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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 latest victim of the culture war over Israel is a leftwing, lapsed Catholic Bible scholar
The flames of cultural boycott of all things Israeli, Zionist and/or Jewish continue to spread across the European continent.
Yesterday, leftwing Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid was prevented from serving on the jury at next month’s international film festival in Marseilles. Though Lapid has loudly denounced the “genocide” in Gaza, his crime — apart from being an Israeli who nevertheless lives and works in France — was that 10% of his most recent film Oui was financed by an Israeli source. (The irony is that the European Union, which Lapid first approached for the financing, refused on the grounds that the film was too anti-Israeli.)
Today, though, the latest victim is neither Israeli nor Jewish. Instead, he is a 76-year-old lapsed Catholic and equally lapsed leftwing extremist who also happens to be one of Italy’s most revered novelists, columnists and translators: Erri De Luca. Once again, it is not just hypocrisy that abounds in this affair, but also irony.
As a student during the anni di piombo, or “years of lead” — the grim period, stretching from the mid-1960s to late-1970s, when Italy was convulsed by political and social turmoil — De Luca became a leading figure in Lotta Continua, one of the militant ultra-leftwing groups. Upon quitting the movement, De Luca also quit the public scene, taking a series of blue-collar jobs, whether as plasterer or construction worker.
By the time De Luca reached his 40s, he also took to writing and has amassed an oeuvre of several dozen books that range across genres and have been translated into several languages; remarkably, he also taught himself ancient Hebrew in the 1980s, while working with a Catholic charity in Africa. It was there that De Luca began to read the one book he found in his room, a copy of the Bible. Fascinated, he acquired three different Hebrew-Italian dictionaries and began to translate the texts on his own. Forty years later, he continues this labor of love, recently publishing his own interpretation of Genesis.
Alessandro Carrera — a friend and colleague who is also a wildly prolific and prominent writer in Italy — told me that De Luca’s approach to the Hebrew Bible “follows Walter Benjamin’s suggestion to translate the Bible as literally as possible, yet without De Luca knowing Benjamin’s essay on translation.” (When I asked Alessandro how he knew this, he replied “I know that because I asked him.”) But why his fascination with the Bible? De Luca told an interviewer for the French newspaper Libération that he wanted to grasp “this language which had taken upon itself the weight of the first monotheistic religion.”
This attachment to the Bible, as unwavering as it is unideological, has had perverse and predictable consequences in our current era of sheer thoughtlessness. Last month, De Luca gave a long interview in Rome to Omer Lachmanovtich, the editor-in-chief of the Israeli daily Israel Hayom. The occasion was his upcoming appearance at the International Writers’ Festival in Jerusalem. Over the course of the conversation, De Luca addressed the war in Gaza and the wasteland wrought by the Israeli military. Yet he refused to describe it as genocide. “Applying it to the war in Gaza is a historical and verbal distortion,” De Luca insisted. “What took place in Gaza is a brutal, modern war, in which the number of civilian casualties is enormous and horrifying because when fighting takes place inside a dense urban space, among schools and hospitals, the population will always pay the highest price.”
Of course, genocide scholars like Omer Bartov disagree, insisting the term is historically, semantically, and legally appropriate. Other critics take issue with De Luca’s understanding of the term “Zionist.” It is difficult to argue with his observation that “in Italy, and in large parts of the West today, ‘Zionist’ is a curse and an insult thrown at you to mark the boundaries of what is beyond the pale.” But it is far easier to take exception to De Luca’s definition of Zionism as “the simplest and most basic recognition of the Jews’ right to a national home, to existential and necessary defense.” This claim, the Italian writer Cinzia Sciuto remarked, suggests that De Luca is referring “to a reality, a Zionism of the kibbutz, that disappeared decades ago.”
Nevertheless, De Luca holds fast to his conviction, declaring that “I will say it out loud, and I do not care about the price.” The price appears to be a creeping banishment from Italy’s cultural scene. Earlier this month, De Luca’s invitation to speak at a literary festival in Salerno this summer was withdrawn by its directors. My friend Alessandro, who criticized this decision, suggested the festival directors feared a boycott by other writers or disturbances in the audience. “I am quite sure that a lot of people were ready to boo him and maybe force him to leave the stage,” he added, “but I don’t think that anything worse was going to happen.”
No doubt. But perhaps something worse in a different register is happening — namely, losing sight of what De Luca insists upon seeing: the humanity of our fellow men and women. Reflecting on a recent two-week experience on a Médecins Sans Frontières ship darting from one raft to another, all sagging under the weight of refugees desperate for new lives, De Luca writes that the experience had branded him with a single image: “a rope ladder trolling in the void.”
