Episode 505: Jewish Music -- What's "Mi-Sinai?" - Mark Kligman

This is Judaism Unbound, episode 505, Jewish Music. What's me seein' I? Welcome back everyone, I'm Dan Liebensen. - And I'm Lex Rofberg. - And today we're continuing our series of episodes exploring Jewish music, what it is, how it works, and how it can help us think about important things beyond music in Jewish life today. In our first two episodes in the series, we talked with two prominent Jewish musicians, Elana Arian and Joey Weisenberg. And today we're talking with a scholar of Jewish music, otherwise known as an ethnomusicologist. And even if you're not generally a fan of seven syllable words, we think that you'll come to like this one after today's conversation. As you'll see, our exploration of ethnomusicology helps us continue so many years long conversation threads on this podcast, with some new layers as well. Our guest today is Mark Kligman, who serves as director of the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience. As you'll see, he brings a wealth of knowledge about the history of Jewish music from both more recent times and deep into the past, along with expertise about the contemporary landscape of Jewish musical modalities around the world. Before we jump into the conversation, Lex, can you bring us this week's Judaism Unbouncements? - Always, so first things first, as this episode is being released on October 17th, there are just a couple days until our fall 2025 on Yeshiva courses start. Now is the time to register. Head to JudaismUnbound.com/classes. Check out the four amazing courses we have, Anti-Semitism Unbound with Shoshana Brown, Jewish Exile and Liberation with Chavez Shapiro, Talmud Unleashed with Olivia Devorah Tucker, and Jubilees, a gateway into Jewish Apocrypha with me. You can sign up for any of them, learn more about them. This is your last chance, so head to JudaismUnbound.com/classes now. Also, we had a book come out recently, Judaism Unbound Bound. We are extra jazzed about it. We mentioned it a bunch about a month ago, but it's still around. We definitely encourage you to purchase it. You can also get our companion experience guide featuring activities for you to do, lots of beautiful art, incredible creations by members of our Judaism Unbound team. And the book itself is, we hope, a really incredible dive into some really amazing experiments in Jewish engagement, education, activism, art, and so much more. So don't miss it. Head to JudaismUnbound.com/book. Learn more and order your copy. That's all for this week, Dan. Back to you. - Thanks so much, Lex. So now here's a little bit more about our guest today, Mark Kligman. Mark Kligman is the inaugural holder of the Mickey Katz Endowed Chair in Jewish Music at the UCLA Herb Albert School of Music, where he is professor of ethnomusicology, musicology, and humanities, as well as serving as the director of the Lowell-Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience. Mark Kligman is the former chair of the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA, and is on the faculty advisory committees of the UCLA Allen D. Lev Center for Jewish Studies and the UCLA Nazarian Center for Israel Studies. He is also the academic chair of the Jewish Music Forum and co-editor of the journal Musica Judeaqa. Mark Kligman serves on the boards of the Klezmer Institute and the European Center for Jewish Music at the Hanover University of Music, Drama, and Media. Finally, he's the chair of the Jewish Studies and Music Group for the American Musicological Society. Mark Kligman has published on the liturgical music of Syrian Jews in journals as well as in his book, Makam and Liturgy, Ritual Music and Aesthetics of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn, which was the notable selection winner of the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award. His other publications focus on the intersection of contemporary Jewish life and various liturgical and paraliturgical musical contexts. The subject of his current work is Orthodox Popular Music. We have a lot to talk about, so Mark Kligman, welcome to Judaism Unbounded, so great to have you. - Great to be with both of you. - I wanted to start with a very basic question, which is, what is ethnomusicology? - Sure, so ethnomusicology is, in the academic sense, it's the combination of the study of music and the study of culture. We're, in a sense, getting music and culture to speak together, so some of the definitions might say things like music and culture, music in culture, music as culture. I mean, you can choose your preposition, but it's how music and culture are connected. What's interesting about the field is that there's an interesting distinction between, at least in the history of ethnomusicology, between what Europeans have done, what Americans have done. The European usage of ethnomusicology was primarily as a way to look at non-Western music. And they would sort of go in as philologists and try and collect music, categorize the music. And that was a part of ethnomusicology in the beginning in America. But what happened in the '70s was a real sharp turn to being deeply connected to cultural anthropology. So since the late '70s and into the '80s and ongoing, American ethnomusicology, and now really all ethnomusicology, is very much connected to cultural anthropology. Really seeing ethnography as being a very important gateway. So the way that I would define ethnomusicology is a set of tools to really understand music, deeply connected to culture. In the work that I do in Jewish music, I'm also trained as a musicologist. So I'm both a musicologist and ethnomusicologist. And I feel to study Jewish music that both are important. The one needs to have the historical understanding as well as the deeply interconnected cultural understanding. - So I don't know if this really is a good question or a bad question. But when I hear you give that explanation, I think by analogy to, I don't know what you would call it exactly, but ethno art history or something like that. When you think of art and Judaism, I feel like there's some high level things that people will tend to say about art and Judaism, whether they're exactly right or not is another question. But for example, we'll say that a core way that Judaism