interesting
November 1, 2006
Reviving a Jewish vaudeville, even if it offends
ord = Math.random() * 10000000000000000; document.write(”);
<A href=”http://ad.fr.doubleclick.net/click%3Bh=v8/3490/3/0/%2a/m%3B32876904%3B0-0%3B0%3B4944050%3B4252-336/280%3B16204392/16222287/1%3B%3B%7Esscs%3D%3fhttp%3A%2F%2Fblogs.iht.com/tribtalk/formula1/” TARGET=”_blank”><IMG src=”http://m.fr.2mdn.net/518758/2204_BHAW_Formula1_MPU.gif” WIDTH=”336″ HEIGHT=”280″ ALT=”Click here…” BORDER=”0″></a>
Sacha Baron Cohen, meet Irving Berlin.
Jokes that compare Jews to cockroaches have left some viewers of Cohen’s farcical new film, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” shifting uncomfortably in their seats. The movie is scheduled to be released almost worldwide this month.
But probably few of those shocked by the movie realize that long before Cohen shed his Ali G persona for Borat’s ill-fitting suit – in fact, long before the 1929 stock market crash – Berlin, the songwriter behind “White Christmas” and “God Bless America,” was reeling off satirical songs about Jews that might seem dodgy on the “Borat” soundtrack. One such Berlin number, “Cohen Owes Me Ninety-Seven Dollars,” from 1916, concerns a businessman on his deathbed who cannot stop fretting over money still due him.
This song and others by long-dead Tin Pan Alley songwriters are featured on a new compact disc, “Jewface.” The album, to be released Nov. 14, contains 16 songs salvaged from wax cylinder recordings and scratchy 78s, from a century-old genre that is essentially Jewish min strelsy. Often known as Jewish dialect music, it was performed in vaudeville houses by singers in hooked putty noses, oversize derbies and tattered overcoats. Highly popular, if controversial, in its day, it has been largely lost to history – perhaps justifiably.
“It’s like Hitler’s playlist, but it’s not, because it was actually Fanny Brice’s playlist,” said Jody Rosen, 37, a music critic for the online magazine Slate, who has spent more than a decade researching the genre. (Brice was the Ziegfeld-era singer and comedian played by Barbra Streisand in “Funny Girl.”) “It’s a more complicated and nuanced vision of Jewish history than what you absorb at Hebrew school.”
In spring 2005, Rosen, who is the author of “White Christmas: The Story of an American Song” joined forces with Courtney Holt, a former Interscope Records executive, who now runs MTV digital operations; David Katznelson, a former Warner Records executive; and Josh Kun, an associate professor at the University of Southern California.
They turned a shared obsession into “Jewface,” an album they hope will turn the MySpace generation on to a form of music that offended many even in their great-grandparents’ day.
“Jewface” is the fourth album released on Reboot Stereophonic, the nonprofit record label devoted to unearthing odd Jewish-theme pop recordings from earlier eras, which Holt, Kun and Katznelson founded a couple of years ago.
The CD is coarse, yes. Consider the very title “When Mose With His Nose Leads the Band,” from 1906. The four collaborators acknowledge that these playful vaudeville ditties could function as hate speech in the wrong context, and they carry particular power in a politicized climate where newspaper cartoons can cause riots, and Mel Gibson has risked his career with a drunken outburst.
But to the project’s partners – music professionals typically associated with the likes of the Beastie Boys (for whom Holt produced a music video) and the Flaming Lips (whom Katznelson signed at Warner) – this forgotten genre serves as a window into American Jewish heritage for people just like them: young secular Jews weaned on kitschy pop culture, abrasive rock and irony, as much as on the Torah.
“We’re all kind of disaffected American Jews, who aren’t particularly religious, don’t really practice and don’t really lead very Jewish lives at all,” said Kun, 35. “Digging up these recordings was really about figuring out who we were in this world.”
