Uncategorized
The hora, the hora! How Jewish wedding music got that way
(JTA) — 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 the klezmer revival, when groups like The Klezmatics and The Klezmer Conservatory Band were rediscovering the genre of Jewish wedding music popular for centuries in Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe.
Of course we also wanted to dance to rock ‘n’ roll and needed musicians who could handle Sinatra for our parents’ benefit, so we went with a more typical wedding band. Modernity won out over tradition.
Or did it? Musician and musicologist Uri Schreter argues that the music heard at American Jewish weddings since the 1950s has become a tradition all its own, especially in the way Old World traditions coexist with contemporary pop. In a dissertation he is writing about the politics of Jewish music in the early postwar period, Schreter argues that American Jewish musical traditions — especially among secularized Conservative and Reform Jews — reflect events happening outside the wedding hall, including the Holocaust, the creation of Israel and the rapid assimilation of American Jews.
That will be the subject of a talk he’ll be giving Monday for YIVO, titled “Yiddish to the Core: Wedding Music and Jewish Identity in Postwar New York City.”
Because it’s June — and because I’m busy planning a wedding for one of my kids one year from now — I wanted to speak to Schreter about Jewish weddings and how they got that way. Our Zoom conversation Wednesday touched on the indestructibility of the hora, the role of musicians as “secular clergy” and why my Ashkenazi parents danced the cha-cha-cha.
Born in Tel Aviv, Schreter is pursuing his PhD in historical musicology at Harvard University. He is a composer, pianist and film editor.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
I was struck by your research because we’re helping to plan a child’s wedding now. It’s the first wedding we’ve planned since our own, and we’re still asking the same questions, like, you’ve got to make sure the band can handle the hora and the Motown set and, I don’t know, “Uptown Funk.” Your research explores when that began — when American Jewish weddings began to combine the traditional and secular cultures.
In the period that I’m talking about, post-World War II America, this is already a fact of life for musicians. A lot of my work is based on interviews with musicians from that period, folks now in their 80s and 90s. The oldest one I have started playing professionally in 1947 or ’48. Popular American music was played at Jewish weddings as early as the 1930s, but it’s a question of proportion — how much the wedding would feature foxtrots and swing and Lindy Hop and other popular dance tunes of the day, and how much of it is going to be klezmer music.
In the postwar period, most of the [non-Orthodox] American Jewish weddings would have featured American pop. For musicians who wanted to be in what they called the “club date” business, they needed to be able to do all these things. And some “offices” — a term they used for a business that books wedding bands — would have specialists that they could call on to do a Jewish wedding.
You’re writing about a period when the Conservative movement becomes the dominant American Jewish denomination. They have one foot in tradition, and the other in modernity. What does a wedding look like in 1958 when they’re building the big suburban synagogues?
The difference is not so much denominational but between the wide spectrum of Orthodoxy and the diverse spectrum of what I describe as “secular.”
Meaning non-Orthodox — Reform, Conservative, etc.?
Right. Only in the sense that they are broadly speaking more secular than the Orthodox. And if so they are going to have, for the most part, one, maybe two sets of Jewish dance music — basically a medley of a few Jewish tunes. You might have a wedding where it could be a quarter of the music or even half would be Jewish music, but this would be for families that have a much stronger degree of attachment to traditional Jewish culture, and primarily Yiddish culture.
There’s a few interrelated elements that shape this. Class is an important thing. For lower class communities in some areas, and I am talking primarily about New York, you’d have communities that are a little bit more secluded, probably speaking more Yiddish at home and hanging out more with other Jewish people from similar backgrounds. So these kinds of communities might have as much as a third or half of the music be Jewish, even though they consider themselves secular. It’s actually very similar to an Orthodox wedding, where you might also have half and half [Jewish and “American” music].
