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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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SoCal rabbi charged with murder in Costco gas station incident
A Chabad-affiliated rabbi has been charged with murder in the death of a man in the parking lot of a Costco store near Los Angeles.
The Ventura County Sheriff’s department says Rabbi Abba Bryski, 35, struck a man with his car by the pumps of a Costco gas station last Tuesday night in Camarillo, about 50 miles northwest of Los Angeles. Bryski was arrested at the scene.
The victim, identified as Nicholas Lang, 28, was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.
Bryski’s father, Rabbi Moshe Bryski, is executive director of Chabad of the Conejo, a network of several synagogues in the West San Fernando Valley that includes locations in Agoura Hills, Calabasas and Thousand Oaks.
Rabbi Moshe Bryski did not respond to an inquiry.
Abba Bryski will be arraigned Monday on felony charges of murder and use of a deadly weapon and a misdemeanor charge of resisting arrest.
The incident happened just before 9 p.m. when Lang was reportedly painting the lot. Local news footage showed yellow paint splattered on the ground and on Bryski’s white sedan.
The Costco store does not open until Oct. 30, though the gas station opened in advance.
A police report from Bryski’s arrest says he is a rabbi and educator, though it is unclear where he teaches. Chabad of the Conejo does not list Abba Bryski on its website.
Chabad of the Conejo has served the West Valley for decades. A 2014 article that quotes Abba Bryski saying its various Jewish learning programs had then taught over 3,000 students dating back to the 1990s.
A 2018 photo published by the Thousand Oaks Acorn, a local news site, shows Moshe and Abba Bryski together at the dedication of a Torah scroll.
Bryski’s initial court appearance was scheduled for last Thursday, but was continued twice for reasons that are unclear.
The post SoCal rabbi charged with murder in Costco gas station incident appeared first on The Forward.
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Planned auction of a Holocaust-era Torah fragment sparked outcry, then intervention
(JTA) — A Torah scroll fragment believed to have been used as parcel paper by Nazi SS soldiers is expected to be donated to a US Holocaust remembrance organization after a Norwegian auction house listed it for sale last week, sparking an outcry.
A spokesperson for Israel’s Foreign Ministry told JTA that Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar had directed the ministry and Israel’s embassy in Norway to intervene to prevent the sale of “a sacred manuscript looted by the Nazis.”
“Thanks to the embassy’s efforts, the auction was canceled and the parchment will be donated to a Holocaust remembrance organization in the United States,” the spokesperson said.
The Torah fragment is expected to go to Remember Us The Holocaust (RUTH), a San Diego Holocaust remembrance organization working to establish a permanent museum. In a statement sent to JTA, RUTH said it had worked over 48 hours to “secure the fragment for preservation” and Holocaust education.
The organization also enlisted Adolfo Roitman, the former curator of the Dead Sea Scrolls and head of the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, to advise on its “appropriate treatment and respectful exhibition,” the statement said.
Moisés Salinas Fleitman, RUTH’s executive director, told JTA that the donation had been confirmed by email last Tuesday but had not yet been finalized. He said there was “no expert confirmation as of yet of the provenance of the scroll,” and that the consignor had told RUTH the parchment was “found on a public market in Poland” over three decades ago. RUTH had not yet inspected the fragment or any evidence supporting that account, he added.
Salinas Fleitman said his understanding was that the fragment had been withdrawn from the auction, but RUTH could not confirm what had happened amid conflicting news reports. The organization also declined to identify the person in possession of the fragment, citing its policy of protecting anonymous donors. RUTH’s procedures for verifying authenticity and legitimate provenance take time, the organization said, adding that the organization would not accept the fragment unless both could be established.
The controversy began when the fragment was put up for auction Oct.18 by Oslo-based Valkyrie Historical Auctions, an online auction house specializing in Third Reich memorabilia.
The handwritten calfskin parchment, estimated to fetch between $1,500 and $2,000, was advertised as a “sad and powerful symbol” of the destruction of European Jewish life.
Valkyrie identifies its president as Norbert Podlesny, a historian and author of a trilogy on the Holocaust. The auction house says its items are examined by experts and carry a lifetime guarantee of authenticity. Neither Valkyrie nor Podlesny responded to repeated inquiries from JTA.
