Yiddish songs about immigration to the United States

Yiddish Songs About Immigration to the United States

Yiddish music has helped tell the story of European-Jewish immigrants to the U.S., and Yiddish songs about immigration and assimilation at every stage of the process help to better illuminate the experiences of these Yiddish-speaking immigrants. The transition from Yiddish folk songs brought by immigrants to theater musicals and radio programs during the twentieth century traces the history of Yiddish immigration and assimilation as it was relayed through music. By examining the shifts in theme and content of Yiddish songs, as well as English songs written and composed by Yiddish-speakers, it is possible to chart a distinct course that begins with anticipation, shifts towards assimilation, and after a period during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s when Yiddish influence becomes completely submerged within American popular culture, finally moves onto a kind of nostalgia for those early stages of anticipation and assimilation. The available sources regarding this topic offer a number of useful perspectives for approaching Yiddish songs and the experience of immigration to America, because the unique success of Yiddish-American music has made sure that the Jewish-American immigrant experience is always somewhere just near the surface of American culture, even if its visibility waxes and wanes over the decades.

Annotated Bibliography

Heskes, Irene. "Music as Social History: American Yiddish Theater Music, 1882-

1920." American Music 2, no. 4 (1984): 73-87.

Heskes' essay traces the history of Yiddish music, beginning with the congealing of Yiddish into its own language and dialect by the 1500s but focusing specifically on the years between 1882 and 1920. The nineteenth-century saw the content of Yiddish music and folk songs transform from traditionally religious and Jewish cultural themes to songs about America, immigration, and new opportunity, and once arrived, Yiddish music gave Jewish immigrants a way to simultaneously assimilate into American culture while retaining a particularly Yiddish identity. While this essay is a critical work, and thus argues that music in general and Yiddish music in particular should be examined as social history, for this project it is more useful simply for its succinct history of the evolution of Yiddish songs in the time period covered.

Kelman, Ari. "The Acoustic Culture of Yiddish." Shofar 25, no. 1 (2006): 127-VIII.

"The Acoustic Culture of Yiddish" looks at how the way Yiddish actually sounds when spoken and sung helped Jewish immigrants' assimilation into American culture. Kelman argues that listening itself is a cultural practice, meaning that there are different ways of listening highly dependent on a person's cultural history, and that when Yiddish speaking Jews emigrated to America, their cultural practices of listening, whether in conversation or more publicly at the theater, had to be adapted to facilitate assimilation into the culture of their new country. This text would be useful when comparing Yiddish songs regarding immigration to America as they were performed both before arriving and once a thriving Yiddish community had been established in America by the 1920s and 30s.

Most, Andrea. "We Know We Belong to the Land": The Theatricality of Assimilation in Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!." PMLA 113, no. 1 (1998): 77-89.

Andrea Most looks at Rodgers and Hammersteins' Oklahoma! And identifies it as belonging to a group of other musicals from the time (including of Thee I Sing, on the Town, My Fair Lady, and West Side Story) written and composed by Jewish artists but which served to create a distinctly American popular culture. For Most, these musicals, and Oklahoma! In particular, were part of a Jewish assimilation into American culture that included considering Jews equally as "white" as other Europeans, made possible because of the large black population in America. According to Most, "in Europe, Jews had been oppressed by racial definitions that labeled them darker than 'white' members of society and hence less privileged." Thus, Oklahoma! represents the assimilation of Yiddish music and culture into mainstream America while the racial distinctions and prejudices already present in America are reinforced. Aside from the interesting argument Most makes about Jews' racial/ethnic-class mobility during their immigration to America, her essay provides a detailed history of the Jewish-American music scene during the 1930s and 40s, a time period not covered by other works.

Riechers, Maggie. "Eavesdropping on a generation: Yiddish broadcast from the golden age of radio ." Humanities 23, no. 1 (2002): 50-53.

This article recounts the process of collecting discarded recordings of Yiddish radio during the 1940s and compiling them for a program on NPR. It gives descriptions of a number of different Yiddish radio shows, ranging from swing versions of Yiddish classics to "a 1940s and 1950s Jewish radio version of today's popular courtroom television shows, called Jewish-American Court of Peace and Justice." In addition, it gives some history regarding the creation and funding of these programs. Because large portions of the Jewish/Yiddish speaking population in America had not abandoned their language and culture by the 1940s, and because of the influx of European Jews following World War II, this article gives some special insight into the ongoing interplay between cultural and political history and Yiddish songs of the time, especially as they relate to reconciling the promise America may have held in the early twentieth century with the worldwide terror felt by the 1940s.

Saposnik, Irv. "Joe and Paul" and other Yiddish-American varieties." Judaism 49, no. 4 (2000): 437-448.

Irv Saposnik's essay about the Yiddish-American song "Joe and Paul" is useful because it traces a single song's history and attempts to explain what has made it enduringly popular, especially as an example of Yiddish folk music adapting itself to an immigrant's life in America. Saposnik makes the case that the special mixing of Yiddish and English that occurred within the Jewish immigrant community over the course of the twentieth century helped to create an American, but uniquely Yiddish, sense of humor.

Shandler, Jeffrey. "Postvernacular Yiddish: Language as a Performance Art." TDR 48, no.

1 (2004): 19-43.

Jeffrey Shandler's essay can be read in conjunction with "The Acoustic Culture of Yiddish" and "Joe and Paul" and other Yiddish-American varieties" because it discusses the state of the Yiddish language and sound in a contemporary setting. If the trajectory of Yiddish songs regarding immigration to America is one of anticipation to assimilation, then Shandler's essay discusses the role of Yiddish at a time when this assimilation is nearly complete. Thus the term "postvernacular" in the title; Yiddish has gone from the genre of folk music and vernacular to high theater and performance speech. Shandler's work puts other histories of Yiddish music in the twentieth-century in some perspective, because it offers a latter point from which to compare earlier songs and movements.

Shepard, Richard F. "MUSICAL: JEWISH JOURNEY." New York Times (October 30,

1984): C.14.

This is a review of the musical "Golden Land," which Richard Shepard describes as "a cavalcade that retraces through 50 songs of the various periods the path of Jewish immigrants from Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe." It includes among others the song "Joe and Paul," and Shepard's essay offers a snapshot into the space Yiddish music still occupied as part of American pop culture in 1984. (This is especially interesting considering the text listed immediately following this one, by the same author but some 13 years later.)

Shepard, Richard F. "Rescuing Old Yiddish Songs From the Haze of Memories." New York

Times (December 28, 1997): 36.

In this instance, Shepard writes a strictly informative article about efforts to recover, record, and protect music and songs played during the heyday of the musical theater discussed by Irene Heskes in "Music as Social History: American Yiddish Theater Music, 1882-1920" and Nina Warnke in "Immigrant Popular Culture as Contested Sphere: Yiddish Music Halls, the Yiddish Press, and the Processes of Americanization, 1900-1910." Furthermore, the distinct shift in tone regarding the status and longevity of Yiddish-American music offers some insight into the perceived fortunes of the once widespread Yiddish musical culture in America.