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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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Three Jewish Men Threatened With Knife in Paris as Antisemitic Attacks Surge
Sign reading “+1000% of Antisemitic Acts: These Are Not Just Numbers” during a march against antisemitism, in Lyon, France, June 25, 2024. Photo: Romain Costaseca / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
Three Jewish men were harassed by a knife-wielding individual in Paris, in the latest antisemitic incident to spark outrage within France’s Jewish community, prompting local authorities to launch a criminal investigation and bolster security amid a rising tide of antisemitism.
On Friday, three Jewish men wearing kippahs were physically threatened with a knife and forced to flee after leaving their Shabbat services near the Trocadéro in southwest Paris’s 16th arrondissement, European Jewish Press reported.
As the victims were leaving a nearby synagogue and walking through the neighborhood, they noticed a man staring at them. The assailant then approached the group and repeatedly asked, “Are you Jews? Are you Israelis?”
When one of them replied “yes,” the man pulled a knife from his pocket and began threatening the group. The victims immediately ran and found police officers nearby. None of the victims were injured.
Local police opened an investigation into acts of violence with a weapon and religiously motivated harassment after all three men filed formal complaints.
Jérémy Redler, mayor of Paris’s 16th arrondissement, publicly condemned the attack, expressing his full support for the victims.
“I will continue to fight relentlessly against antisemitism,” he wrote in a social media post. “Acts of hatred and violence targeting any community have no place in Paris.”
The European Jewish Congress (EJC) also denounced the incident, calling for a swift investigation and stronger action to safeguard Jewish communities amid a surge in antisemitic attacks.
“An attack targeting individuals because of their Jewish identity is unacceptable and incompatible with the values of our democratic societies,” the EJC wrote in a post on X.
“Ensuring that Jews can live, worship and participate fully in public life in safety and dignity must remain a fundamental priority,” the statement said.
The knife threat against three young Jewish men returning from synagogue in Paris is a matter of serious concern.
An attack targeting individuals because of their Jewish identity is unacceptable and incompatible with the values of our democratic societies.
The swift… pic.twitter.com/PsxmP0CeLk
— European Jewish Congress (@eurojewcong) February 9, 2026
Like most countries across Europe and the broader Western world, France has seen a rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
According to the French Interior Ministry, the first six months of 2025 saw more than 640 antisemitic incidents, a 27.5 percent decline from the same period in 2024, but a 112.5 percent increase compared to the first half of 2023, before the Oct. 7 atrocities.
Last week, a Jewish primary school in eastern Paris was vandalized, with windows smashed and security equipment damaged, prompting a criminal investigation and renewed outrage among local Jewish leaders as targeted antisemitic attacks continued to escalate.
Amid a growing climate of hostility toward Jews and Israelis across the country, the French government is facing mounting criticism as the legal system appears to be falling short in addressing antisemitism.
In one of the most recent and controversial cases, a French court tossed out antisemitic-motivated charges against a 55-year-old man convicted of murdering his 89-year-old Jewish neighbor in 2022.
French authorities in Lyon, in southeastern France, acquitted defendant Rachid Kheniche of aggravated murder charges on antisemitic grounds, rejecting the claim that the killing was committed on account of the victim’s religion.
According to French media, the magistrate of the public prosecutor’s office refused to consider the defendant’s prior antisemitic behavior, including online posts spreading hateful content and promoting conspiracy theories about Jews and Israelis, arguing that it was not directly related to the incident itself.
In May 2022, Kheniche threw his neighbor, René Hadjadj, from the 17th floor of his building, an act to which he later admitted.
At the time, Kheniche and his neighbor were having a discussion when the conflict escalated. He told investigators that he had tried to strangle Hadjadj but did not realize what he was doing, as he was experiencing a paranoid episode caused by prior drug use.
After several psychiatric evaluations, the court concluded that the defendant was mentally impaired at the time of the crime, reducing his criminal responsibility and lowering the maximum sentence for murder to 20 years.
In another case last year, the public prosecutor’s office in Nanterre, just west of Paris, appealed a criminal court ruling that cleared a nanny of antisemitism-aggravated charges after she poisoned the food and drinks of the Jewish family she worked for.
Even though the nanny initially denied the charges against her, she later confessed to police that she had poured a soapy lotion into the family’s food as a warning because “they were disrespecting her.”
“They have money and power, so I should never have worked for a Jewish woman — it only brought me trouble,” the nanny told the police. “I knew I could hurt them, but not enough to kill them.”
The French court declined to uphold any antisemitism charges against the defendant, noting that her incriminating statements were made several weeks after the incident and recorded by a police officer without a lawyer present.
In another shocking case last year, a local court in France dramatically reduced the sentence of one of the two teenagers convicted of the brutal gang rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl, citing his “need to prepare for future reintegration.”
More than a year after the attack, the Versailles Court of Appeal retried one of the convicted boys — the only one to challenge his sentence — behind closed doors, ultimately reducing his term from nine to seven years and imposing an educational measure.
