and the founding of Israel. They claim that it reflects events that happened outside the ceremony hall. and the rapid assimilation of American Jews.

It will be the subject of a talk he will give at YIVO on Monday entitled “Yiddish to the Heart: Wedding Music and Jewish Identity in Post-War New York City.”

Since it’s June today, and I’m busy planning my child’s wedding in a year’s time, I wanted to talk to Schletter about the Jewish wedding and how it all came about. Wednesday’s Zoom conversation touched on the immortality of hora, the role of musicians as “secular priests,” and why Ashkenazi parents danced cha-cha-cha.

Schletter was born in Tel Aviv and is pursuing a PhD in Historical Music from Harvard University. He is a composer, pianist and film editor.

Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.

We’re helping plan our child’s wedding now, so your research has struck a chord. It’s the first wedding since we’ve planned it, and we still ask the same questions, like, we have to make sure the band can handle the Ola and Motown sets, and it’s I don’t know.” Uptown Funk. Your research explores when it began—when Jewish weddings in America began to combine traditional and secular culture.

In the post-WWII America I am talking about, this is already a daily fact for musicians. Much of my work is based on interviews with musicians of the time, people who are now in their 80s and 90s. The earliest I started playing professionally was in 1947 or 48. American popular music, he was already playing at Jewish weddings in the 1930s, is a matter of proportion. How many of his tunes—Foxtrot, Swing, Lindy Hop, and other popular dances of the time—will be featured at the wedding, and how many of them will be performed. Klezmer music.

During most of the post-war period, [non-Orthodox] An American Jewish wedding would have featured American pop. For a musician wanting to be in the so-called “club date” business, I needed to be able to do all these things. Also, some “offices” (the term for a business that reserves wedding rings) have specialists who can commission Jewish weddings.

You write about a time when the conservative movement became the dominant denomination of Jews in America. They put one foot on tradition and the other on modernity. What would his 1958 wedding look like while he was building a large synagogue in the suburbs?

The difference is not in sectarianism, but in the wide range of orthodoxy and the range of what I would describe as ‘secular’.

What does unorthodox mean — reformist, conservative, etc.?

right. That is only in the sense that they are broadly more secular than orthodox. And if so, they’ll most likely end up playing one set of Jewish dance music, maybe two, a medley of some Jewish tunes. You might have a wedding where the music is a quarter or half Jewish, but this is for families with a very strong attachment to traditional Jewish culture, mainly Yiddish culture.

There are several interrelated factors that make up this. Classes are important. In some local lower-class communities, I speak mostly of New York, but there are communities that are a little more secluded, perhaps speaking more Yiddish at home, and other Jews of similar backgrounds. will interact more with us. So in this kind of community, even if he considers himself secular, it is possible that his third or half of the music is by Jews. In fact, it is very similar to an Orthodox wedding and is sometimes done in half. [Jewish and “American” music].

Higher socioeconomic Jews are generally more Americanized and may wish to project a more mainstream American identity. They might only listen to him five minutes of Jewish music just to show that they did this. Still, that five minutes of her time is crucial for almost every wedding. Because he is one of what makes a wedding Jewish. When I interviewed couples about to get married in the 1950s, many said, ‘You need Jewish dance music to have a Jewish wedding.’

When I grew up in the 1970s in a reformed synagogue on the outskirts of Long Island, Klezmer was never talked about. I don’t know any parents who owned Klezmer albums. Ten years later, when I got married, it was in the middle of the Klezmer Revival. is that correct? Was the 50’s and 60’s a fallow period for Klezmer?

you are definitely right. Until the mid-1920s, there was still a wave of immigration from Eastern Europe. This means that there are still new people to satisfy their craving for traditional culture. But as immigration stops and people try to become essentially American, the tide is moving away from traditional Klezmer.

Another important thing that happens during this period that I’m noticing is both the negative rejection of klezmer and the positive fascination with other new things. Because klezmer is associated with immigrant culture, would-be Americans don’t want to be associated with it. It also becomes associated with the Holocaust, which is very problematic. For some, everything that sounds Yiddish is associated with tragedy.

