The Gate to the Village: Shlomo Carlebach and the Creation of American Jewish “Folk”

“Chassidim believe that in the highest heavens there is a sanctuary that song alone can unlock. Could these songs be the keys to that Gate? Sing them and see.”

Rachel Anne Rabinowitz, liner notes for Shlomo Carlebach: Live at the Village Gate

“Hevra, let’s pretend we’re happy.”

Shlomo Carlebach, Waban MA, 1995

“Please open the gates for me. Please open the gates.” That’s how Shlomo Carlebach introduced himself to his audience at The Village Gate, the legendary Greenwich Village club where he performed on a number of occasions during the early 1960s. This beseeching, almost liturgical invitation opens his 1963 album, “Shlomo Carlebach: Live at the Village Gate,” and serves as an introduction to his version of Psalm 118: “Open the Gates of Righteousness / I long to enter and give thanks.” According to Carlebach, he wrote the melody for the song on his way to the performance, when he may well have been contemplating the connection between his music, its connection to sacred Jewish texts, and the music scene of the moment in New York’s Greenwich Village in which he had become an active participant as a singer, performer, composer, and somewhat marginal figure in the Folk Revival. In other words, Carlebach wasn’t necessarily talking about the club, but he might as well have been.

Gates, after all, are places of admission and transformation. They open and close, they protect and they make possible. They are liminal places. Literal thresholds. They are places of tricksters and traders, of migrants and paupers and, in the legends of Jewish midrash and folklore, they are where the messiah, appropriately dressed as a vagabond changing the dressing on his wounds, will eventually be found. And, of course, gates, both closed and open, gesture to the Holocaust, a term barely more than decade old in 1962, its survivors trying to reconstitute their broken lives, and something about which was deeply embedded in Carlebach’s psyche.¹ As a child, Carlebach barely escaped Belgium as the Nazis entered the country and this unspeakable tragedy inflected almost everything he did. He was a post-Holocaust itinerant and his was surely an immigrant experience. He came from elsewhere.

It is therefore no mistake, as Stephen Petrus and Ronald Cohen have noted in their recent documentary history, Folk City: New York and the American Folk Revival that the phenomenon consisted largely of individuals who were not native New Yorkers but who were themselves immigrants from elsewhere.² By the 1940s, New York and Greenwich Village specifically, had become a destination for aspiring bohemians and folkies looking to find a community of like-minded, politically progressive people for whom music played a powerful organizing force. It is also widely known that Jews played a prominent role in this revival. Bob Dylan became the most well-known but others such as Theodore Bikel, Jack Elliott, Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul, and Mary), Arlo Guthrie, John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers, and Millard Lampell, lyricist and performer with The Almanac Singers (with a young Pete Seeger) were also Jewish performers, though only Bikel included Jewish material as a regular part of his act.³ Bikel, who was also already successful on Broadway, became widely known in the folk world through his live radio show on WBAI, “Theodore Bikel at Home,” recorded at the folk music club The Bitter End. Bikel’s show included folk music, poetry and commentary on the Folk Revival.

On the production side, prominent Jewish figures included Moses (Moe) Asch, the founder of Folkways Records and son of Shalom Asch, the celebrated Yiddish novelist and poet, Maynard and Seymour Solomon, founders of Vanguard Records, Irwin Silber, co-founder of Sing Out! magazine, Israel “Izzy” Young who established and operated the Folklore Center, New York Times columnist and folk music devotee Richard Shelton (nee Shapiro), Jac Holzman founder of Elektra Records, Manny Roth who founded the folk club The Cock and Bull on Bleeker Street (later bought by another Jew, Fred Weintruab and re-named...