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Golden Ages: Chassidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era

A cadre of young Chassidic singers who have embraced a style of early 20th century recorded sacred music illustrates the contested nature of prayer practices in the contemporary Jewish American community and pushes at the limits on individual creativity in the Haredi world. Cantorial revivalists are artists who surface sounds of the Jewish sonic past as a means of aesthetic self-cultivation and a utopian effort to revive an approach to prayer characterized by the transportive experience of listening. Beyond a revival of musical style, their work with the archive of early Jewish records attempts to reanimate the role of artists as communal leaders, facilitating an experience of listening as a sacred act while opening up channels for the articulation of creative identities within the context of a conservative social milieu that places limits on expressive behavior.

Jeremiah Lockwood is a scholar and musician, working in the fields of Jewish studies, performance studies and ethnomusicology. His work engages with issues arising from peering into the archive and imagining the power of “lost” forms of expression to articulate keenly felt needs in the present. He is currently a Research Fellow at the UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology Milken Center for Music of the American Jewish Experience, and the Lead Researcher of the Cantorial and Synagogue Music Archive, a new undertaking of the Cantors Assembly Foundation. Jeremiah is the recipient of the 2021 Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies Award and the 2019-20 recipient of the YIVO Kremen Memorial Fellowship in East European Arts, Music and Theater. Jeremiah has played around the world as the leader of The Sway Machinery and guitarist in Balkan Beat Box. He was a recipient of a Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists and a Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra Composer Fellow. Jeremiah successfully defended his dissertation, which focuses on the work of cantors in the Brooklyn Chassidic community, in the Stanford Graduate School of Education in the Fall of 2020.

The Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies lecture is supported by the generosity of the Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation.

Presented jointly by Fordham University's Jewish Studies program and Columbia University's Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies.

While all Institute events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Later Event: November 15
Film@IIJS: Breaking Bread