as a culture has related to art for a lot of its history is that figurative art is downgraded, is not something that the culture really did a lot in the ancient world, et cetera, et cetera. And for example, Christian art is very different, is very figurative. So are there things like that in terms of Jewish ethnomusicology in terms of the big picture of the relationship between Judaism and music? - I think so. The art is a good analogy as would be food, dance, and many other expressive forms of Jewish culture is that there's no inherent element that makes some Jewish music Jewish that's defining of all Jewish culture. So meaning that we can talk about Ashkenazi, Eastern European Jewish culture in a particular way, looking at different Sephardic communities, Western Sephardic or different Mizrahi, North African, Syrian, different type of communities. And what we find, which is something I think we kind of well know, is that the music is deeply embedded with that local culture. Again, just like food and clothing and other things. So I think that what makes Jewish music significant and important, it's very flexible in terms of how it can be connected to culture. And the other thing is that it's deeply connected to meaning and emotion. And I think that what gets us really connected to Jewish music, whether or not we're in a synagogue or at a concert or however that we consume or make Jewish music, it's that emotive component we're trying to create as a musician or that as listeners that we want to achieve. And that's related to a whole host of other factors, but the meaning and emotion that's a part of it is also, I think, in some ways more significant than the specific sound. - Yeah, so I kind of wanted to go a little in what I think that direction is, which as we've been recording and releasing these episodes connected to Jewish music, one piece that's been coming up is sort of the question of meaning. What's the meaning and where does the meaning sort of live? I'm asking it in funny ways, but I think for a lot of people who are part of spaces connecting to Jewish music, especially prayer spaces, but even other kinds of spaces, if you ask them sort of what the meaning of a prayer is or even of a melody, a song, et cetera, I think a lot of them think that they're supposed to say, well, what the words of the song or the melody or the text say, that's the meaning. And I've heard from so many people who, their connection to a given piece of liturgy or a given melody, it's often like, this reminds me of grandma. This reminds me of summer camp. This reminds me of a particular holiday. That like, it's actually not the words, the meaning of the prayer or the text or the liturgical, the lyrics. It's some association of theirs. And I think somehow people seem to think that they're like wrong or like they're somehow straying from the intention. But whenever I talk to ethnomusicologists, they're always, in my experience, like, yeah, of course, like music is not just the words that are being said. Music is not even just the melody that's happening. But I'm kind of interested, like, could you break down for us, like what are the layers of meaning creation that exist when one is engaging with Jewish music or music generally? I mean, some obvious ones are like the words. There's the melody, the tone, I guess, the instrumentation. But like, what are some of those layers and how might we better understand people resonating with them? - Yeah, that's a great question. What first comes to mind for me is the word efficacy, which is the word that we often use in talking about ritual. When something is working, you know, it's efficacious. And I think the goal of people engaging in worship or creating the worshiping worship leader is you want that efficacy to happen. And I think that in most of the services that I've studied and the services, of course, the many that I experience, I think we kind of go in and out of these different realms. And the way in which that this is often looked at in music and described in music is in the Middle Eastern concept, there's this word called tarab. Maybe what we would call in the Jewish experience, devakut, that may be the best definition of devakut is like nirvana, you know, that you really reach this point of real spiritual satisfaction. The way in which Jewish worship is generally designed, you're not going to be able to do that for all of Shahrit or a Friday night service. That just can't happen for 90 minutes. I mean, it's just not the way it's designed, largely because in the Jewish tradition, we have a text that's standard, or, you know, we call it the keva, the keva of the text. And what we often talk about is the keva and the kavana, the fixed text, and then the kavana, the intention of being very focused or being very mindful. And I think that the way in which a service flows is that you sort of move in and out of those moments. I did a really interesting study almost 30 years ago now of B'nei Jesharin in New York. And one of the things that I found that their hallmark trademark experience is that when they do lachadodhi during Kabbalat Shabbat, so lachadodhi, a very important hymn that's sort of like the highlight of the Kabbalat, the Friday night service that is right before the matri for the evening prayers, that what they do is they make it a real focus by singing it for at least 15 minutes with repetition and at a certain point, they get up and they dance. And of course, this is something that Hasidic communities do as well to dance on Kabbalat Shabbat. It's something that people who I studied who are congregants, they described it as, we get to this part of the text where we spontaneously get up and dance. It was like there's a spontaneous intention. But the whole point is that you're doing something that gets you to a point that you're moving into a different realm. Other ritual that ethnomusicologists have looked at and people in music and cognitive work have done is that they say that when there's repetition, like rhythmic repetition that goes on for a long time, that breaks down the left and right hemisphere of the brain. So what's usually described as the right hemisphere is sort of more logical, functional, and the left brain is sort of more emotive. And the repetition breaks down those