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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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For Venezuela’s historic Jewish community, the earthquake is a crisis they can’t afford
Less than two hours after two powerful earthquakes left hundreds dead and thousands missing in northern Venezuela, including its capital city of Caracas, families whose homes had been rendered unlivable began to make their way to Hebraica, the Jewish community center in Caracas, where they spent the night sleeping on beach chairs and in cars parked on the center’s football field.
That night, more than 400 people sought refuge.
“Based on all the years of hardships we’ve had — massive power outages and other problems — the community already knows where they can go if something happens,” said Roberto Mishkin, president of the Union Israelita de Caracas, the country’s largest Ashkenazi Jewish congregation, adding that aftershocks are still rattling the area.
“A lot of people don’t want to return because they live on high floors. They’re scared.”
The sprawling campus of Hebraica— built decades ago when Venezuela’s Jewish population numbered around 30,000 — has become an emergency shelter, complete with mattresses, medical care, communal meals and preparations for Shabbat.
According to community leaders, two members of Venezuela’s Jewish community have been confirmed dead, and several others remain missing. Hundreds more are displaced — their houses destroyed or severely damaged.
“People are worried, very worried, very anguished, and a lot of people don’t know if they can go back to their homes,” said Elias Farache, the former president of the Sephardic community in Venezuela and a former leader of the Venezuelan Zionist Federation.
“It’s the club, so people feel very comfortable in this place,” he added, explaining that the tight-knit community has found comfort in gathering together.
Mishkin says Venezuela’s Jews have been in dire straits for years. Before the earthquake, more than 300 Jewish families received food and medicine through local Jewish organizations such as Keren Ezra, which receives support from international partners, including the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, commonly known as the Joint.
Under normal circumstances, Keren Ezra distributes staples such as raw chicken, rice and other groceries. Now, many families no longer have kitchens, so Keren Ezra has been distributing tuna, rice, crackers, cookies, coffee and other emergency supplies to people seeking shelter at Hebraica. Hundreds of displaced people are relying on the organization’s reserves.
“We’re trying to manage the problems as they come, because to be hysterical doesn’t help,” said Syma Farache, a Caracas-based community member and the director of Keren Ezra. “We do have products in stock for emergencies. We buy them four months in advance, but now we realize it’s not enough because we didn’t expect this.”
Several Israeli and international Jewish organizations are working to send aid and rescue teams to Venezuela. Because Israel does not maintain an embassy or consulate in the country (former President Hugo Chávez severed diplomatic ties with Israel in 2009), Jewish community leaders are also coordinating with Venezuelan authorities to facilitate the arrival of these personnel. The first of these organizations began arriving on Friday, with the Jewish humanitarian organization CADENA reaching Venezuela, and an Israeli rescue team expected to arrive on Sunday. Others, including IsraAID and the Joint, remain on standby until Caracas’ airport reopens.
Farache said while there is no shortage of supplies yet, there could be if the airport does not open soon.
For now, community leaders are trying desperately to maintain a sense of normalcy. On Friday, they purchased mattresses so evacuees would no longer have to sleep in their cars or on beach chairs. A rabbi plans to spend Shabbat at the community center, while volunteers prepare cholent, the traditional Shabbat stew, to feed the displaced. Early next week, organizers hope to open a communal kitchen for those who cannot afford to purchase meals.
But addressing the immediate aftermath is only the beginning. Hundreds of displaced people will need housing
“Now everybody here is safe,” Mishkin said. “We’re feeding a few families, and we’re trying to make do, but this is a very poor community.”
He recalled that Venezuela’s Jewish community was once among Latin America’s most prosperous. The community has declined sharply over the past two decades, from a peak of 30,000, as part of a broader exodus that saw 7 million people leave the country due to political, economic and social challenges, including rising antisemitism.
The economy has seen a slight upturn since U.S. forces removed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January, but day-to-day life for most residents remains a struggle. Community institutions have continued to serve members and adapt to the new reality, all while struggling to raise money for social services.
“We used to be a donor community. We sent money all over the world,” Mishkin said. “After 25 years of a complicated country, we have an elderly and not economically prosperous community. Most of the people whose houses are severely damaged are not going to be able to afford to fix them.”
Without property insurance, many families will have few options. Many also lost their businesses.
“They cannot stay on a mattress forever,” Mishkin said. “They cannot afford, on their own, the repairs or a new place to live. That’s our main concern—how to help these families have a decent place to live.”
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Texas creates required reading list that includes Anne Frank and the Bible
(JTA) — Texas instituted on Friday the nation’s first-ever statewide K-12 required reading list for public schools. Students in public schools will soon be required to read Anne Frank’s diary and a host of Bible passages, along with other Jewish- and Holocaust-related texts.
