In his excellent afterword to this collection, Judah Cohen provocatively asks: ‘Given the relatively finite number of people who factor into these conversations, how much more can be said? Another book on Jewish popular music, it might seem, could hardly add to the conversation’ (p. 241). Certainly, with contributions on artists whose Jewishness has been extensively discussed, such as Irving Berlin, Phil Spector and Barbara Streisand, at first sight some of this collection would seem to cover well-worn territory.
However, by placing chapters on Jews and popular music in the USA alongside chapters on their South American analogues, the context of these studies becomes subtly altered. This isn't just because the Argentinian and Brazilian artists discussed are often much less well known globally than American ones, but also because a ‘hemispheric’ focus enables – potentially at least – a destabilisation of the sometimes inward-looking perspective that dominates discussions of Jews, popular music and the USA. As Cohen argues: ‘By adding Jewishness to [the] multidimensional North–South topography, existing histories of political upheaval, activism, population movement, and zealous diplomacy gain new veins of inquiry’ (p. 241). Or, to put it another way, by considering North and South American Jewish popular music together, we might be able to re-position Jewish music in the Diaspora communities of the Americas into a more fluid notion of Diaspora.
The advantages of this approach are most obvious in the chapters in the collection that deal directly with music and musicians that ‘move’, either symbolically or literally. Nili Belkind argues, in her chapter on the Cuban-Jewish-American artist Roberto Juan Rodriguez, who has made a career of collaborating with musicians in multiple cultures, that his biography is ‘a story that demonstrates the affinitive convergence of multiple experiences of dislocation, immigration, and exile’ (p. 123). Similarly, Lilian Whol's chapter on the Argentinian-Jewish musician Simja Dujov is an excellent case study of the unstable eclecticism of artists that see their own background as the jumping off-point for global musical adventures: ‘In France, he and his band are “Latin American”; in the USA, his music is received more often as “Jewish”; in New York City, they play in hipster bars where the public is mostly Latino/a, and in Austin, the listeners are more of the “Jewish-vibe” type. In Canada, Dujov's music is somewhere between “World” and “Jewish” music, and in Chile it is more of the “Latin Gipsy-vibe.” Around the world, everyone receives him a little differently’ (p. 185).
This movement can, of course, be a symbolic one that leads to all kinds of affective investments that allow Jews, and others, to identify themselves musically with other lands. Benjamin Lapidus's contribution on Larry Harlow and the Jewish involvement in ‘Latin’ music in the USA, demonstrates the deep Jewish involvement in the popularisation of this music in the post-war period. More than that, Lapidus claims that not only has Latin music become ‘an integral part of Jewish culture in New York City and its surrounding areas’ (p. 120); he goes further to argue that ‘there has been a profound transformative interplay between these two cultures, one that continues to take on new forms and meanings as it continues to evolve’ (ibid.). There are some troubling questions here regarding appropriation that are also raised in Uri Dorchin's chapter on Jewish American rappers. Examining the case of Drake, an African-American rapper with a Jewish background, Dorchin shows how the coding of Jews as ‘white’ and the concomitant problematics of Jewish hip-hop, has lead the artist to foreground his black identity, albeit without actively denying his Jewish background. In contrast, Ari Katorza's contribution on Leiber and Stoller and Phil Spector offers a reading of the earlier, postwar, period of ‘Black–Jewish alliance’ in which Jewish songwriters and producers, rather than (as is sometimes claimed) appropriating and ‘whitening’ black music, facilitated ‘a general hegemonic struggle that enlarged and diversified America's monolithic WASP culture during the 1960s’ (p. 78).
Yet even where Jewish popular musicians and music do not so obviously travel and confront the complex racialised and globalised economies of signs, space and power, there is much in this collection to remind us of the more subtle ways in which Jews and music can rarely be reduced to ethnic enclaves. Abigail Wood, in her chapter on Yiddish song in North America, emphasises the constantly creative ways in which Yiddish music has dialogued with the vanished Jewish past in the light of a constantly shifting present. The various chapters on the popular music history of Argentinian and Brazilian Jewry unearth both figures that are obscure to many in the region (Jewish or not) nd others that are better known, but what most of them have in common is a complex relationship between their Jewishness and their contributions to local musical culture. Not everyone discussed in this book is globally or even locally renowned, but few are truly parochial.
It is, however, this determined attempt to show how Jewish popular music is not simply an internal matter for siloed Jewish communities that is the book's most significant limitation. The study of Jews and popular music has concentrated, with some exceptions, on those artists and scenes that cannot be easily or simply reduced to Jews and Jewishness alone. That has often meant a fascination – shared in much although not all of this book – with the more subtle, even subterranean, ways in which Jewishness marks the careers of those who do not evoke Jewishness directly and openly in their work. While this tendency has opened up the manifold ways in which Jews are embedded in the world, it has frequently elided the more parochial forms of Jewish music – produced for Jews alone, in or for Jewish institutions, in unambiguously overtly Jewish ways. Unlike Christian popular music, where there has been sustained scholarly attention paid to the popular music produced in institutionally Christian settings for Christians, the Jewish equivalents have not received that much attention.
The two contributions to this collection that do discuss this kind of Jewish popular music are instructive. Edwin Seroussi's chapter on the music of US Jews from Islamic countries emphasises how its obscurity – deriving in part from the ignoring of Jews from this background in the USA – has pushed it to the margins of US culture, which largely means synagogues. It is ironic indeed that the restriction of Jewish music to the most Jewish of institutions is a sign of its weakness.
Judah Cohen's afterword discusses a performance by an orthodox Jewish group called The Maccabeats, who are well known across the Jewish world but unknown outside, hosted by the local Jewish community on the Caribbean island of St Thomas. The ‘local’ community is largely made up of expatriates, led by the US ultra-orthodox Habad sect (which sees as its mission the outreach to non-orthodox Jews throughout the world), and the group are from the USA's Yeshiva University. Here then is a fascinating ethnographic case of a moment that is simultaneously highly parochial and internally focused, and yet is also situated on the intersection of diverse global flows. It is an important reminder, therefore, that music cannot help but be in motion, even when it is made and consumed for parochial purposes.