Jews in the higher socioeconomic class might, in general, be more Americanized, and want to project a more mainstream American identity. They might have as little as five minutes of Jewish music, just to mark it that they did this. Still, it’s very important for almost all of them to have those five minutes — because it’s one of the things that makes the wedding Jewish. I interviewed couples that were getting married in the ’50s, and a lot of them told me, “You need to have Jewish dance music for this to be a Jewish wedding.”
Composer and pianist Uri Schreter is pursuing his PhD in historical musicology at Harvard University. (Nicole Loeb)
When I was growing up in the 1970s at a suburban Reform synagogue on Long Island, klezmer was never spoken about. I don’t know any parents who owned klezmer albums. Then when I got married a decade later, it was in the middle of the klezmer revival. Am I right about that? Were the ’50s and ’60s fallow periods for klezmer?
You’re definitely right. Up until the mid-1920s, you still have waves of immigration coming from Eastern Europe. So you still have new people feeding this desire for the traditional culture. But as immigration stops and people basically tried to become American, the tides shift away from traditional klezmer.
The other important thing that happens in the period that I’m looking at is both a negative rejection of klezmer and a positive attraction to other new things. Klezmer becomes associated with immigrant culture, so people who are trying to be American don’t want to be associated with it. It also becomes associated with the Holocaust, which is very problematic. Anything sounding Yiddish becomes associated for some people with tragedy.
At the same time, and very much related to this, there’s the rise of Israeli popular culture, and especially Israeli folk songs. A really strong symbol of this is in the summer of 1950, when the Weavers record a song called “Tzena, Tzena,” a Hebrew Israeli song written in the 1940s which becomes a massive hit in America — it’s like number two in the Billboard charts for about 10 weeks. Israeli culture becomes this symbol of hope and the future and a new society that’s inspiring. This is all in very stark contrast to what klezmer represents for people. And a lot of the composers of Israeli folk song of its first decades had this very clearly stated ideology that they’re moving away from Ashkenazi musical traditions and Yiddish.
So the Jewish set at a wedding becomes an Israeli set.
At a typical Conservative wedding in the 1950s and ’60s, you might hear 10 minutes of Jewish music. The first one would be “Hava Nagila,” then they went to “Tzena, Tzena,” then they would do a song called “Artza Alinu,” which is today not very well known, and then “Hevenu Shalom Aleichem.” They are songs that are perceived to be Israeli folk songs, even though if you actually look at their origins, it’s a lot murkier than that. Like two of the songs I just mentioned are actually Hasidic songs that received Hebrew words in pre-state Palestine. Another probably comes from some sort of German, non-Jewish composer in 1900, but is in Hebrew and is perceived to be a representation of Israeli culture.
But even when the repertoire already represents a shift towards what’s easier to digest for American Jewry, the arrangements and the instruments and the musical ornamentation are essentially klezmer. The musicians I spoke to said they did this because they felt that this is the only way that it would actually sound Jewish.
That is to say, to be “Jewish” the music had to gesture towards Ashkenazi and Yiddish, even if it were Israeli and Hebrew. As if Jews wanted to distance themselves from Eastern Europe — but only so far.
Someone like Dave Tarras or the Epstein Brothers, musicians who were really at the forefront of klezmer in New York at the time, were really focused on bringing it closer to Ashkenazi traditions. Ashkenazi Jewish weddings in America are not the totality of Jewish weddings in America, and Israeli music itself is made up of all these different traditions — North African, Middle Eastern, Turkish, Greek — but in effect most of the really popular songs of the time were composed by Ashkenazi composers. Even “Hava Nagila” is based on a melody from the Sadigura Hasidic sect in Eastern Europe.
Of course, if you’re a klezmer musician you’re allergic to “Hava Nagila.”
Then-Vice President Joe Biden dances the hora with his daughter Ashley at her wedding to Howard Krein in Wilmington, Delaware on June 2, 2012. (White House/David Lienemann)
You spoke earlier about Latin music, which seemed to become a Jewish thing in the 1950s and ’60s — I know a few scholars have focused on Jews and Latinos and how Latin musical genres like the mambo and cha-cha-cha became popular in the Catskill Mountain resorts and at Jewish weddings.