particular barriers. And a lot of other traditions like Sufi Pakistani, Kuali music, I mean, there are many, many examples where the music has a repetitive structure to it where that ongoing repetition can certainly achieve that. Now it's not that that's necessary to break down the left and right barrier and that cognitive moment to really have the experience that's efficacious, but that's one way it's described in ethnomusicology. So I think when we look at how people responding to music, it's a matter of what we associate to it. And sometimes we may associate things that are incredibly unconscious. You know, we may have heard this as a child and don't remember that we heard it, but then when we hear it, you know, we have some almost Pavlovian response that this really triggered an emotion. I mean, I think as we more consciously consume Jewish music, I think we have intentions of artists we listen to, the services that we go to, where we have those expectations. So I think that a lot of it is built upon, I think past experience, intentions. And I think what's new for us in the last 50 to 100 years is how to deal with the fact that it's almost like an untold number of music and videos are available by a click as opposed to most experiences that people have previously that were very embodied by being in a service or being at a concert. You know, you're there, you're feeling the music, you're involved in a different way. And of course, sound technology, you know, has gotten to a point where things that you hear have a clarity that's really amazing. So I think it's a mix of these different experiences. - So I wanna sticky note that you just brought up services and concerts. And you actually, you brought them up sort of adjacent to each other, not as synonymous, but I actually think that's worth coming back to in a bit. The degree to which what one experiences at a concert versus what one experiences at a service overlap. But we'll come back to that. I do want, before we get much further, to go to an angle that you have, as far as I've observed through your work, a passion for, which is the Eurocentricism. You don't have a passion for Eurocentricism. You have a passion for pushing back on the ways in which our relationship, I'm saying our, but like the collective ways of talking about Jewish music tend to equate in general Jewish music with music that ties to Europe. I mean, I have like a mental drinking game. I'm not an alcoholic, I swear, but like I have it, like I note to myself whenever there's some Jewish moment in a TV show or whatever, and they play the little klezmer, they play the some klezmer clarinet thing to like show you, oh, this is a Jewish moment. It's like, that's how you make something feel Jewish on a TV show or a movie or whatever, is like you play a specific kind of music, usually on a clarinet or something like that, with a specific musical mode for those real diehards. Fragish is often the klezmer mode, but that's not what Jewish music writ large is. There's so, so much more. And I think we do ourselves a disservice when we only highlight one area of collective Jewish culture on the musical front. So I'd love to hear from you like, what's not going great at that front? Like how, like what's the problem? And also what are some gateways into building our relationship to other forms of Jewish music? - That's a great question in terms of the Euricism of Jewish music and how the European reference, particularly Eastern Europe is the go-to default. And working against that or working to expand that is something at the core of all the academic work that I do of what I research, what I teach, my capacity at UCLA in the work that I do is directing the Lowndale Concert for Music of the American Jewish Experience. And I think that we just have inherited Judaism from the Wissenshaft approach, Wissenshaft, being the Eurocentric analysis of studying music, looking at the European experience as being the model. I think this is something that has been an ongoing question with all the study of Jewish music. And we now look at A.Z. Edelson as being the, I guess, father or grandfather of the study of Jewish music, who really wrestled with that idea. And there's a really many interesting stories connected to this. They were trying to place Gregorian chants history into a Jewish context. So within the history of Western music, Gregorian chant, which either develops in the first millennia and really written down in the 10th and 11th century, basically becomes the hallmark of where Western music begins its history. After the ideas that are expressed by Greek philosophers, it's the history of music sort of jumps next to music of the church. And what Edelson and Werner try and do is look at different Gregorian chants that are based on Jewish music to show Jewish music's essence in Gregorian chant. And that scholarship has been debated and dealt with in many different ways in the last 50 to 70 years. But it seems to be that what's at stake is saying that there's somehow some kernel of Jewish music as really being connected to this very early place. What's interesting is that in the Ashkenazi carentorial tradition, they use a term called (speaking in foreign language) or melodies that come from Mount Sinai. It's not as if they literally mean that the music comes from Sinai, but rather that this is a very old melody. And it's a term that Edelson invented. And it comes from this concept when we're discussing in the Gomorrah topics about like, how do we know that to phone or black? There's really no rabbinic discussion of that. And it's just said it's (speaking in foreign language) It's just something that is just part of the Jewish tradition. So to say that a melody is old in the Ashkenazi tradition, you say it's a (speaking in foreign language) So that means the melody is like (speaking in foreign language) or the melody of the evening prayer from (speaking in foreign language) (singing in foreign language) Now you can actually find that melody in Gregorian chant, which is really quite fascinating, of course, to a very different text. But there are about a dozen melodies in the Ashkenazi tradition that are considered to have the status of (speaking in foreign language) And then now people maybe jokingly say that a melody of Debbie