Many of these lost recordings spent nearly a century buried under dust on wax cylinders, the canister-shape phonograph records that predated discs. To contemporary ears the songs are camp, much like a previous Reboot Stereophonic release, “God Is a Moog” – a 1968 rock-opera reinterpretation of the traditional Jewish Sabbath service, performed on Moog synthesizer by the electronic-music pioneer Gershon Kingsley.
But they also fit with a growing tendency among Jews of Generations X and Y to embrace, and even have fun with, stereotypes that might have made their parents squirm.
The “Jewface” tracks may soon find their way onto the dance floor. Adam Dorn, a Manhattan musician and producer who records under the name Mocean Worker and has worked with Bono and Elvis Costello, recently cut a trancy remix of “Under the Matzos Tree,” a 1907 song performed by Ada Jones, complete with blips and beeps and a thudding drum machine laid over lyrics like “Listen to your Abie, baby, Abie, come out in the moonlight with me.”
“I just said, let’s take this woman who would probably be 116 now and give her a backbeat,” explained Dorn, 35.
But even the original versions of the old tunes rock, in their way.
“There’s an ethereal quality” to the music, said Katznelson, 37. “‘It teleports you to another time. It’s almost psychedelic.”
Holt pointed out that such dialect music was usually performed by Jews and was popular among Jewish as well as non-Jewish audiences when it was released. For many immigrants, laughing at even newer arrivals from the Old World was a way to make themselves feel more at home in their adopted country.
But even after a century, the music carries the potential to shock.
“My Yiddisha Mammy,” a 1922 riff on Al Jolson’s “Mammy,” written by Eddie Cantor and others, may offend contemporary Jews and African-Americans equally with lyrics like these:
I’ve got a mammy,
But she don’t come from Alabammy.
Her heart is filled with love and real
sentiment,
Her cabin door is in a Bronx tenement.
The “Jewface” project, however, does have historical as well as musical value, said Jeffrey Magee, an associate professor of musicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“This album is a big step in repossessing this stuff that has been muted for a century,” said Magee, who explained that this music was generally ignored, except in academic works, by earlier generations of American Jews, who were trying to assimilate and wanted to run from painful stereotypes, not explore them. (Other groups, like the Irish and Italians, had their own vaudeville self-parodies.)
“Some generations had to come and go before younger people could listen with fresh ears, say: ‘Hey, let’s listen to this. It’s not us, but it’s our predecessors.’,” Magee said.
Many Jews in the vaudeville era ran from this music. In 1909, Rosen writes in the album liner notes, a prominent Reform rabbi said that such Hebrew comedy was “the cause of greater prejudice against the Jews as a class than all other causes combined,” and that same year it was denounced by the Central Conference of American Rabbis.
Kenneth Jacobsen, the deputy national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said that a project like this “gets very complicated.” It is on the one hand comedy, and that it was usually performed by Jews softens its impact. Still, he said, “our experience in this kind of thing is that inevitably somebody will probably use this for not such good purposes.”
Rosen discovered the genre in the mid-’90s, while working on a master’s degree in Jewish history at University College London. One day, while doing research at the British Library, he ran across the sheet music for a song called “I Want to Be an Oy, Oy, Oyviator” – a comedy song about a Jewish aviator. Digging deeper, he found sheet music for hundreds of such songs, usually decorated with insulting caricatures of Jews as Shylocks, immigrant greenhorns or schlemiels.
Fascinated, Rosen set off on a quest to track down recordings of this music. He trolled dusty junk shops, record-collector conventions and, inevitably, eBay, looking for wax cylinders, which cost $10 to more than $100, and 78s. His search, he said, “took roughly 10 years on and off.”
Kun heard Rosen speak about the genre at the Experience Music Project conference in Seattle last year. Within weeks, they said, they were planning an album.
Kun recalled: “I would get e-mails at 6 in the morning: ‘Hey, have you ever heard of this guy?'”
While the collaborators hardly expect “Jewface” to become a commercial success, their industry savvy does increase the chances that the music will be heard.
Holt, who worked on the iPod deal between U2 and Apple while at Interscope, is trying to organize a concert and eventually an album, with established rock and folk acts doing covers of the old songs.
He’s making calls, he said. So far no one is getting back to him.
