New York Noise: Radical Jewish Music and the Downtown Scene by Tamar Barzel (review)

The very notion of tradition involves a conundrum. In order to be an integral part of a group’s or an individual’s existence, tradition must remain a vital, living practice. That which belongs merely to the past is, by definition, dead. Life involves expansion, renewal, and accommodation to the vicissitudes of the present—even if that accommodation, in the case of tradition, often amounts to various forms of resistance. On the other hand, tradition cannot be unmoored from the past; it is an anchor to that past and thus prevents its adherents from drifting aimlessly in the unpredictable riptide of the present. This is why proselytizers for tradition emphasize the significance of traditional roles. This is exemplified for instance in the famous song “Tradition” from Fiddler on the Roof, in which the lyrics articulate not the activities shared by the group as a whole but rather activities apportioned to the roles of the “papa,” the “mama,” etc. These roles vouch-safe a sense of meaningful identity and purpose. I do what I do because that is what someone occupying my role in this tradition does and because a tradition is a social structure; others recognize that I am fulfilling my role, thus living a meaningful, purposeful life.

Marxism and existentialism (and indeed modernism, broadly speaking) criticize the assumption that our lives can be explained through the roles we occupy. This is what Jean-Paul Sartre terms “bad faith”; the important aspect of bad faith is that we are not only lying to ourselves, but we recognize it as a lie: we are not fooled. We accept these roles as explanatory of our lives, as guarantors of its meaning, only at the price of false consciousness. For Sartre, we simply are cut adrift in the tidal surge of the present and our projects for the future; no tradition can meaningfully anchor us. Marx famously wrote that in modernism “all that is solid melts into air.” Traditional values were no longer a foundation on which we could build a solid framework for existence; we had become not only unmoored but had moved beyond the possibility of such security.

Postmodernism is not as openly dismissive of tradition as modernism. Rather post-modernism views the various traditions as part of a semiotic grab bag of fragmented signifiers, available for deployment in a ludic, indexical display. The reference to many (often irreconcilable) traditions points to various resources of meaning without investing in any of them. This simultaneously embraces the significance of tradition (as a unit of socially recognizable reference) and eviscerates it by reducing the tradition to just one more, ultimately empty, signifier. The individual, in this manner of thinking, is not tied to any meaningful role but rather able to cobble together any assemblage of meanings available to her without even the pretense of coherence. Tradition, by its own logic, demands that we paradoxically find our individuality within pre-established social roles. I am what I am because of my position within a group that coheres, owing, at least to some degree, to the sacrifice of individuality on the altar of shared (traditional) beliefs and values. Modernism and postmodernism demand that we recognize that sense of identity as false consciousness or as one pretense toward meaning that is no more valuable than any other.

This is the conundrum that the protagonists of a new monograph by Tamar Barzel found themselves facing in the Lower East Side of New York City in the 1990s. New York Noise: Radical Jewish Music and the Downtown Scene traces the emergence of what she terms the RJC moment from 1992 to 1998 among a group of Jewish-American musicians embedded in the downtown experimental music scene. Radical Jewish Culture (RJC) was a term coined by...