Friedman or a melody that's sort of common that people sing in synagogues in America today, that that's a (speaking in foreign language) The flip side is that within the Spanish and Portuguese tradition, the Western Sephardic tradition, they feel that their oldest melodies come from the temple and the next oldest melodies come from Spain. So for them, if a melody comes from Spain, it really has this sense of being austere and old and ultimately really very holy. When I begin teaching my course, Jewish Music in America, I go back to my experiences when I was doing fieldwork in Brooklyn. The first thing that I did was I was doing some fieldwork in music of the Orthodox community. And there was a melody by a group called Regesh and a (speaking in foreign language) that they wrote in the '80s off their third album that goes (speaking in foreign language) And the singer of that melody is a guy by the name of Avish Barat. And I remember interviewing him in his home in Brooklyn and he said, this is the essence of Jewish music. This is a melody that goes back to the temple. And I said to him, oh, that's interesting. How do you know that? And he just says, because of the way it makes you feel. A few blocks away in Flatbush in Brooklyn, I interviewed a canter by the name of Isaac Cabasso, the canter for many years of the Syrian synagogue called Bet Torah. And he's singing a melody that's part of their baka shout. And the baka shout are traditionally melodies that they would sing during an early morning service that's done during the winter time. And he was singing one of these baka shout melodies. And someone had asked him where the melody comes from. And he said, these melodies, they go all the way back to the temple. And of course, the melody is done in a very Arabic musical style. And I just ponder the fact that living, just a few blocks away, two men who are transmitters of Orthodox Jewish culture, of Syrian Jewish culture, and they both have the same attitude that the melody is old. And the melody really comes from Sinai. So that's something that these traditions really have in common. I mean, I think that because Jewish music has been institutionalized in America through cantorial programs at Yashivi University, Jews Theological Seminary, Hebrew Union College, Jewish Institute of Religion, there's a certain level to where there's this kind of like standardization. Whenever I speak to Sfardim in America, they always say the same thing. They feel like a minority within a minority. The way that we need to get beyond this is through more exposure. And I think that, you know, younger artists I find are really desirous to really kind of break down these different barriers. There are a number of groups in Israel that really try and produce music that's sort of equally Ashkenazic and Sephardic. So I think that there might be a generational component to this. But I mean, there's no doubt that the numbers of Eastern European Jews that came to America during the height of immigration through the 1920s reshaped American Jewish culture. And of course, their descendants who are, it's an expansion of that. I think that there's more recognition of this from what I can see going on in Israel. You know, I think it's more slowly coming into, you know, American Jewish life. - I mean, this line of thinking makes me wonder about, it's almost like when linguists talk about how languages diverge and how you make two different languages that had a common source, how you kind of know when they've become two separate languages. Some of this is making me wonder about the story of American Jews and Israeli Jews and putting aside all the politics and all the other reasons that there might be divisions between them, but just looking at culture, wondering whether the, I don't know, predominance is the right word, but certainly the music of Israel has a lot more Mizrahi influence, Sephardi influence, Arabic music influence, in all kinds of ways. It sounds very different from anything that an American Jew would be likely to encounter in the context in which they encounter Judaism for the most part. But I wonder whether we can even say, and I wonder if this is a part of the study of musicology or ethnomusicology, that part of the story of how two cultures diverge that had a common origin is that their music diverges. And I wonder, so part of me is listening to you and wondering whether that musical gap is a bridgeable gap or it actually kind of represents when two new societies are diverging from one another. - I think that America is a really interesting case study in the sense that even amongst Ashkenazic music, there's diversity. The way that I've thought about this is that a big city of people in Eastern Europe in the 19th century would be, you know, 50,000 people. That's a big city. Shtetls would be at most, you know, are not even 10% of that number. And when you, you know, you come to America and you go to, you know, certain neighborhoods, you know, a Brooklyn or even parts of Manhattan, and you just encircle the square area of a mile, you may be enveloping 20 or 25 different traditions. And there's almost like survival of the fittest in terms of which tradition sort of becomes the most predominant. So one of the interesting things in America is that the Eastern European style, the Lithuanian style in particular, is the way that Torah chant is taught and is sort of the standard in, you know, conservative reform and orthodox. That's all Eastern European tradition. The Robinuit in England set the Central European or the German tradition as the way to chant the Torah. So even if you are taking an Ashkenazi Jew in London, you know, only grown up in London, never gone to Germany, and someone who's just grown up in America, and, you know, the two meat who both have Ashkenazi heritage, you know, they're doing something really that's very different from each other. That's really part of music. As you said, it's a part of language. It's a part of culture where there's a constant mixing. There's one of the things that I think I always find in all the music I study, in particular in Jewish music, is really how dynamic it is. It's really a changing landscape. Any synagogue melody that you sing today, in any service in America, it would just be a handful of melodies that