Jews in the Music Professions

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
—David Ruderman
Introduction
—Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jonathan Karp

I. CULTURE, COMMERCE, AND CLASS
1. Theater as Educational Institution: Jewish Immigrant Intellectuals and Yiddish Theater Reform
—Nina Warnke
2. Film and Vaudeville on New York's Lower East Side
—Judith Thissen
3. Of Maestros and Minstrels: American Jewish Composers between Black Vernacular and European Art Music
—Jonathan Karp

II. SITING THE JEWISH TOMORROW
4. May Day, Tractors, and Piglets: Yiddish Songs for Little Communists
—Anna Shternshis
5. Performing the State: The Jewish Palestine Pavilion at the New York World's Fair, 1939/40
—Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
6. Was There Anything Particularly Jewish about "The First Hebrew City"?
—Anat Helman
7. Re-Routing Roots: Zehava Ben's Journey between Shuk and Suk
—Amy Horowitz

III. LOST IN PLACE
8. The "Wandering Jew" from Medieval Legend to Modern Metaphor
—Richard I. Cohen
9. Diasporic Values in Contemporary Art: Kitaj, Katchor, Frenkel
—Carol Zemel

IV. PORTRAITS OF THE ARTIST AS JEW
10. Modern? American? Jew? Museums and Exhibitions of Ben Shahn's Late Paintings
—Diana L. Linden
11. Max Liebermann and the Amsterdam Jewish Quarter
—Walter Cahn
12. Rome and Jerusalem: The Figure of Jesus in the Creation of Mark Antokol'skii
—Olga Litvak

V. IN SEARCH OF A USABLE AESTHETIC
13. A Modern Mitzvah-Space-Aesthetic: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig
—Zachary Braiterman
14. Reestablishing a "Jewish Spirit" in American Synagogue Music: The Music of A. W. Binder
—Mark Kligman
15. The Evolution of Philadelphia's Russian Sher Medley
—Hankus Netsky

VI. HOTEL TERMINUS
16. Framing Nazi Art Loot
—Charles Dellheim
17. Joseph Lewitan and the Nazification of Dance in Germany
—Marion Kant
18. History, Memory, and Moral Judgment in Documentary Film: On Marcel Ophuls's Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie
—Susan Rubin Suleiman

Notes
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments

David Conway analyses why and how Jews, virtually absent from Western art music until the end of the eighteenth century, came to be represented in all branches of the profession within fifty years as leading figures – not only as composers and performers, but as publishers, impresarios and critics. His study places this process in the context of dynamic economic, political, sociological and technological changes and also of developments in Jewish communities and the Jewish religion itself, in the major cultural centres of Western Europe. Beginning with a review of attitudes to Jews in the arts and an assessment of Jewish music and musical skills, in the age of the Enlightenment, Conway traces the story of growing Jewish involvement with music through the biographies of the famous, the neglected and the forgotten, leading to a radical contextualisation of Wagner's infamous 'Judaism in Music'.