And We’re All Brothers: Singing in Yiddish in Contemporary North America by Abigail Wood (review)

It is a surprising fact that the tradition of Eastern European Jewish songs, written in a dying or at least “postvernacular” language (as coined by Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006]), continue to live on in such vibrant ways in the early twenty-first century, more than seven decades after the Holocaust. Indeed, as Abigail Wood’s monograph convincingly argues in some detail, Yiddish song and the singing thereof act as a kind of cultural linchpin for a community of contemporary Yiddishists that is centered in New York but stretches across North America and reaches over the Atlantic back to Europe. In this succinct and well-written reworking of her doctoral dissertation, Wood introduces the reader to a wide variety of contexts and functions for contemporary Yiddish singing, and explains how and why Yiddish song occupies this central place.

Rather than constructing a linear, overarching argument or narrative, Wood’s book offers a tour of diverse but overlapping sites within “Yiddishland” (the contemporary Yiddish cultural world) to shed light on the multifaceted and critical ways songs and singing function in and for the Yiddishland community. For some readers these seemingly disparate sites may feel jarringly haphazard. They include: songs used for teaching language, learning about and expressing Jewish culture, and commemorating the Holocaust (chapter 1); the discursive space opened up within printed anthologies of Yiddish song from 1945 onwards (chapter 2); the ideological and aesthetic uses for Yiddish in the klezmer revival as it negotiates past and present (chapter 3); the fraught creative spaces in klezmer music opened up by Jewish-American encounters with modern Europe (chapter 4); the role for Hasidic nigunim among non-Hasidic Yiddishists and this repertoire’s unique performance aesthetics (chapter 5); and, finally, the layered cultural dynamics of klezmer–hip-hop fusions embarked upon by younger Yiddishists (chapter 6). Trust Wood as she leads you on this circuitous journey through the music of Yiddishland. These snapshots of scenes in which Yiddish music and singing reside together offer a fascinating portrait of a colorful and complicated community, and thoroughly convince the reader that the community of Yiddishland was built around, through, and in Yiddish song and Yiddish singing.

While the book’s subtopics may sprawl all over the map of musical Yiddishland, there are key interrelated themes woven throughout Wood’s description that tie the book together in the absence of a central thesis. Not surprisingly, one such theme is the shadow of the Holocaust, which hovers heavily over the hermeneutics of Yiddish cultural life in North America. For many North American Jews of European descent, the sense of urgency to keep a language and culture that was almost lost alive is strong enough to prompt them to engage deeply with a post-vernacular language and culture that may be quite foreign to them. As Wood points out, this urgency can be seen more specifically in dynamics of “salvage ethnography” that accompanied much folk song collection after the war and that still lingers today (chapter 2). A post-Holocaust context is a prominent and complex dynamic of the popular reception of American klezmer in Germany and Poland as well (chapter 3), where the combination of audiences grappling with post-Holocaust German and Polish identities and governments who supported Jewish culture within their borders allowed Jewish-American klezmer to flourish there. The ensuing encounters of Jewish-Americans on klezmer tours within the traumatic historical Holocaust spaces of Europe sometimes prompted complex and overwhelming feelings which were expressed creatively in new klezmer musical material (chapter 4).

Another theme running through the book is how the contemporary community of Yiddishland is imagined by its participants in ways that are idealistic and “utopic.” (Wood uses “utopic” rather than “utopian” in a way that is non-pejorative and seems to suggest a discursive...