American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots

11. Why We Do This Anyway: Klezmer as Jewish Youth Subculture

In this chapter, I expand on some of the points Frank London has made, in his overview of the revival, regarding the variety of motivations for “reviving” klezmer among performers and audiences. I also offer my own understanding of why we’re doing this to begin with. I look at the phenomenon of the klezmer revival from a sociological point of view, in the context of some larger trends in American Jewish life that have been emerging over the past two decades, and I’ll speak not as a scholar presenting research (which I’m not) but as one of the participants in the phenomenon and someone who has promoted a particular use of klezmer and a direction for its future. I’ll finish with my own personal klezmer manifesto. I’m not going to try to cover all the reasons people have been drawn to klezmer, so I’m not going to talk, for example, about the fact that many musicians and listeners, both Jewish and non-Jewish, take a purely musical interest in the genre; what I’m addressing here specifically is the role of the revival in the American Jewish cultural scene. Since the social upheavals and the ethnic-identity or “roots” movements of the 1960s and 1970s, American Jews, especially young American Jews, have been looking for new ways to negotiate our Jewishness in America. Three movements in particular have emerged that address the needs of Jews who reject the assimilationist model of the previous generation, but who haven’t felt an affinity for, or haven’t felt satisfied by, the Israel-centered alternative, and who want to create a new, strong chapter 11 Why We Do This Anyway Klezmer as Jewish Youth Subculture alicia svigals 211 sense of Jewish identity and community. I situate the klezmer revival within the framework of these three movements. The first two are made up of Jews who identify with the progressive left. These are people who are looking for a way of being Jewish that is consonant with their feminist, gay-positive, and other new-left values and that does away with the social strictures of the past: that is, a way of being Jewish while still being themselves. They approach the problem from two very different directions. The Havurah/Jewish Renewal approach locates the social conservatism of the traditional Jewish world in traditional Jewish culture. It selectively revives religious observance, but leaves out the traditional overtones that evoke an old-fashioned and restrictive way of life. This model conceives of religion as timeless spirituality and seeks to distill it from the culture to create a new kind of religion-centered Jewishness. Jewish renewal folks have modified the liturgy to reflect their progressive and feminist worldview and have sometimes drawn on non-Jewish sources, such as eastern religions and New Age concepts, in reworking religious material. The result is Judaism without much Yidishkayt. The cultural secularist model, which I’ll call Yiddishism, on the other hand, locates the conservatism of traditional Judaism in the religion. It looks to Ashkenazic Yiddish culture as the source of a rich Jewish identity and proposes to salvage that culture—its language, literature, and, most importantly for our purposes, its music—but for the most part discards religious observance. These two movements clearly have their antecedents in Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism and in YIVO and Workmen’s Circle Yiddishism , but the advent of the new left, ethnic consciousness, and identity politics has put a whole new spin on those old ideas. Finally, there’s the traditionalist model of the Ba’al T’shuvah movements , which embraces both the culture and the religion of the past unabashedly as a source of identity and community, without concern for the issues with which Jewish renewal and secular cultural Jews are grappling. Of these three movements—the one that discards the culture and keeps the religion, the one that discards the religion and keeps the culture , and the one that uncritically embraces both—I would argue that the klezmer revival has been the province of the second, of the “cultural Jews.” Of course, the audience for klezmer isn’t limited to that group— in fact, it has a wide appeal for all kinds of Jews, not to mention plenty 212 Alicia Svigals of non-Jews. But there’s a special relationship between the klezmer revival and the secular Yiddishist movement that...