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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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Tucker Carlson draws scorn for claiming he was ‘detained’ at Israeli airport after Mike Huckabee interview
(JTA) — Tucker Carlson had just barely wrapped his interview with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee before the two were already disagreeing on a basic fact.
Carlson, the influential conservative commentator, flew to Tel Aviv on Wednesday to conduct the interview with Huckabee at Ben Gurion Airport, departing hours later without leaving the airport. But before leaving, he told the British tabloid Daily Mail, Israeli authorities confiscated his passport, dragged his executive producer into an interrogation room “and then demanded to know what we spoke to Ambassador Huckabee about.’
Not so, says the ambassador: What Carlson’s team experienced was simply a routine security measure.
“EVERYONE who comes in/out of Israel (every country for that matter) has passports checked & routinely asked security questions,” Huckabee wrote on X, refuting his former Fox News colleague before their conversation could go live.
Israel’s airport authority also denied the allegations, saying Carlson’s team “were politely asked a few routine questions, in accordance with standard procedures applied to many travelers.” A longer statement from the U.S. Embassy in Israel also said Carlson’s decision to stay in Israel only a few hours without leaving the airport was his alone.
Carlson’s complaints drew withering reactions from Jews and others who said they recognized the intense security practiced at Ben Gurion. The conservative commentator John Podhoretz, for example, recounted on X how he had been questioned for 20 minutes because he was couriering a dress for a relative. “I’ve known Tucker was an asshole for 30 years but this takes the f–king cake,” he wrote.
The back-and-forth was a preview of the hotly anticipated interview between the two divergent flanks of the Christian MAGA coalition, whose public disagreements on Israel have paralleled a larger fissure in the Republican party. Carlson, the influential GOP kingmaker, has increasingly embraced anti-Israel talking points on his show at the same time as he has platformed conspiracy theorists and antisemites including Nick Fuentes. A growing number of young right-wing influencers and candidates are lining up behind his views.
Huckabee, meanwhile, is a leading evangelical Christian Zionist who has argued in favor of Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank. He publicly lobbied Carlson for a sit-down after Carlson used his podcast to criticize him for what Carlson described as a failure to intervene in Israeli demonization of Christians. Carlson agreed to a talk, and posted a picture of himself arriving Wednesday prior to the interview.
“Greetings from Israel,” Carlson posted to X, captioning a photo of him posing outside near an Israeli flag with his arm around business partner Neil Patel. (“Sell out,” Sneako, a livestreamer and Internet personality with a long streak of antisemitic and anti-Israel comments, wrote in reply.)
Greetings from Israel. pic.twitter.com/1uBWvqBNST
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 18, 2026
To some seasoned travelers, the location was obvious.
“That’s the walkway to the private jet terminal for VIP entry,” tweeted David Friedman, who was U.S. ambassador to Israel during President Donald Trump’s first term.
“After the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, the City of David, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Garden of Gethsemene, Capernaum, the Sea of Galilee, Nazareth, Bethlehem, Yad Vashem, the Knesset and about 2 million other places, this walkway is an important site (but only if you fly on private jets),” he continued. “Too bad Tucker stayed in the airport in the face of so many invitations to see so many wonderful places. A huge and obviously intentional missed opportunity.”
Trump, an ally of both Carlson and Huckabee, may have also played a hand in arranging the interview, according to a former Fox News reporter who told the Times of Israel that Trump wanted to prevent an intra-party spat over Israel that could benefit Democrats. The source, Melissa Francis, also described the interview as “emotional” and said Carlson’s team had tried and failed to also arrange an interview with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Little about the interview process had been straightforward. The week before Carlson touched down in Israel, according to local reports, Israeli authorities had indeed briefly discussed whether to bar Carlson from entering the country over his past comments — something they routinely do for non-Jewish critics of Israel, even for prominent figures. They ultimately decided to avoid a diplomatic incident, according to reports.
In the days since agreeing to an interview with Huckabee, Carlson has posted new interviews with Ryan Zink, a pardoned Jan. 6 rioter and Texas congressional candidate; billionaire hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio; conspiracy theorist Ian Carroll; and former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul.