Latin music is not exclusively a Jewish thing, but it’s part of American popular culture by the late 40s. But Jews are very eagerly adopting it for sure. In the Catskills, you would often have two separate bands that alternated every evening. One is a Latin band, one is a generic American band playing everything else. And part of that is American Jews wanting to become American. And how do you become American? By doing what Americans do: by appropriating “exotic” cultures, in this case Latin. This is a way of being American.
Jews and Chinese food would be another example.
And by the way, in a similar vein, it also becomes very popular to dance to Israeli folk songs. A lot of people are taking lessons. A lot of people are going to their Jewish Y to learn Israeli folk dance.
I’ve been to Jewish weddings where the “Jewish set” feels very perfunctory — you know, dance a hora or two long enough to lift the couple on chairs and then let’s get to the Motown. Or the Black Eyed Peas because they were smart enough to include the words “Mazel Tov!” in the lyrics to “I Gotta Feeling.”
So that’s why we always hear that song! I will say though, even when the Jewish music appears superficial, it does have this deeper layer of meaning. It’s very interesting how, despite all these changes, and despite the secularization process of American Jewish weddings, the music still connects people to their Jewishness. These pieces of music are so meshed with other religious components. Of course, most people see this as secular. But a lot of people connect to their Jewish identity through elements such as Jewish music, Jewish food, certain Jewish customs that are easier to accommodate in your secular lifestyle, and the music specifically has this kind of flexibility, this fluidity between the sacred and the profane.
That’s beautiful. It sort of makes the musicians secular clergy.
It’s interesting that you say that. In his history of klezmer, Walter Zev Feldman refers to the klezmer — the word itself means “musician” — as a kind of a liminal character, an interstitial character between the secular and the mundane. The music is not liturgical, but when the klezmer or the band is playing, it is an interval woven with all these other religious components and things that have ritual meaning.
—
The post The hora, the hora! How Jewish wedding music got that way appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Birthright Israel Foundation Launches $900 Million Campaign, Calls on Jewish World for Help
A man holds a Torah after Simchat Torah, at Hostages Square, in Tel Aviv, Israel on Oct. 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hannah McKay
The Birthright Israel Foundation, which has afforded hundreds of thousands of Jewish youth all expenses paid trips to Israel, announced on Monday night a new “Generations Campaign” to raise $900 million that will fund 200,000 more trips over the next five years.
The organization, which has brought more than 900,000 participants from 70 countries to Israel, announced the new effort to coincide with the commemoration of its 25th anniversary, noting that it aims to raise $650 million from US donors and secure $250 million in “legacy and planned giving commitments to ensure Birthright Israel’s strength and impact for generations to come.”
“Generations” is already being generously supported, Birthright added, with $130 million raised so far and another $80 million pledged as “legacy commitments” that will sustain the program at a time when Jewish students, facing a historic antisemitism crisis across the Western world, crave a connection to Israel more than ever before.
“Birthright Israel’s extraordinary impact is proven. In just 25 years, it has become a rite of passage for Jewish young adults and a launchpad for lifelong engagement in Jewish life,” Bright Israel Foundation president and chief executive officer Elias Saratovsky said in a statement. “It has strengthened Jewish organizations, helped build proud Jewish families, and created resilient, knowledgeable leaders — the kind our community needs at this historic moment.”
He continued, “Imagine a new generation of Jews standing strong and united, advocating for Israel, raising Jewish families, and connected to one global Jewish community. This is not a dream — it is the world Birthright is creating.”