might be more than 75 to 100 years old. Most of the melodies that we sing are relatively modern. And a lot of that is because culture and music changes. We could say there are these Misi and I melodies in the Ashkenazi tradition for certain parts of the High Holy Days, right? Like Col Nidre, like the Great Alenium. Those particular moments are there, but then there's so much variation that's also happening as well. So I mean, I just look at Jewish music as being incredibly dynamic. What's different in Israel is that, what they call Shiri Eretz Israel are songs of the land of Israel. The sort of intent as Israel's sort of become a state in the 1940s and '50s to really establish like a Jewish folk culture. It's funded and artists that work for the army to really expand, create that culture. And as you sort of implied, the Mizrahi influence, the Middle Eastern influence comes much, much later. By the time you get to the '80s or the '90s, it's a different generation of Mizrahi that aren't keeping that Arab Jewish identity in the closet. They wanna embrace it, they wanna express it. And now it just seems that that Mizrahi-ness is just pervasive in Israel. When I'm asked to give talks in places, and I just did Lee Mood in Australia and New Zealand. - Lucky you, I really wanna do that. If anyone's listening, they wanna invite me. - I highly recommend it. And I give them a list of like 20 topics. And I try and do 10 Sephardic and 10 Ashkenazic. But invariably it's an Ashkenazi organization that will largely choose Ashkenaz topics on Yiddish culture or Yiddish theater, Yiddish music, Jews and pop music, I mean certain things. And there's a certain level to which I think that the challenge of adult Jewish education in my mind is that people typically wanna learn more of what they already know. And to teach people something really new, you wanna kind of do it in a very meaningful way and not just make it about like exoticism about a form of Jewish culture or a Jewish tradition. I mean, when I talk about the work that I've done on music of the Syrian Jewish community, I really wanna integrate it with what the community is and what the community does rather than it just being, oh, isn't it nice, these people came from Aleppo and these are the melodies that they sing. I mean, I really, really try not to trivialize it. - This is so, so fascinating to hear. And I guess I feel called to sort of a practically minded question, but my suspicion and you hinted to the work that you do with the Milken Center for American Jewish experience. I kind of just wanna ask you what this center does. Now, you've given a little bit of what is ethnomusicology. When you scale up from one scholar who's studying and having conversations with folks in Flatbush and like finding really interesting parallels between different communities and the ways you describe, like when we scale this up to a center of people exploring American Jewish experience musically, what does that look like? What are some of the kinds of curiosities and questions that folks are asking? I mean, as a person who interviews others, I'm kind of cheating 'cause I'm like, I kind of wanna know what questions I should ask other people in this field in the future. But like, what does this center do on a practical level? 'Cause I think it's one of those things where like, okay, yeah, y'all study American Jewish music and experience, but when I am trying to break down like what that would mean, I'm struggling. So I'm curious, what are some of the core questions that people are exploring? - Yeah, it's funny. I asked Chad GPT this question once just to see what would come up. And I was surprised to find that it drew a lot from what I've written. I don't know what that ultimately means. So-- - You're a robot now. That's what it means. - It means they've taken your intellectual property without paying you. - Or, you know, as Lex said, yeah, I'm becoming a robot like all of us. So the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience is an outgrowth of the Milken Archive. And Lowell Milken in the early '90s set out to record Jewish music that hadn't been recorded. And the archive consists of art music, you know, symphonies and chamber works, things from Yiddish theater, opera. I know I'm forgetting some things here. And they basically have recorded 600 different works and over half of them were premier works, works that hadn't been recorded before. And it had an express Jewish content. So for them, there was, see, it was like an obvious Jewish content. It's not like saying, well, Irving Berlin is Jewish. Let's look at Irving Berlin's music. This was, you know, like there's a conscious attempt. And Lowell wanted, Lowell Milken wanted to find a way to make the work that he did permanent by endowing the center. So we're the only center of Jewish music in the United States. There are other centers in Europe and in Israel. And we have a very intentional goal of trying to grapple with music of Jews in America. And we've been very conscious in the name of the center to not have the word Jewish music. It's the music of American Jewish experience. In fact, the course I teach, it's just a rearrangement of the word. The course is called the Jewish American experience through music. And the reason that I chose Jewish American is that we say Latin American, African American, you know, we Asian American. I think that since Jewish music is so problematic to define, I sort of look at the task of the center as being this wonderful puzzle to say that it's really hard to talk about what American music is. What exactly American music is, is also dynamic and a moving target and something you really have to, you know, come up with a rationale. And Jewish music is the same. So to say with that, to take, you know, sort of two variables is what we're doing. So we have like two variables, you know, in the equation. So our main goals be leaders in research of Jewish music in America, be leaders in the performance of Jewish music in America, and also to provide programs in education. And UCLA is very robust in scholarship. I mean, UCLA, we have the oldest ethnomusicology program in the country, if not, you know, in the world. We're really in a great environment by being at UCLA. I'll give you an example of some of the things