The decision has drawn vigorous objections from some of the state’s Jews. Several local rabbis and other Jewish leaders pushed back on the proposal during the public comment period in the lead-up to the vote this week because of concerns including injecting Christian content into the schools.
In a vote Friday of nine to five, the Republican-controlled state education board approved the list, mandating reading selections usually left to individual schools and teachers. The curriculum will go into effect in 2030 and apply to the roughly 5.5 million schoolchildren in Texas public schools.
The move comes as the board has increasingly sought to incorporate Christianity into the state’s public schools, including in 2024 when it approved an optional Bible curriculum for elementary schools that drew pushback from Jewish parents and advocates. Last year, Republican lawmakers in the state also required the display of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom.
The passage of the reading list follows an effort by the state’s conservative education leaders to reverse a nationwide decline in the number of books read or assigned in class and exercise control over the texts students are exposed to.
In recent years, Texas has been at the forefront of the national wave of book removals, with several districts pulling books about the Holocaust and Jewish history, including versions of Anne Frank’s diary. Decisions by the state education board have historically had an effect on schools nationwide, in part because of the vast population of school age students in the state.
The new reading list, which spans over 150 titles, includes Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir “Night”; Lois Lowry’s young-reader Holocaust novel “Number the Stars”; George Washington’s letter to a Rhode Island synagogue in 1790, and the “original edition” of Frank’s diary. Conservatives, including in Texas, have objected to a graphic novel version that illustrates passages in which the diarist describes her sexual longings.
Other books on the list include “Charlotte’s Web” by E. B. White and “Animal Farm” by George Orwell.
Beginning in the fourth grade, students will also be required to read numerous passages from both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, a requirement that has drawn fierce opposition from some Texas Jewish leaders.
Board members continued to propose last-minute additions to the list right up until the vote Friday afternoon, adding the Biblical parable Jonah and the Whale to the first grade curriculum.
The final reading list was pared down from roughly 300 texts after the board initially discussed the proposal in February. At the time, state education board leaders told JTA that they had consulted with experts including the Texas Holocaust, Genocide, and Antisemitism Advisory Commission, a state government body.
On Monday, a host of rabbis and Jewish leaders attended a Board of Education meeting to voice their opposition to the reading list, including Joshua Fixler, a rabbi at Houston’s Reform Congregation Emanu El.
“There is a difference between teaching about religion and teaching religion, and these texts are going to put Texas teachers in the position of teaching religion to our kids,” Fixler told JTA following Friday’s vote.
Fixler said he believed the required reading list would cause children of all faiths to feel “alienated and isolated” because they would “see the state endorsement of one particular religious tradition.”
Fixler particularly objected to “Night” being part of the same eighth-grade unit as chapter three of the Book of Lamentations, which discusses the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem as God’s punishment for the sins of the Jews.
“To associate that with a Holocaust text like Elie Wiesel’s classic work of ‘Night’ is to imply that the Jews might in some way be responsible for the Holocaust,” Fixler, who has three children in Texas public schools, explained.
Rabbi Neil F. Blumofe, the senior rabbi of Conservative Congregation Agudas Achim in Austin, said that he was concerned that the list’s focus on Holocaust-based text would reduce students’ understanding of Jewish history.
“If one only teaches the Jewish civilization or religion as catastrophe-based, I think that that gives a narrow focus, and also can cause issues of what Judaism is and what its relevancy is currently versus what it used to be in the past,” Blumofe said.
Blumofe added that he had “yet to see an effective curriculum or teacher’s guide or ways to sensitively recognize that these are works of civilization versus works of a particular theology.”
Laney Hawes, the co-founder of Texas Freedom to Read Project, told JTA that she was “seething” over the result of Friday’s vote.
“The lists are promoting a singular narrow ideology,” Hawes said, adding that while proponents of the required reading stressed that it promoted “Judeo-Christian values,” she believed it excluded Jewish perspectives.
“I want my children to have a worldview that is vast and diverse,” Hawes, who is not Jewish, said. “If they’re going to be forced to read certain books, I want those books to represent a plethora of perspectives, not just one world view.”
Fixler and Hawes said that they planned to gather with other local advocates to consider ways to fight the new curriculum. For Fixler, he hoped the outcome would emphasize for others the importance of voting in school board elections.
“I think that this should be a wake-up call to people who have been sleeping about the ways in which Christian nationalism is shaping policy on local, state and federal levels,” he said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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The biggest Jewish issue in New York’s most Jewish primary wasn’t really Israel
Much of the pro-Israel world seems to have seen New York’s Tuesday Democratic primaries as bad for the Jews. When it comes to at least one race, that perspective needs revising.