“It’s a hard sell,” Holt acknowledged last week over a Scotch at at a private club in Manhattan, declining to name the acts he has been in touch with about the concert. “It’s like, ‘Oh my God, there’s this lost Jewish music, recorded by Jews, making fun of Jews for non-Jews to be able to enjoy, in order to assimilate!’ That’s not a great elevator pitch.”
Even family members can be skeptical. Rosen said his in-laws were taken aback. But to him, Jewish dialect music played a role similar to that which gangsta rap plays among African-Americans today. Vulgar and, to some, culturally debasing, it nevertheless managed to smuggle a subculture’s distinct idiom into mainstream popular culture, while creating jobs for entertainers, managers, theater owners and music publishing houses from the same culture.
“To some extent, people like to see themselves represented,” Rosen said, “even if they are badly represented.”
If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am not for others, then what am I? And if not now, when?
Struck me out of nowhere…I’ll be repondering it today.
I’ve been thinking quite a lot about religion, but not a lot I can put into words. I guess I’d say that for a little while I’ve been on the decline as far as observance, and right now I’m at some kind of fork in the road where I feel I’m faced with a choice of either continuing on the decline, or increasing observance. I’m leaning towards increasing, but I don’t necessarily mean stricter kashrut. My kashrut is pretty strict except I eat cheese without a hechsher and don’t separate dishes of course in the dining hall. It occurred to me though that I could possible keep the sabbath, and even go to temple doing it. South Street is not too far to bike at all. I biked to meadowlark and it was nothing. But I’m not really even thinking of that. I’m more thinking of ethical things. Like just trying harder to be positive, to do good deeds, to go out of my way to help people kind of thing.
Edit: I think maybe I feel like I’ve been on the decline partially because some things have become habit, no longer hard. I think religion should be hard.
I’ve got to stop. I’ve got to walk haderech hatzadik.
Rise up. Over-stand. Stand your ground. Own your land. Serve all. Love all. Never sleep. Never fall. Meditate. Eat right. Pray first. Then fight. But for truth. Not for fame. Not for glory. Or the game.
Thanks to Chavi, Geneva, and others for reminding me kind of what I should be doing. Thanks Andy for reminding me what I shouldn’t. Oh, and on an unrelated note, thanks to the Rabbi in Virginia Beach who is making my parents think really hard. And thanks to haShem for keeping my sister safe and baruch haShem that of late she’s been nicer to my parents than she has in a very long time.
I wrote the following recently on a secular message board I frequent when the subject turned to Israel, and people started talking about the “needless” violence of the Israelis and the alliance between the United States and Israel…
—————————
There are continual and constant peace efforts. But peace talks cannot go on while people are strapping bombs to themselves and blowing up Sbarro’s Pizzas. Every time the palestinians agree to some kind of ceasefire, they turn around and break their word, so it’s hard to make any progress. The Israelis have made extreme concessions like, for example, withdrawing from the West Bank. What concessions have the Palestinians made? Only performing acts of terrorism on days that end in the letter Y?
Bush’s official policy, the “Road Map for Peace”, is a two-state solution with an independent state of Palestine. I think that’s a pretty reasonable U.S. policy. If it weren’t for “israeli’s monopoly of public support in the US”, what policy do you think the United States would take instead? I can’t think of much except maybe calls for fewer restrictions on palestinians freedom, and more monetary aid to the palestinians, but more freedoms just leads to more terrorist attacks, and monetary aid has a nasty tendency of not actually helping the plight of ordinary palestinians and instead ending up in the coffers of terrorist rings there. So for now, I don’t see any sensible alternative but for the United States to support Israel’s hard line.
Remember that the government of the palestinian territories is a terrorist organization that not only wants to see the complete destruction of Israel, but isn’t too fond of the United States either. The United States forcibly routed the government of Afghanistan just because some operatives of Al Queda were within its borders. The Taliban did not attack the United States. The United States also routed the government of Iraq even though it really was no threat to the United States at all. Israel is far more restrained than the United States. I’m quite surprised at their restraint, actually. Allowing a terrorist state dedicated to the larger state’s destruction to exist within ones own borders is not something the United States or many other countries would tolerate.