Carlson has not yet published his interview with Huckabee. But late Wednesday, he shared an interview about Israel, continuing the vendetta that started their exchange. “How does Israel treat Christians? We spoke to one whose family has lived there since Jesus. His story is shocking,” Carlson wrote to promote the video.
For Carlson’s Jewish critics, the whole day offered yet more evidence that whatever he ultimately says about Israel should be discounted.
“Tucker Carlson is a chickens–t. The guy who’s been spouting lies about Israel for the past two years, landed today at Ben Gurion airport, took a quick picture in the logistics zone, tweeted it to pretend he’s actually IN Israel (so he can later claim that he’s a serious reporter who toured Israel), didn’t even step foot in country, then made up a story that he’s being supposedly harassed by our security (didn’t happen), whined about it, got back into the private jet and flew off,” tweeted Naftali Bennett, the Israeli politician. “Next time he talks about Israel as if he’s some expert, just remember this guy is a phony!”
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Les Wexner testifies that he was ‘conned’ by Jeffrey Epstein and did not know of his crimes
(JTA) — Leslie Wexner, the Ohio retail billionaire whose association with Jeffrey Epstein has shadowed his philanthropic legacy, spent six hours Wednesday answering questions in a closed-door congressional deposition that Democrats later derided as implausible and evasive.
Wexner, 88, appeared before staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform at his home in New Albany, Ohio, where he sought to rebut years of scrutiny tied to Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender who once managed Wexner’s personal finances.
In a prepared opening statement submitted to the committee, Wexner cast himself as a victim of deception.
“I was naive, foolish, and gullible to put any trust in Jeffrey Epstein,” Wexner said. “He was a con man. And while I was conned, I have done nothing wrong and have nothing to hide.” He added: “I completely and irrevocably cut ties with Epstein nearly twenty years ago when I learned that he was an abuser, a crook, and a liar.”
Wexner’s testimony comes amid renewed attention to his relationship with Epstein following the release of previously redacted federal investigative records. Wexner, long celebrated across the Jewish communal world for his business achievements and billion-dollar philanthropy, has never been charged with a crime connected to Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation and has consistently denied knowledge of Epstein’s misconduct.
In his statement, Wexner presented that denial in unequivocal terms. “Let me be crystal clear: I never witnessed nor had any knowledge of Epstein’s criminal activity,” he said. “I was never a participant nor co-conspirator in any of Epstein’s illegal activities.” He continued, “At no time did I ever witness the side of Epstein’s life for which he is now infamous.”
Wexner also addressed the emotional toll of the scandal and expressed sympathy for survivors. “Before going any further, though, I want to acknowledge the survivors of Epstein’s terrible crimes and the devastation that each of them has endured,” he said. “The pain he inflicted upon them is unfathomable to me. My heart goes out to each of them.”
Throughout the document, Wexner portrayed Epstein as a master manipulator who carefully curated an image of elite credibility. “Epstein lived a double life. He was clever, diabolical, and a master manipulator,” Wexner said, describing how Epstein “revealed to me only glimpses into the life in which he was a sophisticated financial guru.”
Wexner reiterated longstanding claims about the unraveling of their relationship, saying that after Epstein’s legal troubles surfaced, his wife Abigail Wexner reviewed financial records and concluded Epstein had misappropriated “vast sums” from the family. “Once I learned of his abusive conduct and theft from my family, I never spoke with Epstein again. Never,” he said.
But Democrats who participated in the deposition emerged sharply skeptical.
“He’s claiming there was no friendship with Jeffrey Epstein,” Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the committee’s top Democrat, told reporters during a press conference outside Wexner’s residence, calling the claim “bogus.”
Garcia went further, arguing that Epstein’s wealth and influence were inseparable from Wexner’s patronage. “There would be no Epstein island, there’d be no Epstein plane, there would be no money to traffic women and girls … without the support of Les Wexner,” he said.
Rep. Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts struck an even harsher tone. “There’s no question in my mind, given the evidence so far, that Les Wexner knew about this and failed to stop it,” Lynch said.
Other Democrats questioned the credibility of Wexner’s repeated assertions that he had neither seen nor suspected misconduct. Rep. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona said his claims of not recalling key details about Epstein strained belief. Rep. Dave Min of California summarized the testimony as a case of “see no evil, hear no evil,” calling it “really just not credible.”
