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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.
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The post The hora, the hora! How Jewish wedding music got that way appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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In a viral social media showdown, a glimpse of the real Israel
In amateur video footage circulated across Israeli social media in recent weeks, a disturbing scene unfolds. A young man in his mid-twenties, wearing a military-style jacket, looms over a silver car in the heart of Tel Aviv. Inside the vehicle sits an 89-year-old man, mouth agape, expression frozen.
“Dictator! Khamenei!” the young man shouts, his voice sharp, emotional and aggressive.
The young man was Mordechai David, a provocateur who has been documented in a series of confrontations with public figures, journalists and protesters, adopting a style built on creating moments designed for virality. The elderly passenger was former Supreme Court president Aharon Barak — the man whom Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s propaganda machine has painted as a demon, blamed for building, during his tenure in the 1990s, an allegedly over-independent judiciary that supposedly obstructs “governance” by a government eager for unrestrained power.
David, raised in Bnei Brak as the son of a convert to religious life, has become something of a celebrity. His past includes multiple criminal highlights. Blocking Barak’s car may have marked his peak. In a subsequent social-media video, David “apologized” for not blocking Barak’s vehicle “more.”
Two different visions of Israel
David’s stunt is one of several intertwined recent stories in Israel that, between them, outline the contours of a deeper struggle over the character of its society. It is a clash between two fundamentally different visions for the country. And Israel’s fate hangs in the balance.
David’s is a political culture where perpetual confrontation and boundary-breaking increasingly define public behavior. On the other side sits Lucy Aharish, a 44-year-old journalist who grew up in Dimona.
Aharish studied political science at the Hebrew University, and over the years has worked at a variety of radio and TV stations in Israel, including I24News in English, a channel on which I also frequently appear. Today, she hosts a current affairs program. The mother of a little boy, she is also a fierce opponent of Netanyahu and his circle.
That has attracted the ire of the Netanyahu machine’s street rabble. This week, Mordechai David arrived at her doorstep with a megaphone. According to reports, David and one of his followers managed to enter her building — and at the entrance, a tense confrontation unfolded.
This requires the introduction of another character: Tsahi Halevi, 50, an artist of unusual charisma. He is a singer and highly accomplished actor who portrayed Naor in the internationally acclaimed series Fauda, a character admired for intelligence, composure and moral clarity.
In a twist that could only occur in Israel, Halevi also partly plays himself. The son of a Mossad officer, he, like Naor, served as an officer in an elite undercover unit. On Oct. 7, 2023, he volunteered for reserve duty and rushed to the scenes of devastation, where he helped save many lives.
Matan Gendelman, a survivor of the Kfar Aza massacre, recently recounted in Israeli media that Halevi helped rescue her trapped family members after being directed to the scene by his wife, who received the family’s location through social media.
His wife is Lucy Aharish. “Pure gold, the salt of the earth,” Gendelman said of the couple.
The likes of David would vehemently disagree.
Why? Because Aharish, in addition to being a Netanyahu critic, is a member of Israel’s Arab minority. And because Aharish and Halevi are a mixed couple, the hostility against them burns even more intensely.
Back at their house, there was a scent of violence in the air as the decorated officer and provocateur traded barbs.
“You come to my home?” Halevi challenged; “I feel like protesting against your wife!” David replied. “How far do you want this to go?” Halevi asked, menacingly, as police separated the two. The police dragged David away, but he ensured himself another viral success; his future may hold a respectable place on the Likud list for the Knesset.
‘The affliction of Israeli society’
Aharish chose to respond on television. “Bullying — this is the affliction of Israeli society,” she said. “It is escalating. We see it in the streets, on the roads, in public discourse — and now it has reached my own doorstep.”
Worse, she added, “The spirit of this government is a bad spirit that encourages bullies. I will not bow my head before these inciters.” She also addressed Netanyahu directly: “This is precisely your way, Mr. Prime Minister — not to see, not to hear, not to know what is happening under your nose. … One day, these bullies will reach your doorstep as well.”
