As Jonathan Karp and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett note in the introduction to their seminal 2008 volume, The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times, “Much remains to be done if the arts are to figure more fully in Jewish studies and the Jewish experience more fully in the arts disciplines” (1). More specifically, within Jewish studies, Jewish music has recently been caught in the crossfire between the field's desire for scholarship compatible with its priorities (books and articles on contemporary American synagogue music or Israeli pop, for example) and the priorities of the many Jewish music scholars and activists who write about musical traditions that tend to resonate more outside the Jewish community. Throw in the landscape posed by the proliferation of such confusing buzzwords as “Ashkenormativity,” and “postethnicity” (both regularly used in reference to east European Jewish culture), and those trying to figure out how to integrate the study of east European Jewish music into their curricula have been more likely to give up than to forge ahead through the increasingly foggy landscape.

The recent publication of Walter Zev Feldman's Klezmer: Music, History and Memory gives those working in the field of Jewish studies an excellent opportunity to reassess their relationship with east European and other global Jewish ethnic musical traditions. Feldman, a multilingual scholar and virtuosic performer who spearheaded the reemergence of the tsimbl (the Jewish hammered dulcimer), is also profoundly respected for his work as a teacher of east European Jewish dance and universally acknowledged as originator of the English-language term “klezmer music” in the early 1980s, using it to specifically identify the virtuosic practice of east and central European professional folk instrumentalists who performed at Jewish celebrations.

Feldman has long been considered the preeminent scholar in a field that has spawned numerous monographs in the era of klezmer's resurgence. Oddly, before Mark Slobin's pioneering work in the early 1980s, almost no English-language scholarship existed on the topic at all, despite the extraordinary musical accomplishments of its practitioners and klezmer music's ubiquitous position at Jewish celebrations for many hundreds of years in Europe and in the Americas in the first half of the twentieth century. Until this book's appearance, the available literature on klezmer had focused primarily on the music's American incarnation and on the sociological implications of the recent (now over forty-year-old) klezmer resurgence, mainly zeroing in on New York's downtown scene and the bustling klezmer world of contemporary Europe. By positioning klezmer music as a significant component of a tightly interconnected European Jewish system that includes the world of Jewish prayer, hasidic gesture, Yiddish folksong, Yiddish literature, Jewish dance, Jewish-themed visual arts, and coterritorial revelry, Feldman offers a compelling argument for a total reassessment of the value of the klezmer genre as a major conduit of nonverbal cultural memory for Ashkenazic Jews.

Feldman devotes over two hundred pages of this volume to providing support for that argument, including chapters where we learn about talmudic study gesture as dance gesture; read richly ethnographic descriptions of Jewish dancing and music making culled from Yiddish literature; and learn about how Jews and their coterritorial neighbors interacted in constructing a culture that is arguably the most uniquely “Jewish” of any that ever emerged in the Diaspora. We read about a Jewish society whose members were bound together by shared customs that easily traversed ideological lines. Indeed, as Feldman observes, “The gradual demise of the klezmer—and with him traditional Ashkenazic dance—is a barometer of the increased polarization of Jewish society into various secular and religious camps lacking any shared aesthetic vision” (56).

Feldman's much-anticipated volume is the product of over forty-five years of serious research, and, in putting the book together, the author has gone to great pains to parse through virtually all of the available literature in Romanian, Russian, Turkish, German, Polish, Yiddish, English, and Hebrew, not to mention an exhaustive selection of music folios and many compelling visual representations of Jewish celebrations found in woodcuts, lithographs, and paintings. In doing so, he also carefully contextualizes the previous literature on the subject (by such eminent scholars as Moshe Beregovski, A. Z. Idelsohn, and others), which, while crucial to his study, was generally shaped by very specific political and ideological concerns (e.g., Soviet communist and Jewish nationalist politics) that made it impossible for those writers to offer a truly balanced picture of the Jewish cultural world around them. The result is a work that enables us to finally appreciate eastern Europe as a cultural world built on a foundation of true fusion (a thesis advanced earlier by Slobin in Tenement Songs), one where disparate elements were forged into a unique whole over the course of many centuries.

Part 2 of this volume offers detailed analyses of specific dances and the music associated with them. Here we learn how Jewish dance tunes fit in with other European genres, including the virtuosic dance-inspired compositions of Renaissance composers and such Baroque masters as Bach and Vivaldi. We also encounter the unique formal structures spawned by composers of hasidic nigunim and the brooding prayer melodies extracted from the High Holiday liturgy, recast as the chanting of the badkhn (wedding poet) as he preaches to the bride and groom at the Jewish wedding. As the centuries progress, Russian Cossack dances find their way into Jewish celebrations, and a Romanian dance eventually morphs into the Israeli hora.

True to form, in his concluding chapter, Feldman outlines ten more musical topics in east European culture that he believes must be investigated further in order to get a better picture of who Jews really are and where they come from culturally. But, for now, anyone working in the field of Jewish studies will welcome this indispensible volume that is finally available to students and scholars reaching for a higher level of Jewish cultural literacy.