Women, Music, and Judaism in America
First Women Cantors’ Network Conference, Congregation Beth El
Norwalk, CT, May 1982. Left to Right: First row: Deborah Katchko (Norwalk, CT), Linda Shivers (Highland Park, NJ), Doris Cohen (Flushing, NY), Rochelle Helzner (Washington, D.C.), Jane Myers (Philadelphia, PA), Elaine Shapiro (W.Palm Beach, FL), Ruth Devorah (New York, NY). Second row: Sue Roemer (Silver Spring, MD.), Tzippy Bronstein, (Brooklyn, NY), Sheyne Mueller (New York, NY). Third row: Rita Glassman (New York, NY). Courtesy of the Women Cantors’ Network.
American Jewish women’s music has for more than a century been discussed in limiting terms; restrictive categories of musical genre, narratives of women’s “emergence” into male-coded spaces, and inherited wisdom about “Jewish music” have together concealed the diversity and cultural influence American Jewish women’s music. Rather than classifying the music American Jewish women created into these often limiting (and often male-coded) categories, this article discusses Jewish-identifying women’s broader musical activities in both religious and non-religious settings. The article highlights women’s contributions to amateur music-making in the home, music scholarship, liturgical music, Yiddish music, professionally recorded music, and more to illustrate the diverse modes of American Jewish women’s musical choices.
Introduction
Fully understanding the prolific history of women, Judaism, and music in America requires cutting through more than a century of inherited wisdom about the content and practice of “Jewish music.” Women have been deeply involved in Jewish communal, civic, and concert musical life from the earliest days. However, nineteenth-century efforts by (mainly male) scholars and cantors coded “Jewish music” as a male-dominated activity, with the synagogue and cantor at its center. Reinforced by rabbinical concerns over women’s voices, colloquially known as “Kol Isha,” this self-interested scholarship generally marginalized the musical activities of women as exceptions, auxiliaries to tradition, or liberal breakthroughs. (To cite one example: advocates of Jewish reform, while noted for their inclusion of women, also established the cantor as a normatively male figure in mixed-gender congregations.) More recent generations of researchers are rethinking these assumptions.
This article emphasizes American Jewish women’s multivalent musical choices rather than narratives of “emergence” into male-coded American Jewish music spaces. In doing so, it acknowledges that mainstream Jewish liturgical, educational, art, and “popular” music histories often exclude or minimize women’s participation—emphasizing “famous” cantors, composers, and performers, for example, while largely ignoring the many women who served as choir directors, organists, choristers, and local musicians in small- and medium-sized communities. It also acknowledges that the term “Jewish music” itself has long skewed male. Consequently, this article focuses on Jewish-identifying women’s activities in both religious and non-religious settings, rather than seeking to classify the music they create.
Jewish Women and Musical Leadership
Photo from A Woman of the Century: Fourteen Hundred-Seventy Biographical Sketches Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in All Walks of Life, Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds. (Buffalo: Charles Wells Mouton,1893), 1812.
Courtesy of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, OH, www.americanjewisharchives.org and the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods.
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Fostering American Jewish Music Scholarship
"No thunder sounded. No lightening struck," recalled Judith Kaplan Eisenstein of her history-making 1922 Bat Mitzvah ceremony, the first in America. She is pictured here at her second Bat Mitzvah ceremony, where she was honored by a number of prominent Jewish women, including Betty Friedan and Letty Cottin Pogrebin.
Institution: The Ira and Judith Kaplan Eisenstein Reconstructionist Archives, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College
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Postwar Liturgical Leadership
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Yiddish Music
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Women and Music in American Sephardi Populations
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American Art Music
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Negotiating Musical Spaces and Genres
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Reconsidering the Past and Looking Forward
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