Jews Race And Popular Music

Jon Stratton provides a pioneering work on Jews as a racialized group in the popular music of America, Britain and Australia during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Rather than taking a narrative, historical approach the book consists of a number of case studies, looking at the American, British and Australian music industries. Stratton's primary motivation is to uncover how the racialized positioning of Jews, which was sometimes similar but often different in each of the societies under consideration, affected the kinds of music with which Jews have become involved. Stratton explores race as a cultural construction and continues discussions undertaken in Jewish Studies concerning the racialization of the Jews and the stereotyping of Jews in order to present an in-depth and critical understanding of Jews, race and popular music.

Jon Stratton provides a pioneering work on Jews as a racialized group in the popular music of America, Britain and Australia during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Rather than taking a narrative, historical approach the book consists of a number of case studies, looking at the American, British and Australian music industries. Stratton's primary motivation is to uncover how the racialized positioning of Jews, which was sometimes similar but often different in each of the societies under consideration, affected the kinds of music with which Jews have become involved. Stratton explores race as a cultural construction and continues discussions undertaken in Jewish Studies concerning the racialization of the Jews and the stereotyping of Jews in order to present an in-depth and critical understanding of Jews, race and popular music.

There has been a long-standing relationship between Jewish Americans and the world of American popular music. The essays in this volume blend surveys of music making as a whole with profiles of single artists. This is volume 8 of the annual publication, The Jewish Role in American Life (ISSN 1934-7529), produced by the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life at the University of Southern California. Contents: Foreword (Gayle Wald); Introduction (Josh Kun); "Cohen Owes Me Ninety-Seven Dollars, and other Tales from the Jewish Sheet-Music Trade" (Jody Rosen); “'Dances Partake of the Racial Characteristics of the People Who Dance Them': Nordicism, Antisemitism, and Henry Ford's Old Time Music and Dance Revival" (Peter La Chapelle); “Ovoutie Slanguage is Absolutely Kosher: Yiddish in Scat-Singing, Jazz Jargon, and Black Music” (Jonathan Z. S. Pollack); "'If I Embarrass You, Tell Your Friends': Belle Barth, Pearl Williams, and the Space of the Risqué" (Josh Kun); "'Here's a foreign song I learned in Utah': The Anxiety of Jewish Influence in the Music of Bob Dylan" (David Kaufman); "Jazz Liturgy, Yiddishe Blues, Cantorial Death Metal, and Free Klez: Musical Hybridity in Radical Jewish Culture" (Jeff Janeczco).

All too often an incident or accident, such as the eruption in Crown Heights with its legacy of bitterness and recrimination, thrusts Black-Jewish relations into the news. A volley of discussion follows, but little in the way of progress or enlightenment results--and this is how things will remain until we radically revise the way we think about the complex interactions between African Americans and Jews. A Right to Sing the Blues offers just such a revision. Black-Jewish relations, Jeffrey Melnick argues, has mostly been a way for American Jews to talk about their ambivalent racial status, a narrative collectively constructed at critical moments, when particular conflicts demand an explanation. Remarkably flexible, this narrative can organize diffuse materials into a coherent story that has a powerful hold on our imagination. Melnick elaborates this idea through an in-depth look at Jewish songwriters, composers, and perfomers who made Black music in the first few decades of this century. He shows how Jews such as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, and others were able to portray their natural affinity for producing Black music as a product of their Jewishness while simultaneously depicting Jewishness as a stable white identity. Melnick also contends that this cultural activity competed directly with Harlem Renaissance attempts to define Blackness. Moving beyond the narrow focus of advocacy group politics, this book complicates and enriches our understanding of the cultural terrain shared by African Americans and Jews.

Mazal Tov, Amigos! Jews and Popular Music in the Americas explores the sphere of Jews and Jewishness in the popular music arena in the Americas, by creating a framework for the discussion of new and old trends from an interdisciplinary standpoint.

Stairway to Paradise reveals how American Jewish entrepreneurs, musicians, and performers influenced American popular music from the late nineteenth century till the mid-1960s. From blackface minstrelsy, ragtime, blues, jazz, and Broadway musicals, ending with folk and rock 'n' roll. The book follows the writers and artists' real and imaginative relationship with African-American culture's charisma. Stairway to Paradise discusses the artistic and occasionally ideological dialogue that these artists, writers, and entrepreneurs had with African-American artists and culture. Tracing Jewish immigration to the United States and the entry of Jews into the entertainment and cultural industry, the book allocates extensive space to the charged connection between music and politics as reflected in the Jewish-Black Alliance - both in the struggle for social justice and in the music field. It reveals Jewish success in the music industry and the unique and sometimes problematic relationships that characterized this process, as their dominance in this field became a source of blame for exploiting African-American artistic and human capital. Alongside this, the book shows how black-Jewish cooperation, and its fragile alliance, played a role in the hegemonic conflicts involving American culture during the 20th century. Unintentionally, it influenced the process of decline of the influence of the WASP elite during the 1960s. Stairway to Paradise fuses American history and musicology with cultural studies theories. This inter-disciplinary approach regarding race, class, and ethnicity offers an alternative view of more traditional notions regarding understanding American music's evolution.