Yes, Brad Lander, who is highly critical of Israel, defeated the AIPAC-backed incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in NY-10 — which, according to the Jewish Electorate Institute, boasts the second-highest number of Jewish voters of any district in the country. But seeing that result as “bad for the Jews” misunderstands what the candidates, both of whom are Jewish and self-professed Zionists, were arguing about.
Both are motivated by a profound wish to protect Jews in the United States from rising hatred. Both understand how high the stakes are. What divided them was the question of how to govern well for Jews — a new iteration of a dispute between two robust strains of Jewish thought that extend deep into our shared history.
Both Lander and Goldman ran on their Jewish identities and built explicit plans for confronting antisemitism into their pitches to voters.
Goldman called himself a “proud Zionist,” and told the NY Jewish Week “I do think there is an undercurrent of antisemitism in the degree to which AIPAC seems to be vilified,” even as he said he’d pushed AIPAC to be more willing to criticize the Israeli government.
Lander, upon winning by an almost two-to-one margin, told supporters, “I will be one of the Jewish members of Congress most willing to stand up for Palestinian human rights, and I will stand firmly against bigotry aimed at Jews. Those are not two different jobs. They are the same job.”
Both men accepted, as a starting premise, that antisemitism is rising and real. What they disagreed about was where the danger is concentrated, and which set of political alliances will actually help contain it.
Goldman focused on concerns about the political left’s tendency to treat Zionism as suspect. He prioritized standing with Israel, staying close to its institutional defenders, and refusing to let the loudest progressive critics define what counts as acceptable Jewish politics.
Lander, instead, argued that conflating support for the Israeli government with Jewish safety leaves Jews exposed if and when that government’s policies become impossible to defend. His strategy: decouple Jewish identity from Israeli state policy, ally with the growing progressive coalition in New York politics, and fight antisemitism from inside that coalition’s ranks rather than outside and against it.
Both of these approaches draw from recognizable, longstanding strains of American Jewish thought. Goldman hewed to the camp of covenantal loyalty first and foremost to the Jewish people, and, by extension, to Israel as a sacred trust. And Lander hewed to the camp of universalist ethics and solidarity with the marginalized.
To call one of those stances worse for Jews than the other ignores the historical truth that both are deeply grounded in American Jewish life. But there is something potentially troubling for Jews about this contest: the evident truth, which it displayed, that the rift between these two schools of American Judaism is widening rather than closing.
That split isn’t really about the state of Israel. It’s a much older argument inside Jewish thought, about whether Jewish ethics point outward or inward first.
The universalist strand understands much of the Hebrew Bible, and centuries of subsequent commentary, as promoting the idea that justice is owed to everyone. It lives by the instruction to remember that we were once strangers in Egypt and the commandment that the same law applies to the stranger as to the native-born. It follows the prophets who reserved their harshest words not for the Jewish people’s enemies, but for that people’s own failures to protect the poor and the powerless.
According to this reading, Jews must practice solidarity with anyone suffering. A Jewish politics that didn’t extend itself to advocating for Palestinians, immigrants, or any other group facing state violence would be failing the tradition rather than honoring it.
The particularist strand reads the same texts and the same history and draws an opposite lesson: that universalism without a prior, unapologetic loyalty to one’s own people is exactly the moral posture that left Jews undefended for most of their history. This strand sees that loyalty as a structural condition that allows Jewish communal survival. To its gaze, a Jewish politics that can’t put Jewish safety first, especially after the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, has lost its way.
What makes the tension between these stances difficult to resolve is that both readings are genuinely supported by the textual and historical record, which is long and varied enough to furnish ammunition for either side without anyone needing to misquote it.
Goldman and Lander didn’t invent this fight. They just gave New York’s most Jewish congressional district a chance to vote on it again, in a fresh context, with the war in Gaza standing in for whatever the live test case happened to be a generation ago — and whatever it will be will be in the next crisis in Jewish history.
That divide is part of why framing progressive victories on New York’s primary night as a loss for Jews flattens something more interesting happening inside NY-10 specifically. This election was a fight between two Jewish candidates, on some of the most Jewish terrain in the entire country, with each offering a fully worked-out theory of how to keep Jews safe, and each able to point to real receipts.
That is not a fight over whether Jews matter in New York politics. It is a fight over which of two coalitions — one anchored to Israel and institutional Jewish groups, and one tied to the multiracial progressive coalition reshaping the city — is the safer harbor for American Jews going forward.
It’s fair to be concerned about how bitter that fight seems to be becoming. But it’s also fair to celebrate the fact that Jewish life can still maintain such rich ideological diversity. This was a constructive political race conducted between Jews, waged substantially in Jewish terms, over which political strategy actually protects Jewish life in a moment when antisemitism is on the rise. It’s arguable that to have the choice between candidates like Goldman and Lander, who take their own Jewishness seriously enough to fight about what it should mean in American politics, is actually very good for the Jews.
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