It was on the final step of this ladder that, “one by one, I saw faces pop up, the people climbing from the edge of the abyss to their salvation. Those hundreds of faces: I don’t have the force to hold them back. I’ve simply had the absurd privilege of seeing them. From them I have left only the rope ladder they climbed, half-naked and shoeless, up its wooden rungs.” This experience taught De Luca, who is also a mountain climber, a deeper meaning of the verb “to climb,” one that no peak had ever taught him. It is this way of seeing the world that is paying an even steeper price than a writer’s banishment from a literary conference.
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Antisemitic incidents in Germany remained elevated in 2025, fueled by rise-in far-right cases
(JTA) — BERLIN — The number of annual antisemitic incidents in Germany remains at a high, with right-wing extremism surging, according to a report issued Wednesday by the country’s leading antisemitism watchdog.
An average of 24 antisemitic incidents per day were reported in Germany in 2025, totaling 8,725, about the same as in 2024, according to the report from the Federal Association of Departments for Research and Information on Antisemitism, a nonprofit that is known by its German acronym RIAS. The total has been consistently high since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, according to the group.
“These are not statistical outliers; it is the grim reality in Germany,” Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said at a press conference in Berlin announcing the annual tally.
The numbers reflect a concrete impact on Jews in Germany, said RIAS executive director Benjamin Steinitz, who coauthored the report with researcher Bianca Loy. They urged continued funding for programs to report incidents and additional help for victims.
Many documented cases occurred in everyday settings, RIAS reported: In Kehl, four members of the Jewish community were insulted and spat on outside a Jewish prayer room. In Hesse, a rabbi was shoved in a supermarket in front of his children and had his cell phone snatched from him. According to RIAS, the victims in these incidents were blamed for Israeli actions.
But it was incidents with a right-wing extremist background that shot up most, amounting to 807, up from 562 in 2024 – the highest figure since nationwide surveys began in 2020. They outnumbered incidents of a left-wing imperialist (501) and Islamist extremist (166) background.
Right-wing incidents included conspiracy theories, glorification of the Nazi regime, and calls for a repeat of the Holocaust. The incidents also have become more openly violent, researchers said.
For example, a right-wing extremist group in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania shouted “Jews to the wall” on a bus, mocked the Holocaust and threatened refugees as well as passengers who intervened.
The release of the 2025 antisemitism tally came the same day as a new poll finding a best-ever standing among voters for the far-right party Alternative for Germany. The party’s rhetoric, which includes nativism and calling to move on from the shadow of the Holocaust, has ignited allegations of antisemitism from leading Jewish voices in Germany, even as the party and its defenders say its policies are ideal to keep Jews safe.
The RIAS report found that the internet continued to be a major platform for antisemitism: More than a quarter of all antisemitic incidents (2,314 incidents, or 27%) occurred online, including nearly 43% of documented threats, including death threats. It cited as an example messages received by a Jewish woman that included an image of a Zyklon B canister with the comment “Still in stock.” Zyklon B was the chemical the Nazis used to asphyxiate victims in gas chambers.
Four cases of extreme violence were reported, including a knife attack in February 2025 at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. The victim, who was Spanish, was saved by an emergency doctor. The perpetrator was sentenced to 13 years in prison in March.
In a recent interview with Deutsche Welle, Schuster said Jewish community members in major cities have told him they worry “about appearing in public as visibly Jewish — for instance, by wearing a kippah or a Star of David as jewelry.” He said the concern is not as acute in less populous areas.
RIAS — which subscribes to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism — attributes more than two-thirds of the incidents (68%, or 5,916 cases) last year to Israel-related antisemitism.
Anti-Israel gatherings continued to be major hubs for antisemitic incidents, though the total number of such gatherings dropped slightly to 1,210 (from 1,358 the previous year), according to the report. There was also a drop in incidents at Islamic/Islamist gatherings, to 43 in 2025, down from 58 in 2024.
On the other hand, the number of incidents at gatherings had risen within left-wing extremist circles, from 131 in 2024 to 214 last year; and in the right-wing extremist camp, 96 incidents at gatherings were reported — nearly double that of 2024.
RIAS has rejected criticism by Diaspora Alliance, an international group that addresses antisemitism from a progressive stance, that its data overemphasizes Israel-related antisemitism and underestimates far-right incidents.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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The manosphere says women owe their husbands sex — Judaism says the opposite
The poll posted by writer Emily May on X asked: “Married women, have you ever said yes to sex because you didn’t want to deal with his moodiness if you said no?”
