Why do we do this anyway: klezmer as Jewish youth subculture

Judaism, Wntr, 1998 by Alicia Svigals

I'm not going to try to cover all the reasons people have been drawn to klezmer, so I'm not going to talk, for example, about the fact that many musicians and listeners, both Jewish and non-Jewish, take a purely musical interest in the genre; what I'm addressing here specifically is the role of the revival in the American Jewish cultural scene.

Since the social upheavals and the ethnic-identity or "roots" movements of the 1960s and '70s, American Jews, especially young American Jews, have been looking for new ways to negotiate our Jewishness in America. Three movements in particular have emerged which address the needs of Jews who reject the assimilationist model of the previous generation, but who haven't felt an affinity for, or haven't felt satisfied by, the Israel-centered alternative, and who want to create a new, strong sense of Jewish identity and community. I'm going to try to situate the klezmer revival within the framework of these three movements.

The first two are made up of Jews who identify with the progressive left. These are people who are looking for a way of being Jewish that is consonant with their feminist, gay-positive, and other new-left values, and that does away with the social strictures of the past: that is, a way of being Jewish while still being themselves. But they come at the problem from two very different directions.

The Havurah/Jewish Renewal approach locates the social conservatism of the traditional Jewish word in traditional Jewish culture. It selectively revives religious observance, but leaves out the traditional overtones which evoke an old-fashioned and restrictive way of life. This model conceives of religion as timeless spirituality and seeks to distill it from the culture to create a new kind of religion-centered Jewishness. Jewish Renewal folks have modified the liturgy to reflect their progressive and feminist world view, and have sometimes drawn on non-Jewish sources, such as eastern religions and New Age concepts, in reworking religious material. The result is Judaism without much Yiddishkeit.

The cultural secularist model, which I'll call Yiddishism, on the other hand, locates the conservatism of traditional Judaism in the religion. It looks to Ashkenazic Yiddish culture as the source of a rich Jewish identity and proposes to salvage that culture - its language, literature, and most importantly for our purposes, its music - but for the most part discards religious observance.

These two movements clearly have their antecedents in Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism and in YIVO and Workmen's Circle Yiddishism, but the advent of the new left, ethnic consciousness, and identity politics has put a whole new spin on those old ideas.

Finally, there's the traditionalist model of the Ba'al T'shuvah movements, which embraces both the culture and religion of the past unabashedly as a source of identity and community, without concern for the issues with which Jewish Renewal and secular cultural Jews are grappling.

Of these three movements - the one that discards the culture and keeps the religion, the one that discards the religion and keeps the culture, and the one that uncritically embraces both - I would argue that the klezmer revival has been the province of the second, of the "cultural Jews." of course, the audience for klezmer isn't limited to that group - in fact, it has a wide appeal for all kinds of Jews, not to mention plenty of non-Jews. But there's a special relationship between the klezmer revival and the secular Yiddishist movement which I want to explore here.

In fact, all three of these movements have inspired or embraced a whole range of new Jewish music, not just klezmer. The Jewish Renewal movement, for example, is associated with singer Debbie Friedman, whose songs are a perfect musical reflection of the Jewish Renewal philosophy: she sets religious texts, modified to reflect a feminist sensibility, to beautiful, spiritual melodies which for the most part draw on an American popular music vocabulary. Some of her songs have an Israeli flavor, but none of them are in an Eastern European Jewish idiom. Her songs are included in the liturgies of so many congregations, by the way, that many people now think of them as "traditional."

Then there are such artists as the orthodox Piementa brothers, whose music is an unselfconscious and spirited amalgam of anything and everything that appeals to them, from orthodox Jewish melodies to jazz, rock, and middle eastern pop, all in the service of a religious message which appeals to a modem orthodox, Ba'al T'shuvah and Hasidic following.

But the klezmer revival has been the most vibrant and active Jewish music scene to emerge in decades, and it has provided the musical soundtrack for the construction of a whole new progressive, secular, Yiddishist youth culture. Its origins in the late '70s can be found in the confluence of the larger American "roots" and folk music movements, "folk music" being the musical department of the alternative youth scene at that time. The musicians who initiated the klezmer revival to a large extent started out playing bluegrass, old-timey, and other American traditional music genres, and these musicians jumped at the chance to have their very own folk music (as in the famous story about Kapelye's Henry Sapoznik and his watershed conversation with elderly old-timey fiddler Tommy Jarrell, who prompted the start of Henry's klezmer journey when he asked, "Don't you people have none of your own music?"). The musical renaissance has gone hand in hand with a Yiddish language and literature "roots" revival, comprising such phenomena as the growth and success of Klezkamp and the other campus which it has inspired, the National Yiddish Book Center, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research's summer Yiddish course, and the new Yiddish language programs at colleges across the country. This rekindled interest in Eastern European Jewish culture and the Yiddish language, which began for many as an extracurricular activity, has since turned into the cornerstone of a new Jewish identity. Klezkamp, for example, which has been the fertile crescent of the Yiddishist and klezmer renaissance for over a decade, was given a name twelve years ago which had a recreational connotation ("camp"). On the other hand, Ashkenaz, a Yiddish culture festival of more recent vintage, goes by a name that implies a nation, an ideology, a way of life. And as the participants in this renaissance have gained more cultural literacy and confidence, they've shifted their focus from study and imitation to the creation of new works of music and literature that draw on traditional material. (Ashkenaz bills itself, in fact, as a New Yiddish Culture festival and invites artists to present new works.)