that we've done, which we'll really demonstrate. In 2023, we sort of did sort of our inaugural performance through a program that we called Music and Justice. And we wanted to take on the topic and see how the Jewish engagement is involved in that. And we featured a work by Dave Brubeck. And Dave Brubeck, a really well-known jazz musician in America, probably one of the most famous jazz musicians. And he wrote, been commissioned by UHC, or the Union of American Keeper Congregations, after Martin Luther King was assassinated. So this is a 1969 work that's called Gates of Justice. And at the time in Cincinnati, the Jewish community, which was in the city of Cincinnati, led, you know, the white flight, they flew to the suburbs. And there was this moment after Martin Luther King's assassination, where they wanted to heal the rift between the African-American community and Jewish community. And they asked Dave Brubeck, who wasn't Jewish, but they felt could be versed in both to do a big work. So this is, like, in the work, the scale of an oratorio. It has orchestral brass, orchestral percussion, no strings or woodwinds. It has a very large choir, a bass singer who's an African-American spiritual singer, and a tenor who's a canter. In addition to that, there's a jazz trio. And what we did when we performed this work, we actually asked three of Dave Brubeck's sons to come and play. And the three of them play together a lot. A choir, choir's called Tonality, and it's a choir that's built for underrepresented minorities singing in the music industry and in concerts in LA. And they combined with our UCLA choir. So we performed this work as a way that we could, with intentionality, have representation from the Jewish community and the African-American community. So we did this very large performance and organized an academic conference where we had scholars coming to speak about the relations between the African-American Jewish community and America to really look at Jews who are involved in jazz and look at those polemics. And there are a lot of wonderful things about the connection between Jews and blacks and some, I think, things that are not so wonderful. A lot of Jews were the producers of black jazz musicians and really exploited these jazz musicians in ways that should really be called out. And we wanted to really assess how music is engaged in this dialogue between music and justice. And I taught a course on this topic as well. So we feel that what we're trying to do is look at various issues that are not Jewish music that are really at the surface level Jewish music but are very deeply embedded, where the performance can engage a lot of performers. It's something that we could also approach academically and bring in leading scholars. And most importantly, I think, is really engage students in the classroom as well. - Well, I wanted to pull together some of the lines that we've been talking about. At first I wanna note that I've been sitting here pondering the whole "Mesinae" question, the idea that these tunes or these songs came from Mount Sinai. And initially, as a kind of a realist, you're like, "Well, that's ridiculous. It didn't come from Mount Sinai." And then on a more spiritual level, I was thinking about the person who says, "The way that I know that this is from the temple is the way that it makes you feel." And I was thinking in a certain way, right? I've talked before in the podcast about Sinai as a myth, as a mythic idea. And a mythic idea is one that is always true. It's a story, but it's not about history. The story is about something that is always true and it's put into the story. And in that sense, Sinai is always happening. We're always receiving revelation. And so actually the way that it makes you feel is not necessarily a bad way to understand whether or not something is quote unquote from Sinai, because if it feels like revelation, maybe it is. Something along those lines. And that doesn't matter in terms of when it was historically written or what was its historical antecedents. And so there's something in all this that is a conversation in a way between history and myth and also the present. And it just makes me think about things that, some of which I know that you're interested in Broadway. And I'm thinking about what are some of the almost paradigmatic Jewish music of today that if you really ask people, name five pieces of Jewish music. I think number one and maybe one through five would be from Fiddler and the Roof. - Exactly. - And I remember reading something or listening maybe to, there's like an extra interview on the CD of Blessed Memory of Fiddler and the Roof. So there are no CDs anymore. I don't know where this kind of stuff is, but where the writers of Fiddler and the Roof said, they basically didn't know anything about Jewish music or the songs in Fiddler and the Roof weren't really meant to be Jewish music, but somehow they became Jewish music. And I'm really curious about what that means or how you analyze that from a historical standpoint. But I'm also thinking about things like Debbie Friedman's Misha Bayrach or in another way Leonard Cohen's music and maybe others that people really would say, like there's something where they feel like this is authentic Jewish music. And then when you tell them it's really pretty new, they still think it is, but they can't quite tell you the story of why it is. And I'm wondering if we could just sort of try to flesh that out a little bit. Like how do you make the connection between what is old and ancient and the grounding that that gives you in some kind of line of dissent and what is in the present and is kind of accepted by the people that we're talking about as the thing, even though they can't tell you why. - Yeah, really great, big question. So let me answer it in two ways. I think that the reason that Fiddler and the Roof was really so successful is that it came at a time in American Judaism, similar to what I said earlier, where you have Jews coming from so many different traditions to America, where it's like one way in which a lot of American Jewish tunes got standardized, like the Shal-Malaifem that we all sing, right? Shal-vo-ma-la-ka-ma-la-ka, I should write, which is tribute to Abraham Goldfarb, is that synagogues in the 1920s and '30s in the big cities, like in Manhattan, were built for everyone to come to a Friday night dinner. And when these Friday night dinners developed, they needed to have the rituals defined and they needed to do things that were needed. The other thing is the melody on Friday night, "Maganovoche," right? "Maganovoche, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da." I mean, that melody is almost like ubiquitous amongst American Ashkenazi congregations. A lot of that sort of like American melodies that sort of come in came in because there was no standard melody that existed prior. Everyone was from different traditions, so it's kind of like the survival and fittest. Those sort of came in at a time of need and they were catchy and so they caught on. I mean, I don't want to say it's that simple, but that's essentially how it works. So I did a research project to really look at contemporary Jewish music from the 1970s. And one thing I found amongst everyone I spoke to, a bunch of wedding band musicians, is that prior to "Fither on the Roof," most Jewish weddings, people walked down to Wagner's low-end grin, that here comes the bride melody. And there was sort of like-- - Right here, that's incredible. - Right, but we'd sort of completely disassociate that with Wagner, right? And of all ironic things, why Wagner to Jewish wedding. And so there was this, I think, always a desire for there to be something, but nothing really existed. So when "Fither on the Roof" comes out and you have some rice and set, Sabbath prayer, you could go down the list of melodies, they start becoming a part of Jewish life and Jewish culture. There's a colleague and she worked on this summer camp in Connecticut that's not a Jewish camp, but mostly has Jewish kids. And they take a break on Friday night from doing musical theater and they have a Friday night service. And they pretty much sing the Sabbath prayer and sing like the soundtrack of "Fither on the Roof." I mean, there's a certain way in which it was the right thing at the right time to really come and be a part of American culture. I think we could say that of a lot of carbox melodies that he wrote, Odishama, Hallel, a lot of the different things that are part of Jewish ritual, synagogue and personal life. And of course, with Debbie Friedman, the Misha Barak really has its really own unique story to it. The prayer really was, it was in the prayer book, but not really said in a lot of congregations. And because of who she is at the time that she wrote this and her personal health issues and journey, I think people were listening and it just came at the right time, unfortunately, out of certain tragedies in her life. - And sorry, just to fill in some of the gaps there for people who might not be familiar, that particular prayer, the prayer for healing that Misha Barak, that Debbie Friedman made, it became popularized, I mean, she was a giant of Jewish music and also this was a moment in the 80s and early 90s, in the late 80s, early 90s, where a lot of communities, especially gay and lesbian synagogues, communities that Debbie Friedman was connected to, used it in conjunction with those in their community that were dying related to the AIDS epidemic, which I mean, I think it's a beautiful healing prayer for so many reasons beyond just that particularity, but I think that's part of the right timepiece you're hinting at. - Right, exactly. And the things that she's contributed, it deserves its own separate special discussion. So the way that I try and describe Jewish music, at least in my own mind, in my own experiences, is that I think that Jewish music that blends past and present in somehow East and West or something that's sort of local and something that's somewhere else. You know, we may wanna say how Klesner music is maybe overemphasized as like the paradigmatic American Jewish music, that's true, but also Klesner music in and of itself is an incredible genre and form of music. And I think one reason that American Jews gravitate to it is that it sort of lends this sense of authenticity and I kinda hate using that word, but I don't have another word to really use, but there's this sense that it has a history, it has meaning and it has purpose, and we're bringing it to the present. The singers who sing Ladino, Judeo-Spanish music, the ballads, Romanceros will say that people who sing these songs wanna be reminded of Spain. I mean, there's this certain aspect of being exiled from your homeland that gives you like a certain sense of where that music is. But I think that music that gives you that sense of being in your moment, but yet it's a reference to something else, both geographically and over time. I mean, that's to me, that's the music that really hits you in different ways. And I'll give you the examples. I always like teaching about Ophrahaza and I know that younger people don't know who she was, but Ophrahaza was born from the Yemenite family. She was an Israeli and sang in Eurovision. She was a very, very popular artist and the song "High, High, High," there are many, many others. She has this very iconic voice. And in the 1980s, Columbia Records started what they called their world beat ethnopop. And she took melodies from the traditional Yemenite diwan, the traditional Yemenite religious poetry, that's usually a male repertoire. And she sang it, but really mixed in a really funky beat pattern that's sort of inherent in the Yemenite drumming. And this aspect of world beat ethnopop was trying to, as you could say, maybe Westernized music that was from another place. And Ophrahaza was really the first one to do that. The other artist who I listen to a lot is the bass guitarist jazz guitarist named Avi Shaikon. He incorporates Middle Eastern music into the jazz context. And to me, the music that really kind of, where you can audibly hear that sense of a journey are things that really make me come alive with interest and feels like the way that I want to sort of embody these things. - Well, that's beautiful. And Ophrahaza, for the millennials in the room, and by the room I mean listening, she's a key voice to the movie "Prince of Egypt," which I mention both because it's cool and because it kind of gets, I'm not gonna ask exactly the service versus concert question, but it brings us and