Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity by Jonathan Freedman (review)

For an ethnomusicologist, reading literary critic Jonathan Freedman's Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity is both an exhilarating and frustrating experience. Klezmer, in the mid- to late-1970s an obscure expression known to a few music specialists and Yiddish-speakers, has clearly moved to the center of academic discussions about Jews, identity, race, ethnicity, and gender. This had become clear to me at least as early as 2004, when Sander L. Gilman and Elizabeth Loentz organized the conference "Beyond Klezmer: The Legacy of Eastern European Jewry Today" at Schloss Elmau in Germany, at which only one music specialist presented. In his work, Freedman uses klezmer as a metaphor not only for changes that he perceives taking place in the American Jewish experience but also extends it to apply to changing modes of thinking about ethnicity in America in general. As such, his work continues in the direction of the past fifteen years with the emergence of the subfield of Jewish cultural studies pioneered by Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin and others. In particular, Freedman's work seems to resonate with that of the Australia-based British scholar Jon Stratton.

The main point Freedman seeks to convey, using klezmer music as an "organizing trope" (18) is to "provide an account of the newer cultural formations that continue to swirl around the figure of the Jew, formations that point toward changing ethnoracial and ethnocultural dispensations" in the United States. (17) He especially invokes terms such as hybridity and cosmopolitanism, seeing that they "have implications for cultural criticism across the board. They represent a significant alternative to the ways in which cultural production and/as social reproduction are being retheorized in the context of a globalizing public sphere at large." (92)

In particular, Freedman points to the activities of what he calls "klezmer revivalists" and "postklezmer Radical Jewish Culture makers" (22) as a model, ignoring the aesthetic gap between the majority of klezmer revivalists and the movement of experimental improvisers around composer-saxophonist John Zorn, which has been examined in the work of Tamar Barzel and others. At the same time, while Freedman recognizes on some level that the klezmer revival has split into factions—one of the largest has a distinctly conservative artistic streak—he tends to focus on the work of a small number of innovative klezmer musicians. He speaks of the New York-based Klezmatics as if they represented the klezmer revival—which has room for interpretations ranging from representations of nineteenth-century East European style to reconstructions of early- to mid-twentieth century American klezmer, to contemporary fusions with a wide range of other musical styles—in its entirety. He views the Klezmatics as creators of a "new form of radical Jewish culture," which completely misses their important role in ushering klezmer and Yiddish music into the realm of world pop music, a place where the radical plays a very small role. Finally, Freedman misunderstands the role played by the original generation of immigrant musicians such as clarinetist Naftule Brandwein in the early decades of the twentieth century in urban centers like New York.

What appeals most to Freedman about klezmer, both historically and in the present, is "its relentless hybridity, its negotiation between the soundscapes of a traditional religious culture and those of the larger, circumambient world." (76) Here he views Brandwein in particular as representative of the experimental end of klezmer music at that time, yet my own research shows that he was regarded in his day as the quintessentially old-fashioned, European player by the younger musicians with whom he worked.

One might ask, what does all of this have to do with a work that covers far-reaching topics ranging from the role of Jews and "queer diasporism" in Tony Kushner's Angels in America, to Jewish and ethnic masculinity in Arthur Miller's marriage to Marilyn Monroe, the latent antisemitism without Jews in the Left Behind series of Christian-right literature, Philip Roth's novel of racial passing, The Human...