In terms of the status quo of international relations and reaction to terrorism, I don’t think Israel is out of line.
However, I don’t believe in the status quo. I’d like to see an end to the westphalian order, geographically based government, theocracies and quasi-theocracies, and the advent of minimal night-watchman governance by voluntary associations rather than governance by whoever has enough firearms to maintain a monopoly on “legitimate” violence in a funny-shaped piece of dirt.
—————————————
Perhaps when the messiah comes?
A recent discussion with my friend Matthew from my Hebrew class last year…
What is this “Isaac” business? A nom de plume? A nom de guerre? Stage name? Covenental name?
—————————————-
Its my Hebrew name!
—————————————-
Ah, gotcha. Isaac or Yitzhak though? Mine is Arel, which is unbiblical. It’s Arel with an alef, not an ayin, mind you. With an alef it means “Lion of G-d”. With an ayin it means “uncircumcised”
—————————————-
Well that’s a pretty vital importance. That’s one of the reasons why Hebrew is really a poor language. Perhaps you’ve heard me give this spiel before? The Bible certainly should not have been written in Hebrew.
—————————————-
I think I’ve heard a little, but not a full exposition. I have my own numerous gripes with Hebrew, but would you mind touching on a few and suggesting a better language for biblical composition for me?
—————————————-
I think you know which language I would have chosen had I been in charge of said composition: Latin! The thing about Hebrew is that there is no tense. Sure there’s some sort of verbal aspect, but that doesn’t really illustrate time. How do you know whether a verb is preterite, present, or future: the Hebrew grammarians would have us believe in context! Ha! What I read from context will most cerainly differ from what Alex gets from the same context. You may say, “Well, that’s true in any language.” That statement’s true to a certain extent, but in Hebrew it’s far more difficult to gauge context because things are not concrete. In Latin, except for poetry, things are very clear cut. There’s almost never any doubt about when a verb is occuring, nor is there generally any doubt about what’s the subject and what’s the object. In Hebrew, the all powerful “position of the word” is the determiner of whether or not it’s the subject or object; but not always! In fact, word order is switched around so often in Hebrew, how can anyone know unless he use context, and you know my feelings about that.
Okay, one more thing: VOWELS! Who the hell writes a language without vowels! Who’s to say that one word was pointed thus and not another way. There’s no guarantee, it’s just tradition handed down. Well in Latin there would be no doubt because it has these nifty doo-hickies call “vowels.”
I could go on for hours, but I’ll leave it at that for now. By the way you know I love Judaism, so you can’t call me anti-Semitic.
—————————————-
Ah, yes I think I’ve heard you say some of this before. I empathize with those gripes, but there are a couple issues that are even more disturbing to me than that.
To me, verb tenses are not so important as issues like whether a particular verse is talking about earthly masters and princes, or about God, or even about the angels!
In Maimonides’ Guide to The Perplexed, part 1, chapter two, he points out “… the term Elohim is a homonym and denotes God, angels, judges, and the rulers of countries, and that Onkelos the proselyte explained it in the true and correct manner by taking Elohim in the sentence ‘and ye shall be like Elohim’ (Gen iii. 5) in the last-mentioned meaning, and rendering the sentence ‘and ye shall be like princes.'”
This is a very important distinction, Matthew, and NOT one that you can always tell by context.
And, looking in my Lexicon at “Adon,” I see that there are about 300 times where this word is referring to earthly “lords”, referring to lords over land, households, wife to husband, daughter to father, even to Moses, and there are about 400 times where it’s supposedly referring to God.
This becomes VERY important in passages like Psalm 110, whose verse 1 refers to YHVH speaking to “adonai.” The Christians say that “adonai” here is divine, and about Jesus, whereas we Jews say it is an earthly master, and refers to Abraham.
http://www.chabad.org/library/article.asp?AID=16331&showrashi=true
http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt26b0.htm
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ps%20110:1-7&version=9;
This is an extremely ridiculous ambiguity to me.