Birthright Israel co-founder and philanthropist Charles Bronfman, added, “Twenty-five years ago, Michal Steinhardt and I had the audacious idea to offer every Jewish young adult in the diaspora a free trip to Israel, a gift from our generation to theirs. My dear friend, Lynn Schusterman, helped turn this idea into a global movement. Birthright Israel has become a household name … This program belongs to the Jewish people. May it continue to go from strength to strength”
The “Generations” campaign arrives at a challenging moment for the Jewish community in which antisemitic hate crimes see year-on-year increases and anti-Zionists are mobilizing to sever the Jewish people’s connection to their ancient homeland.
According to the results of a recent survey commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Jewish Federations of North America, a majority of American Jews now consider antisemitism to be a normal and endemic aspect of life in the US. A striking 57 percent reported believing “that antisemitism is now a normal Jewish experience,” the organizations disclosed, while 55 percent said they have personally witnessed or been subjected to antisemitic hatred, including physical assaults, threats, and harassment, in the past year.
This new reality, precipitated by Hamas’s Oct.7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, has effected a psychological change in American Jews, prompting firearms sales, disaster planning, and “plans to flee the country.”
Antisemitic incidents continue to feed the impression that such thinking is not only logical but necessary.
Last month, a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi in Missoula, Montana was charged for allegedly assaulting a Jewish man outside a homeless shelter on the second anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion. Michael Cain, 29, was charged with felony malicious intimidation or harassment relating to civil or human rights, and his bond was set at $50,000. He allegedly accosted the victim after identifying a Star of David tattooed on his arm.
Cain also reportedly told the victim that he is a Nazi, initiating an exchange of remarks which ended with a brutal assault replete with kicks and punches. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Cain later told police that he is part of a “Fourth Reich” fifth-column cell in the US.
More recently, on Friday, police in Ann Arbor, Michigan, launched a search for a man who trespassed the grounds of the Jewish Resource Center, which serves University of Michigan students, and kicked its door while howling antisemitic statements.
“F—k Israel, f—k the Jewish people,” the man — whom multiple reports describe as white, “college-age,” and possibly named “Jake” or “Jay” — screamed before running away. He did not damage the property, and he may have been accompanied by as many as two other people, one of whom him shouted “no!” when he ran up to the building.
Saratovsky called on the Jewish people to safeguard the diaspora’s access to Israel.
“We need every Jewish person to join us in this effort — to stand together, invest together, and ensure that every young Jew feels proud, connected, and ready to lead,” he said. “Birthright benefits the entire Jewish world, and it must be supported by the entire Jewish world. The Jewish future is up to all of us.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
Uncategorized
Canadian Jewish Groups Demand Toronto Mayor Apologize, Resign for ‘Genocide in Gaza’ Comments
Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow speaks to reporters in Toronto, March 8, 2025. Photo: Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press via ZUMA Press via Reuters Connect
Several Canadian Jewish organizations are calling for Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow to apologize and even resign for publicly calling Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip a “genocide” during an event on Saturday night.
Chow was speaking at a fundraising gala for the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) at the Pearson Convention Center when she said, “The genocide in Gaza impact us all,” as seen in videos from the event that were shared on social media.
“A common bond to shared humanity is tested, and I will speak out when children anywhere are feeling the pain and violence and hunger,” she added to applause from the audience. The mayor also compared the suffering Palestinian children face in Gaza to her mother’s experience of being “a child in a warzone” in China when Japan invaded during World War II.
The Canadian Antisemitism Education Foundation said Chow should immediately resign after having “the audacity to compare” Israel’s war against a terrorist organization in Gaza to Japan’s invasion of China, and following her “inexcusable” false claims about a genocide.
“The only Gaza genocide was the massacre perpetrated by Hamas and its allies against Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023. Somehow, we doubt that’s what the mayor was referencing,” said the foundation. It added that the mayor’s genocide claim is not only “false and defamatory” to Israel and its people but also “a calculated insult to the almost 200,000 Jews in the Greater Toronto Area who support Israel, and it exposes the Jewish community to material risk of violence.”
The Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) sent a letter to Chow about her “reckless, divisive, and dangerous” comments, and said in a separate statement on X that “such language distorts fact and law, and it legitimizes the hostility and intimidation that Jewish Torontonians are already facing in record numbers.”
Antisemitic hate crimes have spiked in Canada, especially the Toronto area, over the past two years amid the Gaza war, following Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“By echoing that narrative, Mayor Chow lends support to those spreading malicious libels and undermine public confidence in your commitment to the safety, dignity, and inclusion of all Torontonians,” CIJA added. “The Jewish community expects the mayor to make this right by addressing the harm caused and taking immediate action to restore trust and ensure our safety.”
The Canada-Israel Friendship Association accused Chow of promoting “an antisemitic blood libel” by accusing Israel of committing a genocide in Gaza during its war targeting Hamas terrorists who orchestrated the deadly massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Amir Epstein, executive director of the Canadian Jewish civil rights group the Tafsik Organization, called Chow’s comments “disgraceful, reckless and dangerously irresponsible.” Her “genocide in Gaza” remarks were “a slap in the face to Jews in Toronto, across Canada, and around the world — an unforgivable betrayal and a disgraceful distortion of reality,” the statement continued.
“Effective immediately, Mayor Chow is not welcome at any Tafsik Organization events, commemorations, or meetings. Her conduct has failed Toronto, and we reject her presence and participation in our community spaces,” Epstein noted. “We call for Mayor Olivia Chow to be formally excommunicated and permanently rejected by the Jewish community and all Jewish organizations. Providing her a stage … risks legitimizing antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and undermines community safety and integrity.”
B’nai Brith Canada has written to Toronto’s Integrity Commissioner Paul Muldoon, asking him to open an investigation to see if Chow violated the city’s Code of Conduct, which states that elected officials must “ensure that their work environment is free from discrimination and harassment.”
“Making such inaccurate and misleading statements, while representing all Torontonians, sends a harmful and divisive message,” said B’nai Brith Canada. “Toronto deserves leaders who treat every community with respect and act with impartiality. At a time when the mayor should be working to mend divisions and ease tensions, she has instead chosen to inflame them … When a mayor presents a legally disputed claim as fact, it crosses the line from leadership to bias.”
Uncategorized
Mamdani said NYPD boots were ‘laced by the IDF.’ What is the relationship between American police departments and Israel?
New York mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani’s recently resurfaced remark that “when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF” has renewed concerns from some Jewish voters about his potential administration’s attitude toward Israel — and renewed questions about the Israeli military’s relationship with police departments across the U.S.
Mamdani made the comment during an August 2023 conference for the Democratic Socialists of America. Mamdani, a DSA member representing Queens in the New York State Assembly, was a keynote speaker at the conference and appeared on a panel about “Socialist Internationalism.”
Mamdani said during the panel that for Americans to care about international issues, “We have to make them hyper-local. We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF. We have to make — not specifically that example all the time — just to say that for working class people who have very little time, who have so many stresses, who are under so many pressures, there isn’t much time for symbolism. We have to make it materially connected to their life.”
Mamdani told CNN last week that he had been referring to training exercises that have taken place between the New York Police Department and the Israel Defense Forces, not suggesting that the two were in close collaboration.
American Jewish leaders have widely objected to the comments. Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the head of prominent New York Reform congregation Central Synagogue, said it “contributed to a mainstreaming of some of the most abhorrent antisemitism.” Meanwhile, progressive groups outside the Jewish establishment say Mamdani hit on an uncomfortable truth about American law enforcement.
The image of an NYPD boot laced by an IDF soldier evokes a broader claim that the militarism and brutality of American law enforcement was imported from Israel in police training programs. The claim first gained traction in anti-Zionist spaces following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin.
The relationship between American police departments and Israel has since become the subject of ongoing criticism by groups who say Israel’s law enforcement practices promote aggressive surveillance, discrimination and violent intervention, and otherwise infringe on human rights.