At the same time, very related to this is the rise of Israeli popular culture, especially Israeli folk songs. A strong example of this was in the summer of 1950, when The Weavers recorded the song “Zena, Zena”. This song, his Israeli Hebrew song written in the 1940s, was a big hit in America and appears to have reached number two on his Billboard charts. about 10 weeks. Israeli culture represents hope, a future, and an exciting new society. All this is in stark contrast to what Klezmer represents to people. And many of the composers of Israeli folk songs in the first few decades had a very clear ideology that they were trying to move away from the Ashkenazi musical tradition and the Yiddish language.

So the Jewish set for the wedding becomes the Israeli set.

Ten minutes of Jewish music might have been heard at a typical Conservative wedding in the 1950s and ’60s. The first is ‘Hava Nagila’, then ‘Tsena, Tsena’, then the now lesser known song ‘Artza Arinu’, and then ‘Hevenu Shalom Aleichem’. These are songs that are recognized as Israeli folk songs, but when we actually look into their origins, they’re actually more obscure. Two of his songs I just mentioned are actually Hasidic songs that embraced the Hebrew language in pre-national Palestine. Another, probably by some sort of German, non-Jewish composer in his 1900, is written in Hebrew and is thought to represent Israeli culture.

But even if the repertoire already marks a shift toward something more understandable to American Jews, the arrangements, instrumentation, and musical decoration are inherently Klezmer. Musicians I spoke to said they did this because they felt it was the only way to sound really Jewish.

In other words, to be “Jewish”, the music had to be directed at Ashkenazi or Yiddish, even if it was in Israeli or Hebrew. As if the Jews were trying to distance themselves from Eastern Europe, but that’s only the limit.

The likes of Dave Tarras and the Epstein Brothers were musicians at the forefront of klezmer in New York at the time, and were serious about bringing klezmer closer to the Ashkenazi tradition. American Ashkenazi Jewish weddings are not all American Jewish weddings, and Israeli music itself is composed of all different traditions: North African, Middle Eastern, Turkish, Greek, etc. Virtually most of the songs that were really popular at the time were composed by Ashkenazi composers. Even “Hava Nagila” is based on Eastern European Sadigra Hasidic melodies.

Of course, if you’re a Klezmer musician, you’re likely allergic to “Hava Naguila.”

You were talking earlier about Latin music that seemed to have become Jewish in the 1950s and ’60s. I know some scholars have focused on Jews and Latinos and how Latin music genres such as mambo and cha-cha-cha became popular in the West. Catskill Mountain resorts and Jewish weddings.

Latin music isn’t just for Jews, but it was part of American popular culture in the late ’40s. But the Jews have undoubtedly adopted it with great enthusiasm. In the Catskills, two separate bands often alternated nightly. One is a Latin band and the other is a generic American band playing everything else. And some of them are American Jews who want to be Americans. And how can you become an American? By doing what Americans do, namely by plagiarizing an “exotic” culture, in this case Latin. This is the way Americans are.

Jewish and Chinese cuisine is another example.

By the way, in a similar trend, dancing to Israeli folk songs is also very popular. Many people are taking lessons. Many people go to Jewish Y’s to learn Israeli folk dances.

I’ve been to a Jewish wedding, where the “Jewish set” felt very perfunctory. I mean, dance a hola or two long enough to get a couple in a chair, then go to Motown. Or because the Black Eyed Peas were smart enough to put the words “Mazel Tov!” In the lyrics of “I Gotta Feeling”.

That’s why we always listen to that song! However, even if Jewish music seems superficial, I will say that it has a much deeper meaning. It is very interesting that despite all these changes, and the process of secularization of Jewish weddings in America, music still connects people with Jews. These music mesh very well with other religious elements.

Of course, most people consider this a worldly thing. However, many people associate themselves with their Jewish identity through elements such as Jewish music, Jewish cuisine, and certain Jewish customs that are easier to incorporate into their secular lifestyle, and music has this kind of flexibility in particular. , there is a fluidity between the sacred and the profane. profane.

That’s beautiful. It’s like turning a musician into a secular clergy.

It’s interesting that you say so. Walter Zev Feldman, in his history of klezmer, refers to klezmer (the word itself means “musician”) as a kind of liminal figure, someone who stands between the secular and the secular. there is The music is not liturgical, but when played by the klezmer or the band, it is in tune with all other religious and ritualistic implications interwoven.

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