Another thing that floors me are the the serious problems that textual integrity pose because of the similarity of so many of the members of the character set to eachother. For example, check out Genesis 32:31-32
http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0132.htm
First, the name of the place is Peniel, and then it is called Penuel just one verse later. Rabbi Azriel in Omaha once told me that a scribe probably made a mistake, and just pulled the tail of the yud down a bit too far. Note that the folks at mechon-mamre.org try to cover this up in their translation, fudging it so that it says “Peniel” in both instances, even though there’s obviously a shiruk in the hebrew in the second instance. This is ridiculous.
Same thing with the classic confusion between resh and dalet. There are places where likely this has been confused as well.
I actually had an internet discussion for a very long time last night with a Catholic from Turkey over the meaning of Psalm 22, whether it was was about Jesus’ crucifixion or about Nebudchanezer and the Babylonian plundering of Israel and the Babylonian exile. The argument revolved around 22:17, whether “ca’ari” means, “like a lion” and refers to Nebudchanezer(as I and other Jews say it does), or whether it says “pierced/drilled.” It’s slightly ambiguous if you don’t look at it in context. What they claim is really a stretch though, because they claim that the verb there is “caf resh he”, which truthfully is an agricultural term and more likely means “dig” than “pierce”, “drill” or “gouge”, if that’s truly what the root there was. Plus, just a couple verses later it again refers to the same dogs and lions that are mentioned in 22:17. In fairness though, I feel that this is probably only 30% a problem with Hebrew. It is mostly a problem with those silly Christians . I cannot put all the blame on Hebrew.
http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt2622.htm
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ps%2022;&version=9;
—————————————-
All very good points. This and more led me a long time ago to realize one of the major flaws of Protestantism: sola scriptura. How ridiculous is that! All faith and doctrine is based on the bible alone? That’s impossible! Unless we have an authority to interpret scripture for us, we would never agree upon what’s being said; hence, the need for the church (The one and only Roman Catholic Church, that is; or Judaism (but not Reform), albeit Rabbis argue over meaning all the time, but in Judaism, it’s okay, right?)
—————————————-
I believe that the reason why Christianity is so fractured whereas Judaism is not is because Christian identity, that is, what makes one a Christian or not a Christian is matter of dogma, and the dogma that any sect requires you to adopt is extensive, whereas, with Judaism, what makes one a Jew is much more a matter of bloodlines. Halakhically, even the most haredi orthodox rabbinic authority would say that an athiest born of a Jewish mother is a Jew.
There are very few items of dogma in Judaism where if you hold a belief contrary to that item, people will call your belief heretical. As long as you affirm unity, eternity, existence and incorporeality of God, you’re really in the clear, as far as beliefs go. And even then, I think there is an expection in Judaism that one should be doubtful, critical and questioning toward everything. No one will begrudge you if you say that your faith is imperfect, and you’re not sure you believe with 100% certainty that Moses split the red sea. In Christianity though, if you aren’t sure of the miraculous events of the new testament, they might tell you you’re not “saved.”
Most of the arguments that Rabbis have had through the ages about meaning of a passage or how to observe a mitzvah are solved either by the conclusion that the passage mystically means two things at the same time, and both Rabbis’ opinions are correct, or by conservatively applying the principle of “building a fence around the torah.” In other words, if you don’t know exactly how to obey a commandment, adopt a practice that is so extreme that you’re sure you’re obeying it. Case in point, seperate cookware for meat and dairy to make sure that one is not “boiling a kid in its mothers milk.” Another example, some Jews wear two sets of tefillin simultaneously, one with the passages that Rashi said should be enclosed, and one set with the passages Rabbenu Tam said should be enclosed.
The only important splinterings of Judaism have to do with the acceptance or rejection of of the law, either because the Oral Law is seen as un-authentic, or because they feel for some reason that the law was only meant for Israelites thousands of years ago, and not to us in this day and age, since we’re so smart now. Arguments over meaning of individual verses have not historically been cause for starting entirely new religions in the Jewish tradition, as it seems to be in the Christian.
