University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Undergraduate Humanities Forum 2009-2010: Penn Humanities Forum Undergraduate Connections Research Fellows 4-2010 Sampling the Shtetl: Reinventing American Jewish Identity through Hip Hop Meredith R. Aska McBride University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/uhf_2010 Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Aska McBride, Meredith R., "Sampling the Shtetl: Reinventing American Jewish Identity through Hip Hop" (2010). Undergraduate Humanities Forum 2009-2010: Connections. 1. https://repository.upenn.edu/uhf_2010/1 Suggested Citation: Aska McBride, Meredith. (2010). "Sampling the Shtetl: Reinventing American Jewish Identity through Hip Hop." 2009-2010 Penn Humanities Forum on Connections. This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/uhf_2010/1 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Sampling the Shtetl: Reinventing American Jewish Identity through Hip Hop Disciplines Arts and Humanities Comments Suggested Citation: Aska McBride, Meredith. (2010). "Sampling the Shtetl: Reinventing American Jewish Identity through Hip Hop." 2009-2010 Penn Humanities Forum on Connections. This other is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/uhf_2010/1 0 Sampling the Shtetl Reinventing American Jewish Identity through Hip Hop Meredith R. Aska McBride 2009–2010 Penn Humanities Forum Undergraduate Mellon Research Fellowship Penn Humanities Forum Mellon Undergraduate Research Fellowship, Final Paper April 2010 Meredith R. Aska McBride, College ‘10 CONTENTS Acknowledgments and Note on Non-English Words 1 Introduction 2 Klezmering Up: An Alternative History of Ashkenazi Jewish Music in 8 the United States Textuality, Tradition and Modernity: Orthodox Jewish Music in the 42 United States from World War II to the Present The New Portable Homelands: Material Culture, (Post)vernacularity, 77 and Rethinking Diasporic Nationalism Case Study: SoCalled 108 Case Study: Matisyahu 153 Conclusion 188 Glossary of Non-English Words 200 Bibliography 205 Penn Humanities Forum Mellon Undergraduate Research Fellowship, Final Paper April 2010 Meredith R. Aska McBride, College ‘10 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am incredibly grateful for the support of the University of Pennsylvania Undergraduate Humanities Forum and to the Mellon Foundation, which provided funding for this project, along with the Penn UHF faculty advisor, Karen Detlefsen, staff, and the other 2009-2010 fellows. I am, if possible, even more grateful to my advisor in the Penn Department of Music, Tim Rommen, who has been key in helping me design the project, organizing my thinking and research, and providing ongoing commentary and support. I also appreciate the other faculty in the department who have had a profound impact on me over the past several years, notably Carol Muller, Guy Ramsey and David Yang, as well as Talya Fishman in Religious Studies and SAS Dean of Advising Janet Tighe. My rabbi, Lauren Grabelle Hermann at Congregation Kol Tzedek, and Rabbi Michael Uram and Debbie Yunker at Penn Hillel have been invaluable sources of Jewish learning and guidance intellectually as well as spiritually. Finally, thanks to my parents, siblings, extended family and friends who have supported and encouraged me throughout my life and education—and to my partner, Matt Meltzer, my chavrutah. A NOTE ON NON-ENGLISH WORDS The communities whose music I analyze here speak or have spoken a variety of languages and dialects thereof, primarily English, Hebrew and Yiddish. To give a sense of the multilingual milieu and frequent code-switching of these communities, I generally do not translate or italicize words that are not standard English (i.e., comprehensible to most American English speakers) within the text. However, the first time they appear, I provide a translation or explanation in a footnote, and there will be a glossary at the back. Hebrew and Yiddish words are transliterated in order to be more easily comprehensible. I have not used any particular system of transliteration, instead choosing the most commonly-used romanization or one that I think will make the most phonetic sense to English speakers. I have occasionally used less-common romanizations of particular words in order to preserve a sense of their idiomatic pronunciation in Hebrew or Yiddish (most notably “Chasid” instead of “Hasid”). Penn Humanities Forum Mellon Undergraduate Research Fellowship, Final Paper April 2010 Meredith R. Aska McBride, College ‘10 Aska McBride 2010 Introduction 2 INTRODUCTION In late March 2010, the hipster-Jewish online magazine Jewcy posted a YouTube video on its website that quickly went viral in the Jewish blogosphere. In it, a Chasidic wedding band