In the vision of Israel embodied by Aharish and Halevi, with their impassioned but civil approach, even the most fierce political disagreement remains bounded by restraint. An important distinction is drawn between rival and enemy.
In that advanced by David, those boundaries erode. Confrontation becomes personal. Intimidation is standard.
The first vision leads to an Israel that strives for peace within itself and with its neighbors, and remains a prosperous liberal democracy grounded in basic rights and openness to the world. The second leads to an unstable, isolated and increasingly theocratic state, which will be in constant conflict with its neighbors, and from which the most productive citizens will steadily depart. In short order it will be unrecognizable, and nothing will be left of “Start-Up Nation.”
The 2026 elections, which must be held by October, will not merely determine a government. They may decide with finality which of these two Israels prevails. And after four years of trauma under Netanyahu’s far-right government, there is urgency in the air.
The post In a viral social media showdown, a glimpse of the real Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump’s pick for surgeon general gets her ‘daily dose of inspiring Kabbalah wisdom’
Casey Means, President Trump’s nominee for U.S. surgeon general, preaches a broad, loosely-defined spirituality that blends ideas such as the “divine feminine,” meditation, and connection with nature. In her email newsletter, she has endorsed practices such as full moon rituals and talking to trees. And, though she was raised Roman Catholic, she has expressed interest in kabbalah, the ancient Jewish mystical tradition focused on esoteric interpretations of scripture and the nature of the soul, the cosmos, and the divine.
In May 2025, she wrote about drawing inspiration from Kabbalah teacher and influencer David Ghiyam to help deal with those who judge her for taking breaks from work to rest and recover during certain phases of the lunar cycle, which she views as essential to “feminine creativity.” She directed her readers to follow Ghiyam “for a daily dose of inspiring Kabbalah wisdom.”
Cathy Heller, a Jewish wellness influencer who preaches mindfulness and manifestation drawing on her studies of Jewish mysticism with rabbis in Israel, told the Forward in a phone interview that Means is a close friend — and often asks her to share wisdom about the Torah and kabbalah.
“She loves it,” Heller said. “She sees such beauty and wisdom in this body of work, and how universal it is and how applicable it is.”
Means’ interest in mysticism expands well beyond kabbalah. In Good Energy, a book she co-wrote with her brother, Calley Means, who works as a senior advisor to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., she quotes Rumi, an influential figure in Sufism — the mystical dimension of Islam — and encourages her readers to practice yoga, tai chi, or qigong, try aromatherapy, and consider taking psychedelics. She has also opposed bans on raw milk despite the risk of serious bacterial infections, said more research is needed on a possible link between vaccines and autism, and criticized hormonal contraception as reflecting a “disrespect of life.”
Means’ interest in Kabbalah seems to reflect less a desire to engage in Jewish religious observance than a core belief of the Make America Healthy Again movement: that physical ailments often have underlying spiritual causes, and that tapping into the mind-body connection has the power to heal. Her promotion of kabbalah also represents the further mainstreaming of an ancient practice once reserved for only the most learned of Jewish scholars — repackaged for non-Jewish audiences and finding its way into spaces as unlikely as the U.S. Public Health Service.
“The idea that it’s controversial that we should BOTH trust unbiased scientific information AND our divine intuition is a sign of darkness in our culture,” Means wrote in November 2024.
‘A manifester’
Heller met Means in 2024 through a mutual friend in Los Angeles who hosts sound baths and other wellness events. They now take long walks and hikes together, share meals, and have celebrated several Shabbat dinners.
On one hike in Los Angeles, they came across a rabbi, and Heller says she asked him to offer a teaching. He shared an explanation of why Jacob’s name derives from the Hebrew root for “heel,” saying that Jacob had the capacity to draw the highest consciousness down into the lowest places.
Means “was literally beaming from ear to ear. We both had tears in our eyes,” Heller recalled. “I said, ‘What’s your name?’ And he said, ‘Rabbi Heller,’ which is funny because that’s my last name. And Casey’s like, ‘You’re such a manifester, that’s crazy.’”