—————————————-
That’s a very good analysis. I like that. I never really thought of it that way. If only Christianity were matrilineally inherited! What a world we’d live in! I think…
I did not know about this.
I carry a free card from them, and you should too.
June 21, 2006
Dear HOD Society Members,
In two weeks we will be half way through 2006. Below is an update of the
Halachic Organ Donor Society achievements and ongoing projects for this
year.
SAVING LIVES
Over the first 6 months of 2006, at least 5 lives were saved as a result of
HOD Society interventions with potential organ donor families and Rabbis.
Without these HOD interventions, the organs would not have been donated.
ISRAEL DAY PARADE
An energetic group of more than 200 volunteers marched with the HOD Society
at the Israel Day Parade. We were privileged to be joined by a contingent of
Yeshiva Chovavei Torah students and graduates as well as by Jackie Leifert
and Aryeh Leifert, wife and son of Robert J. Leifert who was both an organ
recipient and organ donor. This year our parade expenses were at an all time
low ($3,066) as a result of us selling raffle tickets and memory bracelets
("Remember Alisa Flatow", "Remember JJ Greenberg") at the
parade.
LECTURES
Since the beginning of the calendar year, the HOD Society has delivered 32
lectures, including two lectures yesterday at the Israel Knesset (one of
them hosted by Beni Elon), educating over one thousand Jews about halacha
and organ donation.
TWO FREE EL-AL AIRLINE TICKETS TO ISRAEL AND 3 NIGHTS IN THE KING DAVID
HOTEL
The HOD Society is now selling $20 raffle tickets through its website. The
prize, that will be drawn December 31, is 2 free round-trip tickets to
Israel and 3 nights in the King David Hotel or a cash award of $3,500. The
money collected will go help fund our educational activities such as
lectures, advertisements, publications, and educational video. You may buy a
raffle ticket on-line. If you wish to buy a book of tickets (25 tickets to a
book), or refer to the HOD Society a high school or college student to sell
raffle tickets please contact our new special events coordinator Rachel
Shtern (rachelshtern@hods.org)
ISRAEL VOLUNTEERS
The HOD Society has recruited 3 committed volunteer activists in Israel:
Judith, Shoshana and Tzvi. Judith and Shoshana are both organ recipients,
while Tzvi, a charedi from Bnei Brak, donated his kidney to his son. They
will lobby rabbis, distribute our literature, and attempt to secure for HODS
speaking engagements. This past week, Judith arranged for a HOD presentation
at the OU center and at the Knesset.
WEBSITE
The website has been receiving a number of upgrades and we are getting, by
and large, about 150 unique visitors a day that spend most of their time
watching the video interviews and perusing the list of Rabbis who have our
organ donor card. Given a number of inquiries from the former Soviet Union,
and the more than 1 million Russian immigrants in Israel, the HODS website
is in the process of being translated into Russian. (It is relatively
inexpensive to do and we are giving parnasa to a Russian immigrant in Israel
who is a professional translator.) The website currently offers English and
Hebrew versions.
EDUCATIONAL VIDEO
The HOD Society has engaged Key-Animation Production to produce a short (4
minute) 3D animation to illustrate the difference between Brain-Stem Death
and Coma that will ultimately be part of our larger educational video
project.
BOOK PRODUCTION
The HOD Society will be working in conjunction with Dr. Halperin and the
Schlesinger Institute for Medical Halachic Research to translate into
English and disseminate in North America their new book, a collection of
halachic articles on determining the time of death. Although most of the
articles appear on our website, I think, as they do, it is very important
for the articles to be in hard copy for easy access and reference by Rabbis,
scholars, physicians and laypeople.
Sincerely,
Robert Berman
Founder & Director
Halachic Organ Donor Society
3000 Marcus Avenue, Suite 3W10
Lake Success, NY 11042
Ph. 212-213-5087
Fx. 212-213-9451
USA Cell: 646-645-4637
Israel Cell: 052-527-5284
http://www.hods.org
Kosher Fusion 