The auction house’s original listing explicitly described it as having been plundered by SS soldiers during the Holocaust, an account its representative subsequently disputed in comments to a Norwegian newspaper. The parchment was also described as having been used to wrap a package sent to Germany.
The Valkyrie website recorded a winning bid of $8,500 on the Torah fragment, more than four times the upper estimate for the parchment.
Video footage of the live auction reviewed by JTA shows bidding on the fragment proceeding, with offers rising incrementally. The footage does not establish who placed the bids or whether a transaction was ultimately completed.
Conflicting accounts have left it unclear whether the fragment was formally withdrawn, purchased by the auction house itself or simply withheld from the winning bidder.
Other lots in the same auction included a death certificate for a Polish prisoner at Dachau, a book from the scientific library at Auschwitz, and a dress bearing a yellow Star of David marked “JUIF.”
The controversy went public after the Foreign Ministry condemned the planned sale in a post on X headed “A Nazi celebration in Oslo.”
The ministry also criticized Norway’s proposal to end dedicated funding for school trips to former Nazi concentration camps, with the funding instead transferred to general local government allocations.
“Auctions of sacred texts looted by the Nazis: IN. Visits to extermination camps: OUT,” the ministry wrote.
Gideon Taylor, president of the World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO), said that the auction house had taken steps to remove the fragment from public sale but added that those measures “in no way” resolved the issue.
“There are many unanswered questions,” Taylor told JTA.
He urged Valkyrie to identify the seller, explain how the fragment had been acquired, disclose what provenance information accompanied it and undertake further research into its history. He also questioned why the auction house had agreed to sell the parchment despite its original description as Nazi-looted property.
“There is a profound contradiction in recognizing an object as a symbol of the Holocaust while treating it as something to be bought and sold,” he said.
He said the case exposed a “lack of historical awareness” of how the systematic plunder of Jewish property, both private and communal, formed part of the Nazis’ campaign to annihilate European Jewry.
“This is not simply an antique or a historical curiosity. It is a sacred Jewish object that represents a community’s religious life and the devastating destruction of that life during the Holocaust,” he added.
WJRO has called on the Norwegian government to launch an investigation into the auction house’s handling of the fragment, Taylor said, adding that similar questions had arisen concerning other objects previously sold by it.
Taylor also called for “a coordinated international effort” to tackle the trade in sacred Jewish objects looted during the Holocaust and still held by private collectors.
“This is not about private collections, this is about the memory of the Jewish people,” he said.
Norway is among 35 countries that have endorsed the 2024 Best Practices for the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art. The nonbinding guidelines cover Holocaust-looted religious and communal property, including sacred scrolls, manuscripts and synagogue objects, and recommend returning objects determined to have belonged to Jewish communities to successor communities or institutions. They do not automatically require restitution of an item offered through a private auction.
The dispute follows other controversies over the sale and ownership of Holocaust-era artifacts. Last November, a German auction house canceled a planned sale of more than 600 concentration camp-related objects, including prisoners’ correspondence, identification documents and a yellow Star of David, following protests from Holocaust survivors and Jewish organizations.
Earlier this year, Poland returned 91 Jewish religious objects to Greece, decades after they were seized by the Nazis from synagogues in Thessaloniki. WJRO helped coordinate their restitution following years of research and negotiations.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Planned auction of a Holocaust-era Torah fragment sparked outcry, then intervention appeared first on The Forward.
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People accusing El-Sayed of Muslim Brotherhood ties will accuse Jews of dual loyalty too
Abdul El-Sayed, Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, has said that he has no ties to, and disavows, the Muslim Brotherhood. It does not matter how many times he is asked about this, or how many times he answers, because there will be those who insist that it is a real concern. Their position relies not on reality, but on a deep-rooted idea Jews should recognize: that people who are “other” hold dual loyalties, and that those dual loyalties are a danger to America.
El-Sayed has had ample reason and opportunity to assert his distance from the group, as he has been asked about it over and over again. (The connection to the Muslim Brotherhood specifically seems to be a tweet from El-Sayed’s half-sister saying their mother was once involved with the organization.) He was asked at a town hall earlier this month to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood; he was asked about the Muslim Brotherhood earlier this month on Meet the Press; he was asked about it by Fox News; and he was accused without evidence by his opponent, Republican Mike Rogers, of being “bought” by the Muslim Brotherhood and of being a national security risk in their debate last week. Other Democrats were also asked to weigh in: CNN, for example, asked Sen. Chris Murphy if Democrats were “concerned about this with El-Sayed.”