continues from the Fiddler on the Roof front to this question and layering of Jewish, or as you would say, not Jewish music, music for the Jewish experience or music for the American Jewish experience that is, I don't know, inside Jewish versus outside Jewish? Like primarily in Jewish communities by Jews versus like a DreamWorks movie that is being watched by millions of people that are mostly not Jewish. But I actually want to go a different direction in terms of which artist or song I want to spotlight. I have a specific case study that I want to sit with. "The Boxer" by Simon and Garfunkel. This is on any list of like really well-known mid-late 20th century pop songs. And I think it's so interesting from the vantage point of how we orient to what is Jewish music because, so Simon and Garfunkel, Paul Simon and Garfunkel are two Jews. So on the one hand, there's a part of me whose instinct on the Jewish music questions is like, we should stop caring what is authentically to use the term you're criticizing Jewish music. And instead to say like music that Jews create for some kind of Jewish purpose, that's Jewish music or that's music for the American Jewish experience, great. But "The Boxer" it's created by two Jews, not really four Jews specifically. It's a pop song whose audience was just whoever out there listened to it. But then also you get to the specifics of it and it's like in the middle of it, you basically have a niggun. You have (singing in foreign language) Like you have this extended wordless (singing in foreign language) Now, I don't know. I haven't seen if Paul Simon and Garfunkel like have said they chose the (singing in foreign language) syllable because of its, I don't know if it was a conscious choice or maybe they just subconsciously they've been part of spaces that's saying (singing in foreign language) But when I hear that, like my body can't tell. It's not like I can, in my head, and I can know that this is like a pop song. But when I hear "Yahein and Ahin and Ahi" I am immediately transported, maybe in that Pavlovian way you mentioned, to like, oh, kind of Jewish sounding, even if it's in a major key, even if it's not the kinds of music people would generally most point at as this is Jewish. And also like, you know, it's part of a '60s counterculture that was disproportionately made up of many Jews, but not exclusively Jews. Like there's so many layers to this. And so as a closing question, I guess I'm asking like, how might we broaden our sense of what music related to the American Jewish experience is? Because I know a lot of people who actually don't care that much about Avino Malcanu melodies. But if I mentioned the boxer to them, they are like lit up in a deep way. And I think even in a way that they would call Jewish. - No, that's a really beautiful, beautiful question. And I would say that, you know, not having thought about this exactly in the same way that that's what I remember from the boxer is the negun. You feel like it's catchy, you know, you can connect to it. And I think this is something that is so much a part of the what is Jewish music. So without answering the question, I think the way to think about it further might be, you know, a response that people ask of George Gershwin when they say in the opening of Rhapsody in Blue where there's this big clarinet note that comes in sort of gets into this blues lick. People say, asked him, were you referencing Klesmer music in that? Are you referencing Jewish music? And George Gershwin's response was basically, I grew up going to Yiddish theater. I grew up with all that schmaltz. I grew up with hearing all of that music. I cried, I laughed, I sang along, I love that music. He said, if that somehow seeped into my music, then that's wonderful. So I think that for him, it wasn't the sense of a consciousness that he's not letting his Jewish background come into it. He clearly has an intention for this to be a concert blues work, but within the fabric of his music, it's really all woven together. And I think that that's what's gonna stand the test of time is when things are woven together and people can have many entry points to it. I mean, that's one of the things that we try to do in the work that we do is that I felt with our Gates Justice Project with Dave Brubeck that there were many entry points. There's an entry point of the Black Jewish Dialogue. There's an entry point that it's Dave Brubeck. Many ways to refer to it. I think that we talked earlier a little, you mentioned things about Leonard Cohen. I mean, I think that Leonard Cohen's Jewishness is really a dialogue throughout his life in his music and certain things feature it more so than others. And I think you're right that we have to broaden that sense. And the best way I can close is I was highly influenced by my grandfather, who was a violinist, loved classical music, and really grew up as a Yiddishist and came to Judaism as a religion later in his life. But when I remember him listening to the Beethoven Violin Concerto been played by Yasha Haifetz. And for my grandfather, that was like the ultimate. The greatest violin piece of music played by the greatest violinist, Yasha Haifetz, who is Jewish, who was so expressive. And my grandfather would say like, "Only a Jew can make it sound like that." You know, I don't think that's true. But what I take is how for my grandfather, the beauty, the gorgeousness, the place that he was at was a Jewish place because he wanted it to be a Jewish place. You know, we can have that with any form of Jewish music. As you said, we have to really broaden our understanding. - Well, thank you so much, Mark Kligman for joining us. This has been a fantastic conversation. - Great to be with you. Thank you for the opportunity. - And thanks so much to all of you out there for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this conversation and we hope that you'll tune in again in the future. As we close a couple of reminders, first, we have four amazing courses in the Anishiva starting very soon, but it is very, very soon. This is your last chance to register. This episode is coming out on October 17th, 2025. These classes start in just a few days. So head to judyismunbound.com/classes to register. 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