Committee Republicans did not attend the deposition, citing a medical procedure for Chairman James Comer. A committee spokeswoman said Wexner “answered every question asked of him” and pledged that video and transcripts would be released.
For Wexner, the proceeding marked another chapter in a saga that has complicated his public image and tarnished his name in the Jewish world, where countless rabbis and other professionals have received fellowships bearing his name. In his statement, he framed the deposition as an opportunity for to help the Epstein’s victims.
“I hope you are successful in uncovering the truth and bringing closure to all survivors,” Wexner said. “If I am able to assist you in that effort by answering your questions, I am grateful for the opportunity to do so.”
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Quietly sold by Jewish library, letter by famed 18th-century rabbi surfaces at auction, fetching $400,000
(JTA) — A decade ago, amid a financial crisis, the Jewish Theological Seminary turned to its assets, selling real estate as well as rare books from its world-renowned library. The book sales were private, and the institution has never detailed what was sold or for how much.
Now, a lost treasure from the library has once again emerged at auction: this time, a letter written and autographed by the 18th-century Jewish luminary Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, also known as the Ramchal.
When it was housed at the library, the letter belonged to a Ramchal collection numbering hundreds of pages. Removed from the collection and marketed to the auction house’s Orthodox clientele as a profound text by “a great and holy Kabbalist,” the letter sold on Sunday for nearly $400,000. The identities of the seller and buyer are not publicly known.
The price reflects the massive appeal of heritage items in a newly affluent Orthodox market, where rare texts and autograph material are increasingly treated as both status symbols and investment vehicles. It is a market the auction house, Genazym, has helped supercharge by selling not just books, but proximity to revered rabbinic figures.
Born in 1707, Luzzatto was an Italian Jewish thinker, mystic and writer whose influence far exceeded his brief life. His best-known work, “Mesillat Yesharim,” became a cornerstone of Jewish ethical literature and remains widely studied today. Though his mystical teachings stirred suspicion among some contemporaries, later generations regarded him as a major figure of Jewish thought.
In a famous 1928 essay titled “The Boy from Padua,” the Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik offered one of the most enduring modern interpretations of Luzzatto’s legacy. Bialik described Luzzatto as a forerunner of three great streams of modern Jewish history: the Lithuanian rabbinic tradition, Hasidism and the Enlightenment.
The auctioned letter, spanning two handwritten pages and addressed to his mentor, captures Luzzatto engaged in a detailed discussion of mystical concepts. He uses the space to explain his reasoning and mentions additional writings then in progress.
For scholars like David Sclar, the quiet removal of Luzzatto’s writings from the JTS library and their transfer to private hands suggests a cultural decline.
“It’s a scandal within the world of scholarship and American Jewish institutions,” Sclar, a librarian at a Modern Orthodox high school in New Jersey, said in an interview. Sclar wrote his dissertation on Luzzatto using primary sources such as the auctioned letter.
He is also a former employee of the special collections division at JTS who left the institution years before the crisis that precipitated the sell-off. He sees the outcome of the auction as evidence of not only wrongdoing but incompetence.
“This is one of the items that they sold through the back door, which means they sold it for probably virtually nothing,” Sclar said. “And the tragedy in all of this, besides JTS sort of destroying cultural heritage, is that it’s also stupid, because if they had decided that they were desperate for money then just do an auction. Don’t do it through the back door.”
The librarian at JTS, David Kraemer, declined a request for an interview, directing questions to the institution’s spokesperson, who offered a brief emailed statement.
“Decisions were made at the time with careful consideration of what was in the best interest of the institution,” the spokesperson wrote.
In 2021, amid earlier revelations of the library’s sell-off, Kraemer told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he had been ordered to sell items of his choosing to raise a specified amount of money, which he did not disclose.
In their defense of the sales, Kraemer and other JTS officials said at the time that the deaccessioned materials had been digitized and were deemed to have limited research value, allowing scholars to access their contents even after the originals left the collection. Seminary leaders described the decisions as financially prudent and of minimal impact on the library’s core mission.
Critics, however, argue that digitization does not replace the scholarly and cultural value of original manuscripts.
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