In November 2024, Means promoted Heller’s book, Abundant Ever After: Tools for Creating a Life of Prosperity and Ease on her blog.
“Cathy is a goddess friend and her message resonates with me profoundly about how to live a limitless and spiritual life. Abundant Ever After is a transformative guide blending Jewish mysticism, meditation, and practical tools,” Means wrote. “Manifestation is real. Why wouldn’t we want to learn?”
One month later, Means appeared on Heller’s podcast, “Everything is Energy with Cathy Heller,” where she said that meeting Heller felt like “divine timing” and that their relationship was helping her make sense of concepts from Good Energy, including her belief that everything is interconnected.
“This idea that we’re oneness and everything is connected, it’s not a metaphor. It’s not hippie,” Means said on the podcast. “It’s literally truth on the physical, chemical level. And it’s so absent from our paradigm of healing.”
MAHA and religion
Adrienne Krone, a professor at Allegheny University and author of Free-Range Religion: Alternative Food Movements and Religious Life in the United States, sees a direct connection between the MAHA movement and religious ways of thinking about food, health and the body.
She said that the internet has accelerated a broader shift in wellness culture and its relationship to spirituality. On social media, mystical teachings can often be mistranslated and blended together, she said, sometimes losing their original cultural context.
“Some of what’s going on is people are picking up other religious ideas, other secular ideas, scientific research, and they bring it all together,” Krone said. “That’s what forms their understanding of what they’re supposed to eat, how they’re supposed to treat their bodies, what kinds of extra exercise regimens they should be doing. And so it doesn’t surprise me that Casey Means has this kind of collection of ideas that are more accessible than they used to be.”
Still, Means’ spirituality seems to be an outlier among the traditional Christian conservative worldview touted by most of Trump’s other nominees. Her calls to “EMBRACE THE ‘WOO WOO’” and engage in various spiritual ceremonies have drawn the ire of some activists, including conservative talk radio host Erick Erickson, who critiqued Means as “a near Wiccan” who has “dabbled in occult practices that amount to witchcraft.”
Two Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, have not yet committed to vote “yes” on Means’ confirmation, and pressed Means at her confirmation hearing about her stance on vaccines and past use of psychedelic mushrooms.
If confirmed as the nation’s top doctor, Means has signaled that spirituality will play a significant role in how she approaches the position.
“I do believe that Americans are ready to hear about spirituality when it pertains to medicine,” Means said at her confirmation hearing.
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More Americans now sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis, new poll finds
(JTA) — Another major poll has founded that sympathy has surged among Americans for Palestinians and now exceeds support for Israelis.
Gallup, one of the country’s most respected polling outfits, found that 41% of Americans say they sympathize more with the Palestinians, compare to 36% who sympathize more with the Israelis. A year ago, a Gallup poll showed a 13-point advantage for the Israelis.
The poll comes nearly six months after a national poll found for the first time that Americans’ sympathies had flipped. In a New York Times and Siena University poll released in September, 35% of registered American voters said they sympathized more with Palestinians compared to 34% with Israel. Prior to the war in Gaza, 47% of respondents said they sympathized more with the Israelis.
Both pollsters have asked about voters’ sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades. They each said the sympathy gap in their latest polls was not statistically significant but that the trajectory of sentiments was.
Between 2001 and 2018, the Gallup poll found that Americans were more sympathetic to the Israelis by an average margin of 43 points. The gap began narrowing the following year but did not flip until now.
In both polls, the stark recent shift was driven by sharp shifts in sentiments among Democrats. The Gallup poll found that voters under 55 prefer the Palestinians by a wide margin, while older voters remain more sympathetic to the Israelis. The New York Times poll found that older, college-educated Democrats had seen their sentiments shift most harshly.
The polls add to the data points showing a sharp drop in sympathy for Israelis since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack and the subsequent war in Gaza, for which the United States brokered a ceasefire in October. The Gallup poll is the first to demonstrate post-ceasefire sentiments among Americans.
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