American Jews should object to this cynical, baseless fearmongering because it is wrong and destructive in and of itself to charge that a person who is Muslim is a threat to national security. American Jews should also recognize it for what it is: a charge of dual loyalty, and one they should speak up against if they do not want similar charges leveled against Jewish politicians. This is true even if they disagree with El-Sayed or do not want to see him win in next week’s midterm elections.
For American Jews, dual loyalty is an old and familiar antisemitic trope. It’s a suspicion and accusation that has followed us around the globe and across decades and says that we can never really be loyal to the country or society in which we find ourselves because we are secretly loyal only to each other or, more recently, to Israel.
American Jews — understandably, given the history of this trope — are attuned to politics that smack of dual loyalty. For example, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro wrote in his book that, when he was being vetted as a potential running mate for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, he was asked if he had ever been an Israeli agent and felt that that was inappropriate. In fact, being asked about loyalty to other countries is a regular occurrence in obtaining a security clearance.
Nevertheless, Shapiro’s alertness to it speaks to the sensitivity American Jews, and particularly politicians, feel around being accused of dual loyalty, especially as Israel becomes a “litmus test” in Democratic party politics. For example, was congressional candidate Scott Weiner chased from a rally for trans rights solely because he had declined to say that Israel committed a genocide in Gaza (before he said they did days later), or was it because he’s Jewish?
And this past weekend, a RebellionPac ad in which a couple can’t buy eggs because, they say, the United States sends money to Israel, concludes with “Mike Rogers is for they/them” — cutting to photos of Israeli politicians — “Abdul El-Sayed is for you,” suggesting that being supportive of Israel is at odds with being supportive of Michigan, which some Jews feel creates a permission structure for antisemitism and suspicion toward Jews.
U.S. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, once again put forth his specific version of the dual loyalty trope, in which to be a true American Jew is to vote for him because he supports Israel, by saying American Jews should be “ashamed of themselves” if they voted for El-Sayed.
It is not enough for American Jews to be against dual loyalty when it is leveled against us. We just need to be against it. Because if you do not want it to be acceptable to cast aspersions regarding a candidate’s race, religion, or ethnicity, and if you do not want there to be different, special, higher bars that candidates need to meet because of their culture or where they pray, then you need to be against that for anyone. Otherwise, you’re accepting it for everyone.
I am not equating Israel with the Muslim Brotherhood, nor am I defending the Muslim Brotherhood. What I am saying is this: If you are offended by the idea that Jews need to prove that we are not first and foremost loyal to Israel, or by the notion that Jews should be punished for perceived connections to Israel, then you should also be offended by what politicians and pundits are demanding of El-Sayed. You should do this not only because not doing so is hypocritical (though we, as a nation, seem long past the point of hypocrisy mattering), but because the more comfortable we are having charges of dual loyalty in our politics, the more comfortable we are having charges of dual loyalty in our politics for everyone, including Jewish candidates.
I made a similar point last week on X (formerly Twitter) and was promptly accused of hating myself and Jews, loving the Muslim Brotherhood, and having my priorities wrong. In one response to my post, which read, “You don’t get a more tolerant, accepting, pluralistic, liberal country by accusing people of another religion of inherently hating and being disloyal to it and you, it is simply not going to work,” someone wrote, “I don’t want a more tolerant society you stupid twat, I want my kids to be safe at Jewish day school and I don’t want 24/7 security at shul.”
What I found most fascinating about this person’s reply was the idea that Jewish institutions could be safe in the United States, where we are a small minority, without ours being a tolerant society. That struck me as almost as fanciful as thinking that we could allow charges of dual loyalty for Muslim candidates and then turn around and ask that Jewish candidates not have to face dual loyalty accusations or special extra litmus tests.
Much as a society in which antisemitic conspiracy theories are allowed to flourish is ultimately a more conspiratorial, paranoid, and less trusting place for everyone, a polity where candidates are regularly charged with dual loyalty or disloyalty on the basis of their religion or ethnicity is just that — a political discourse where charges of dual loyalty are leveled against ethnic and religious minorities. We don’t get to choose against whom dual loyalty cards are played. We only get to choose whether we think it’s acceptable to play them at all.
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