When Music Migrates uses rich material to examine the ways that music has crossed racial faultlines that have developed in the post-Second World War era as a consequence of the movement of previously colonized peoples to the countries that colonized them. This development, which can be thought of in terms of diaspora, can also be thought of as postmodern in that it reverses the modern flow which took colonizers, and sometimes settlers, from European countries to other places in the world. Stratton explores the concept of ’song careers’, referring to how a song is picked up and then transformed by being revisioned by different artists and in different cultural contexts. The idea of the song career extends the descriptive term ’cover’ in order to examine the transformations a song undergoes from artist to artist and cultural context to cultural context. Stratton focuses on the British faultline between the post-war African-Caribbean settlers and the white Britons. Central to the book is the question of identity. For example, how African-Caribbean people have constructed their identity in Britain can be considered through an examination of when ’Police on My Back’ was written and how it has been revisioned by Lethal Bizzle in its most recent iteration. At the same time, this song, written by the Guyanese migrant Eddy Grant for his mixed-race group The Equals, crossed the racial faultline when it was picked up by the punk-rock group, The Clash. Conversely, ’Johnny Reggae’, originally a pop-ska track written about a skinhead by Jonathan King and performed by a group of studio artists whom King named The Piglets, was revisioned by a Jamaican studio group called The Roosevelt Singers. After this, the character of Johnny Reggae takes on a life of his own and appears in tracks by Jamaican toasters as a Rastafarian. Johnny’s identity is, then, totally transformed. It is this migration of music that will appeal not only to those studying popular music, but

When Music Migrates uses rich material to examine the ways that music has crossed racial faultlines that have developed in the post-Second World War era as a consequence of the movement of previously colonized peoples to the countries that colonized them. This development, which can be thought of in terms of diaspora, can also be thought of as postmodern in that it reverses the modern flow which took colonizers, and sometimes settlers, from European countries to other places in the world. Stratton explores the concept of 'song careers', referring to how a song is picked up and then transformed by being revisioned by different artists and in different cultural contexts. The idea of the song career extends the descriptive term 'cover' in order to examine the transformations a song undergoes from artist to artist and cultural context to cultural context. Stratton focuses on the British faultline between the post-war African-Caribbean settlers and the white Britons. Central to the book is the question of identity. For example, how African-Caribbean people have constructed their identity in Britain can be considered through an examination of when 'Police on My Back' was written and how it has been revisioned by Lethal Bizzle in its most recent iteration. At the same time, this song, written by the Guyanese migrant Eddy Grant for his mixed-race group The Equals, crossed the racial faultline when it was picked up by the punk-rock group, The Clash. Conversely, 'Johnny Reggae', originally a pop-ska track written about a skinhead by Jonathan King and performed by a group of studio artists whom King named The Piglets, was revisioned by a Jamaican studio group called The Roosevelt Singers. After this, the character of Johnny Reggae takes on a life of his own and appears in tracks by Jamaican toasters as a Rastafarian. Johnny's identity is, then, totally transformed. It is this migration of music that will appeal not only to those studying popular music, but

"This book makes a decisive and controversial contribution to the history of musical modernism. Moricz radically but thoroughly scrutinizes concepts of Jewish identity, and in doing so re-orders our understanding of 'Jewish music' as an outgrowth of nationalist, racist and utopian ideologies. The scholarship is superior in every respect. Jewish Identities is destined to become a seminal work in the reception history of European musical modernism. An absolutely outstanding and intellectually brilliant work."—Harry White, author of The Keeper's Recital: Music and Cultural History in Ireland, 1770-1970

This text describes the response of Jewish race scientists in the late 1800s to the question of whether there was a biological basis for Jewish distinctiveness and social development and the complex factors involved in the debate.