But police aggression in the U.S. long predates Israel’s founding, much less American law enforcement training visits. The anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace, though it opposes the trips, has cautioned against the notion that Israel is the origin of American police violence or racism, saying that such claims “obscure the fundamental responsibility and nature of the U.S.” and “further an antisemitic ideology.”
So what is the actual relationship between Israel and American police today, and what is its impact on law enforcement tactics in the U.S.?
Roots in counterterrorism
American law enforcement’s relationship with Israel dates back to the 1990s, but accelerated after 9/11, when police departments across the U.S. were responding to the threat of terrorism. In September 2002, the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, an American nonprofit, brought high-ranking law enforcement officials from several major U.S. metro areas — among them New York, Los Angeles, South Florida and Dallas — to Israel to learn best practices for terrorism deterrence and response.
According to a press release JINSA issued at the time, the Americans observed “methods and techniques” that included bomb disposal, forensics, crowd control and coordination with the media and the public. The release also said the group visited police and IDF outposts to study Border Guard operations in the Galilee and the West Bank.
Since then, the trips have become routine. As of 2020, more than 1,000 American police officers from across the country have made similar training visits, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. JINSA isn’t the only group organizing the trips; the Anti-Defamation League and a program called the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange have also led American police trips to Israel.
JINSA maintains that its trips focus on management and policy issues, and that officials do not learn about physical tactics. But that may be little consolation to groups that oppose the visits in the first place, who say that observers of any Israeli police operation in Palestinian areas are witnessing live demonstrations of repressive violence.
The trips are only one aspect of the relationship. There is also a more direct collaboration between the NYPD and Israel: the former has had an office — though it reportedly consists of a single officer — at the Israeli police headquarters since 2012, as part of the NYPD’s counterterrorism efforts.
Backlash to the relationship
One group leading opposition to the trips is JVP, which in 2018 published a 57-page report about them called “Deadly Exchange.”
The report documented not only what officers encounter on the trips — for example, a network of hundreds of surveillance cameras around Jerusalem’s Old City — but also their parallel tactics in the U.S.; it points to a 5,300-camera surveillance system in Atlanta that the Atlanta Police Department said was modeled after the command center in Jerusalem. It also claimed that the St. Louis Metropolitan Police used Skunk, a foul-odor spray, on protesters in Ferguson in 2014 after seeing it deployed in Israel.
Not all of its claims are substantiated. One section that describes a Jewish lawmaker’s push for increased surveillance states that he was influenced by Israel’s example; that lawmaker never said such a thing and had not attended a police exchange program. Other cases cited in the report show similarities in American and Israeli law enforcement practices but do not show a causal link between them.
Still, the JVP report became a proof text following George Floyd’s death, when Black Lives Matter protesters were building coalitions with the pro-Palestinian resistance. Protesters pointed to the Minneapolis police officers’ attendance at a security exchange conference at the Israeli Consulate in Chicago in 2012, saying the knee-to-neck restraint Chauvin used to strangle Floyd was a hold IDF soldiers often employed on Palestinians.
Palestinians have described similar treatment by IDF soldiers. But records show neck restraints had been used in MPD training since at least 2002, and it’s unclear whether Israeli officials even taught the chokehold at the conference, or whether Chauvin — who was on the force at the time — was in attendance.
Moreover, reasons for increasing militarism in American police forces are manifold. To explain why American police departments look more like military bases now, observers would point to the military industrial complex and civilian access to military-grade weapons (which led law enforcement to keep up).
Nevertheless, the charge of Israeli influence has become all-encompassing; as in countless other examples, it is a simple explanation for complicated, maddening and seemingly unsolvable American institutional dysfunction. And as Mamdani said in 2023, it’s a convenient way to make international concerns feel “hyper-local.”
The post Mamdani said NYPD boots were ‘laced by the IDF.’ What is the relationship between American police departments and Israel? appeared first on The Forward.