Over 5,000 people responded. The majority — 72% — were men, despite the fact that the question was directed at married women. Manosphere influencers, including self-proclaimed misogynist and antisemite Andrew Tate, jumped in to use the post as a proof that women use sex to manipulate men, and generally denigrate any woman who turns a man down. Gendered ideas of marriage and sexual drive — that men need sex physically, that women want to “trap” men into marriage — percolate constantly in manosphere and incel circles, and May’s posts sent the internet into a predictable tizzy.
The question of sex within marriage — how often to have it, whether it requires consent, and whether women owe it to their husbands — has been a matter of debate for, arguably, centuries. Marital rape wasn’t outlawed in all 50 states until 1993. The U.S. imported British common law, in which, as 17th century English jurist Matthew Hale put it, a “husband cannot be guilty of a rape” because marriage means that “the wife hath given up herself in this kind to her husband which she cannot retract.” In short, a wife cannot turn down her husband.
Marital rape is illegal in the U.S. in the contemporary era, but the presumptions that women owe their husband sex have continued. And undergirding all of these assumptions in many of the discussions is a Christian idea of marriage and sex.
In Christian subreddits, people discuss the idea that, in marriage, the two become one flesh, and the women must submit to their husbands, concluding that this means the woman cannot refuse the man as her body belongs to him. They cite First Corinthians 7:4-5, which says a couple cannot “deprive” the other except by mutual agreement to abstain for prayer, and that the “wife’s body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband.”
It says the same of the husband’s body, though few commenters note this line. But in Judaism, this is in fact the main focus. While both religions agree that sex is a fundamental part of marriage, the emphasis in Judaism is not that the wife owes it to her husband. Instead, it’s that a husband owes it to his wife. Within limits.
The Talmud is very specific on those limits. First of all, there are the menstrual purity laws, which forbid sex during menstruation as well as for seven days after the bleeding has stopped, which means that for about two weeks out of the month, observant couples are forbidden from having sex.
More to the point of the current debate, the Talmud — in the Ketubot tractate, dealing with the laws of marriage — also speaks very explicitly to the realities of life: That people get tired, exhausted and aren’t in the mood for intimacy. Still, it says, there are limits on the excuses. And these relate to exactly how taxing one’s job and daily duties are.
The rules are as follows: A man who is unemployed must offer his wife sex every day, because there is nothing exhausting him. Workers or laborers must be available twice a week if they work in the city in which they live. Donkey drivers — e.g. those whose work requires traveling shorter distances — are obligated to offer once a week, while camel drivers, who must travel long distances, must return home and offer their wives sex at least once a month. Sailors must return home to do the same every six months. And students of the Torah may leave home to study for up to 30 days — but they must then spend a full month at home with their wife.
In each of these cases, the wife isn’t obligated to accept any offer of sex; in fact, the wife can give permission for her husband to be gone longer — perhaps to take a job in another city to support the family, which would result in less sex. But she can also demand he stay closer to home so he can fulfill his conjugal duties. Sex is her right, not her obligation.
Her pleasure is also the focus. Men are instructed to court their wives, not simply rush to sex — to learn from “the rooster, which first cajoles the hen and then mates with it.” In tractate Eruvim, a man is not only explicitly forbidden from having sex with his wife without her consent, but also from doing so in any way that causes her discomfort, emotional or physical — e.g. pushing for her consent or making her unhappy, or even having sex that isn’t pleasurable for her.
What is clear from all of the writing is that the presumption of the rabbis is that it is more likely that the man, for reasons of exhaustion or work or even another wife, might avoid having sex with a desiring woman. This isn’t to say that Jewish text is perfect in its conception of women; there are, of course, plenty of other problematic, less empowering ideas about women in Jewish text. A man has a right to divorce his wife, for example, for all kinds of reasons, including spoiling his dinner, while she cannot divorce him. Still, it’s fascinating that the Jewish approach to sex and gender turns the common gender expectations around sex in modern Western society upside-down.
Today, the dominant stereotypes presume men are horny and desirous at all times, and women are far less sexual. Those are not neutral ideas; just looking at the discourse raging online right now, it’s clear those presumptions drive a lot of misogynistic hate, like the idea that women would only use sex as a way to entrap men. People take these gendered beliefs about sex as though they’re unassailable truisms about the world.
But they’re clearly not; for millennia, Jewish culture has believed the opposite. The reality is nothing is so clearcut, and different people of any gender have different relationships to sex, and different libidos. The internet isn’t a great place for that kind of nuance, but maybe — just maybe — if people realized their conclusions aren’t as foundational, or as God-given, as they thought, they might reexamine their assumptions.
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