This book is the first collection of multi-disciplinary research on the experience of Italian-Jewish musicians and composers in Fascist Italy. Drawing together seven diverse essays from both established and emerging scholars across a range of fields, this book examines multiple aspects of this neglected period of music history, including the marginalization and expulsion of Jewish musicians and composers from Italian theatres and conservatories after the 1938–39 Race Laws, and their subsequent exile and persecution. Using a variety of critical perspectives and innovative methodological approaches, these essays reconstruct and analyze the impact that the Italian Race Laws and Fascist Italy’s musical relations with Nazi Germany had on the lives and works of Italian Jewish composers from 1933 to 1945. These original contributions on relatively unresearched aspects of historical musicology offer new insight into the relationship between the Fascist regime and music.

It has long been acknowledged that Richard Wagner was a virulent antisemite, yet the composer has also been characterized as an idealistic revolutionary, and historians have puzzled over the paradox of these conflicting elements in his character. In this fascinating book, Paul Lawrence Rose argues that Wagner did not suddenly change from a progressive revolutionary into a reactionary racist; for him, as for many other Germans, the idea of revolution always contained a racial and antisemtic core. Rose approaches Wagner on varying levels so as to see him as he really was: he places Wagner within the context of mid-nineteenth-century German revolutionary culture; he studies the composer's whole range of theoretical and artistic works, tracing his career and the evolution of his thought; and he considers Wagner's personality and his personal relationships (especially with those Jews who considered themselves his friends). Rose demonstrates that Wagner's conversion to antisemitism dates not from 1850--the year in which his infamous essay Judaism in Music was published--but from his conflict with the Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer three years earlier over the Berlin production of Rienze. This affects our understanding of the genesis of the Ring operas. In addition, Rose offers fresh and stimulating interpretations of Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger, and Parsifal, based on an analysis of their revolutionary and antisemitic elements.

Ranging from Los Angeles to Havana to the Bronx to the U.S.-Mexico border and from klezmer to hip hop to Latin rock, this groundbreaking book injects popular music into contemporary debates over American identity. Josh Kun, a MacArthur "Genius" Fellow, insists that America is not a single chorus of many voices folded into one, but rather various republics of sound that represent multiple stories of racial and ethnic difference. To this end he covers a range of music and listeners to evoke the ways that popular sounds have expanded our idea of American culture and American identity. Artists as diverse as The Weavers, Café Tacuba, Mickey Katz, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Bessie Smith, and Ozomatli reveal that the song of America is endlessly hybrid, heterogeneous, and enriching—a source of comfort and strength for populations who have been taught that their lives do not matter. Kun melds studies of individual musicians with studies of painters such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and of writers such as Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, and Langston Hughes. There is no history of race in the Americas that is not a history of popular music, Kun claims. Inviting readers to listen closely and critically, Audiotopia forges a new understanding of sound that will stoke debates about music, race, identity, and culture for many years to come.

First published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"A specter lurks in the house of music, and it goes by the name of race," write Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman in their introduction. Yet the intimate relationship between race and music has rarely been examined by contemporary scholars, most of whom have abandoned it for the more enlightened notions of ethnicity and culture. Here, a distinguished group of contributors confront the issue head on. Representing an unusually broad range of academic disciplines and geographic regions, they critically examine how the imagination of race has influenced musical production, reception, and scholarly analysis, even as they reject the objectivity of the concept itself. Each essay follows the lead of the substantial introduction, which reviews the history of race in European and American, non-Western and global musics, placing it within the contexts of the colonial experience and the more recent formation of "world music." Offering a bold, new revisionist agenda for musicology in a postmodern, postcolonial world, this book will appeal to students of culture and race across the humanities and social sciences.

Jews and Jazz: Improvising Ethnicity explores the meaning of Jewish involvement in the world of American jazz. It focuses on the ways prominent jazz musicians like Stan Getz, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Lee Konitz, Dave Liebman, Michael Brecker, and Red Rodney have engaged with jazz in order to explore and construct ethnic identities. The author looks at Jewish identity through jazz in the context of the surrounding American culture, believing that American Jews have used jazz to construct three kinds of identities: to become more American, to emphasize their minority outsider status, and to become more Jewish. From the beginning, Jewish musicians have used jazz for all three of these purposes, but the emphasis has shifted over time. In the 1920s and 1930s, when Jews were seen as foreign, Jews used jazz to make a more inclusive America, for themselves and for blacks, establishing their American identity. Beginning in the 1940s, as Jews became more accepted into the mainstream, they used jazz to "re-minoritize" and avoid over-assimilation through identification with African Americans. Finally, starting in the 1960s as ethnic assertion became more predominant in America, Jews have used jazz to explore and advance their identities as Jews in a multicultural society.