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US Judge Orders Carnegie Mellon to Disclose Documents on Qatari Money in Explosive Lawsuit
Students walking on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University on July 15, 2025. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
A US federal judge has ordered Carnegie Mellon University to release documents relating to its $1 billion financial relationship with the government of Qatar, an arrangement which has allegedly led to the country’s purchasing influence over how the school handles antisemitic incidents.
The ruling, issued last week, is the latest development in a lawsuit filed by The Lawfare Project on behalf of a Jewish Israeli student, Yael Canaan, who came forward to accuse one of the Pittsburgh university’s top DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and civil rights officials of being a bystander to a series of antisemitic incidents. She allegedly witnessed a number of the incidents and refused to address them in accordance with antidiscrimination policies which explicitly proscribe racial abuse and harassment.
Canaan originally sought redress for an incident in which Carnie Mellon (CMU) professor Mary-Lou Arscott told her to submit a project which would show “what Jews do to make themselves such a hated group,” according to court documents. Later, the diversity official, who is not named in the filing, allegedly perpetrated illegal wiretapping in an attempted mediation between Arscott and Canaan, recording their conversation without securing the consent of every party who participated in the dialogue.
Carnegie Mellon University is located in Pennsylvania, a “two-party consent state” which proscribes recording conversations without the consent of every participant.
With the DEI official’s knowledge, Arscott allegedly continued to harass Canaan after the mediation by sending her a note which contained a link to an “antisemitic journal.” As the conflict progressed, a gang of CMU faculty piled on, reducing her marks and accusing her of “acting like a victim.” Canaan was also told that no one at CMU would “be an advocate for the Jews,” according to court documents.
Discovery has since revealed that the unnamed DEI official, whose sole responsibility is to protect students like Canaan from harassment and discrimination based on race, ethnic origin, and sex, is receiving a salary partly funded by Qatari money — which The Lawfare Project described as an example of foreign influence interfering with the enforcement of civil rights laws passed by US lawmakers.
Now, a judge has ordered Carnegie Mellon University to turn over a slew of documents “reflecting the full economic benefit received from its Qatari relationship,” a decision The Lawfare Project touted as both a major victory in the case and a dramatic revelation of the consequences of foreign influence in American higher education.
“This case shines a light on a dangerous civil rights conflict hiding in plain sight,” Lawfare Project director Ziporah Reich said in a statement. “Foreign governments with appalling human rights records are funding the very offices meant to protect students’ civil rights. This should alarm every parent, every student, and every policymaker in this country. The court recognized that foreign government funding is not peripheral but potentially central to understanding how civil rights laws are applied on campus.”
She continued, “That acknowledgement opens the door for courts nationwide to examine whether hostile foreign state interests are shaping institutional behavior in ways that undermine US law.”
Carnegie Mellon University — which has not responded to The Algemeiner’s request for comment on this story — is not the only school to be accused of being restrained from taking action on antisemitism by a straitjacket of Qatari money.
Last month, the Middle East Forum (MEF) issued a report titled “Qatar’s Multidimensional Takeover of Georgetown University,” which described how Qatar has allegedly exploited and manipulated Georgetown since 2005 by hooking the school on money that buys influence, promotes Islamism, and degrades the curricula of one of the most recognized names in American higher education.
“The unchecked funds provided by Qatar demonstrate how foreign countries can shape scholarship, faculty recruitment, and teaching in our universities to reflect their preferences,” the report explained. “At Georgetown, courses and research show growing ideological drift toward post-colonial scholarship, anti-Western critiques, and anti-Israel advocacy, with some faculty engaged in political activism related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or anti-Western interventionism.”
Georgetown is hardly the only school to receive Qatari money. Indeed, Qatar is the single largest foreign source of funding to American colleges and universities, according to a recently launched public database from the US Department of Education that reveals the scope of overseas influence in US higher education. Meanwhile, the federal dashboard shows Qatar has provided $6.6 billion in gifts and contracts to US universities, more than any other foreign government or entity. Of the schools that received Qatari money, Cornell University topped the list with $2.3 billion, followed by Carnegie Mellon University ($1 billion), Texas A&M University ($992.8 million), and Georgetown ($971.1 million).
“Qatar has proved highly adept at compromising individuals and institutions with cold hard cash,” MEF Campus Watch director Winfield Myers said in a statement. “But with Georgetown, it found a recipient already eager to do Doha’s bidding to advance Islamist goals at home and abroad. It was a natural fit.”
Another recent MEF report raised concerns about Northwestern University’s Qatar campus (NU-Q), accusing it of having undermined the school’s mission to foster academic excellence by functioning as a “pipeline” for the next generation of a foreign monarchy’s leadership class.
MEF found that 19 percent of NU-Q graduates carry the surnames of “either the Al-Thani family or other elite Qatari families.” Additionally, graduates from the House of Thani, the country’s royal family, are overrepresented in NU-Q by a factor of five despite being only 2 percent of the population.