welcomes the newlyweds to their reception to the tune of a Lady Gaga medley: the bandleader says, “Ladies and gentlemen, here they are, our favorite chosson and kallah!”, the brass section plays an excerpt from the beginning of the song “Bad Romance” out of a spiral-bound volume labeled, simply, “DANCE BOOK,” and the vocalists start singing “Everybody let’s get ready for Shaya and Perry, Shaya, Shaya and Perry…Shaya and Perry Weinberger!” to the tune of the chorus from “Paparazzi.” As the Weinbergers’ entrance is announced, the band seamlessly transitions into a traditional freylekhs while the camera pans across a sea of Chasidic men wearing black coats, fedoras and shtreimels, the traditional round fur hats worn on festive occasions. No one Penn Humanities Forum Mellon Undergraduate Research Fellowship, Final Paper April 2010 Meredith R. Aska McBride, College ‘10 Aska McBride 2010 Introduction 3 appears fazed in the slightest by the music. Jewcy and other blogs that linked to it, however, were incredulous and amused. Jewcy wrote, “This is one of those ‘see it to believe it’ situations”; Heeb compared it to the “success of YouTube vid ‘Kosher Face’” (Goldsher, Heeb ). Perhaps the Chasidim recognized that members of their communities have been reinterpreting the popular music of the countries in which they live for many years. Gaga may be the latest craze, but the process itself is not new. Jewcy should know this: it is affiliated with the record label JDub, which actively encourages creatively Jewish takes on popular music and launched the career of Chasidic star Matisyahu. Since mass Ashkenazi Jewish arrival in the United States between 1880 and 1920, Jews have been interacting with American popular music, creating a variety of styles generally derived in equal parts from African-American music and Jewish liturgical or folk music that address issues of Jewish identity and culture. The latest in this string of hybridizations has been Jewish hip-hop, which, for the past 25 years, has negotiated contemporary issues of race, ethnic identity, gender and diaspora, negotiating how to be both Jewish and American, what constitutes each of these identities, and the place of Jewish heritage and Jewish masculinity within the American binaries of race and gender. For these artists, hip-hop and related genres have been canvases against which to play out their own stories about America, religion and heritage, a microcosm of the past 50 years of demographic, institutional and ideological changes in the American Ashkenazi Jewish community. The compositional techniques of hip-hop have served as a way to organize, juxtapose and negotiate everything from the revival of klezmer to the Penn Humanities Forum Mellon Undergraduate Research Fellowship, Final Paper April 2010 Meredith R. Aska McBride, College ‘10 Aska McBride 2010 Introduction 4 uptick in stringent religious observance and from the aftermath of the Holocaust to the ever-evolving American Jewish relationship with the young state of Israel. Jewish musicians making overtly-Jewish hip-hop, are, notably, not generally part of the mainstream American hip-hop community. Several have collaborated upon occasion with mainstream hip-hop artists (such as the Wu-Tang Clan’s Killah Priest’s appearance on The SoCalled Seder ), but in general these artists form a community unto themselves, sampling and headlining for other Jewish acts and being nurtured by Jewish- oriented or specialty labels. Even Matisyahu, who has achieved worldwide fame, is often pigeonholed as a Chasidic novelty act despite his apparent desire not to be considered as such. While this work investigates some reasons why self-consciously Jewish artists may make use of hip-hop, and the theoretical and musical consequences of these stylistic choices, I do not generally address the history of musical interactions between American Jews and African-Americans, nor do I attempt to address whether this is “right” or “wrong” or constitutes appropriation. First, most Jewish artists who use musical styles derived from African-American cultural forms do so once those forms have penetrated American popular culture and thus learn them from the radio, music television and recordings instead of from engagement with African-American musical communities. Second, while the fact of these genres’ African-American origins is important for some aspects of the work Jewish hip-hop does, and Jewish jazz did, with respect to race, most artists working in these styles perceive them as “American” rather than “African- American.” This is a sign of the lasting influence of African-American music on American popular culture more than anything, a phenomenon with its own complex Penn Humanities Forum Mellon Undergraduate Research Fellowship,