The report also said that NU-Q uses its immense wealth, which includes a whopping $700 million in funding from Qatar, to influence the Evanston campus in Illinois, Northwestern’s flagship institution.
“Endowed chairs, faculty exchanges, and governance links” reportedly purchase opinions which are palatable to the Qatari elite instead of investments in new NU-Q campus facilities and programs.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Can Manischewitz make matzo ball soup hot again?
Last weekend, I was walking through Lower Manhattan, when I strolled past something confusing. Several women in matching baby blue leggings and puffer coats were dancing to pop music in a small park outside the Soho Apple store, surrounded by ice blocks with something — it was hard to tell what — frozen inside them. As I got closer, I realized that they were handing out some kind of greens-boosted energy drink. The set-up was a made-for-Instagram PR stunt.
The whole point of the event seemed to be to cultivate a cool Manhattanite sheen for the brand. People were taking cans of the beverage, because why not — it was free! No one, however, was hanging out and dancing with the paid promoters, who were dancing conspicuously alone. The drink, which was gross, piled up in nearby municipal trashcans. The whole thing left a sour taste in my mouth, and not just from the fake sweetener in the beverage. Do these stunts sell energy drinks? Do they sell anything at all?
These questions were front of mind when I showed up at an art exhibit at a gallery on the Lower East Side. The art show was called SOUP, and it was hosted by Manischewitz to mark the launch of, yes, a line of jarred soups.
When I walked in, there was a solid crowd mingling in the gallery. Photos from Manischewitz’s newest ad campaign from Ohad Romano — a delightfully campy set of family photos featuring, of course, jars of soup — hung on one wall, opposite the soup-free work of two other Jewish artists, psychedelic scenes by Dan Weinstein and colorful objects from Rosemarie Gleiser.
Orange-aproned waiters passed around teacups full of soup and a bartender made gin and tonics featuring Cel-Ray and spritzes with Manischewitz wine. (The wine is owned by a different company than the food products, so was unrelated to the event.) There was a line in the back room to get Manischewitz-themed patches sewn onto Manischewitz-branded hats. A baby on a woman’s hip giggled. A man in a sharp suit, cravat and kippah laughed with a group of friends as they all sipped chicken soup with matzo ball floaters.
But what did any of it have to do with actually selling soup?
Talia Sabag, a marketing manager at Manischewitz, told me that the art show was part of the rebrand that the company has been rolling out over the past few years. Their boxes of matzo went from a bookish off-white to a bright orange, with scribbled illustrations of little figures carrying bowls of soup across the box that look like they should have walked out of the Jewish Almanac. The company told The New York Times, in 2024, that the rebranding effort was to refresh the brand, but also to target a new base of “culturally curious” consumers. In short, they wanted to sell kosher products to everyone, not just Jews.
Nearly everyone at the art show’s opening, however, seemed to be Jewish. More relevantly, the show was only planned to be up for six days.
While I sipped my teacup of soup, I asked Sabag what the show was meant to achieve for the brand. At first, she stuck to the message, arguing that the show was exactly what it said it was: an art show about soup.
“We want to celebrate the interwoven ways cuisine plays a role in communicating Jewish culture to ourselves and to the world,” she said with a bright smile, all symbolized by “the warmth of soup!”
Eventually, though, we got down to it: “A lot of studies do show that Gen Z does buy products based on that coolness factor,” Sabag told me. (She mentioned Nutter Butter as an example; the cookie started posting surreal, apocalyptic memes and saw their sales spike as a result.) In the words of the Gen Z buyers the brand is trying to attract, the art show is aura farming.
But is it possible to make Manischewitz cool? The brand is so iconic, so central to American Judaism, that it almost feels like asking whether it’s possible to make Judaism itself cool. Whether or not Judaism needs help in that arena is an open question, but plenty of people and brands have been trying to boost its coolness factor, whether it’s handbag designer Susan Alexandra’s glitzy launch party for her line of Judaica or the transgressive Bushwick burlesque show, Sinner’s Shabbat.
“We want to open up the conversation to the younger generations of course,” Sabag said. “But we’re not neglecting our core audience: our bubbes.” That means balancing nostalgia and hipness.
It’s almost impossible to purposefully construct coolness; by its nature, it resists trying. Usually, trying to be cool can only backfire, like the event with the energy drink dancers.
But I have to admit: The art show was kind of cool. It nailed its aesthetic, embracing the absurdity and surrealism of a moment in which a historic, grandmotherly brand like Manischewitz would be running an aura farming event, tonally a perfect fit for an irony-pilled era. Yet it also took itself seriously in the right ways; it was, ultimately, an actual art show with Jewish artists’ work in a neighborhood with deep Jewish roots, serving historic Jewish food. It felt genuine and rooted even as it was irreverent. Every detail was thoughtful. The drinks were actually good. The soup was exactly the same as ever.
The truth is, Manischewitz’s rebrand is cool because Manischewitz has always been cool. So has Judaism.
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