Tulane to host Jewish Music Forum Sunday-Monday
Tulane University will serve as the host conference site for the Jewish Music Forum titled “From Europe to New Orleans: Jewish Music Past and Present.” It all begins with a free concert at Tulane’s Dixon Recital Hall of 19th and 20th Century synagogue music featuring local cantors and the Tulane University Choir conducted by C. Leonard Raybon on Sunday night. Tulane provost Michael Bernstein will welcome all to the kickoff for the conference at 7:00 p.m.
A reception hosted by the Newcomb Department of Music will follow in Dixon Room 118 at 8:00 p.m., immediately following the concert.
Local Jews like clarinetist Meyer Weinberg and Godfrey Hirsch were featured in big name bands like Louis Prima's group, pictured here in 1937. (Photo courtesy the William Hogan Jazz Archives, Tulane University)
Cantorial soloist Victoria May Cohen from Congregation Gates of Prayer in Metairie and New Orleans Cantors Jamie Marx and Joel Colman from Touro Synagogue and Temple Sinai, respectively, will take center stage as part of the concert put on by the Jewish Music forum, a project of the the American Society for Jewish Music. Founded in 2004, the Jewish Music Forum is now in its eighth season.
This marks the first time the Jewish Music Forum has chosen Tulane as a site for a conference, having had similar venues like Brandeis University in 2011 on German Jewry. The conference will feature three sessions throughout the day with academic focus on history and musicology. Tulane professor John Baron will join with Michael Leavitt, the president of the American Society for Jewish Music, in welcoming the public to the first session that begins at 9:00 a.m. at the Rogers Memorial Chapel on Broadway at Oak Street.
The first of three academic sessions will begin with a study of “European Roots of American Jewish Music.” Brian Horowitz, the department chair of Jewish Studies, will present “Recording on a Gravestone: the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition of 1912-1914 and Jewish Music.”
Kligman
Horowitz will be joined by musicologist professor Mark Kligman of the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) in New York, the college from which both Cantors Marx and Colman were invested. Kligman’s talk will be on “The Developing Sound of the Synagogue in the 19th Century: Western and Eastern European Liturgical Music.” Baron will serve as moderator on the panel.
Kligman is keen on renewing his friendships with Colman and Marx. “When I started HUC (-JIR) 20 years ago, Joel Colman was there,” he admitted. “Jamie wrote his thesis with me.”
According to Kligman, Tulane was chosen to host the forum because of the increase in the Jewish presence there. In addition to provost Bernstein and the strong Rohr Chabad Student Center and the Tulane Hillel Center organizations, Kligman points out that both Tulane University president Scott Cowen and the dean of the Tulane Medical School, Dr. Benjamin Sachs, are Jewish.
Judah Cohen
Tulane historian professor Michael Cohen will lead the next session on “American Adaptations of the European Experience.” His talk titled “From Minhag America to American Jewish Movements: Unity and Fragmentation in Nineteenth-Century American Judaism” will focus on a historical perspective, while Indiana University ethnomusicologist Judah Cohen will talk on “A New Sound for a New Place: Zimrath Yah and the Formation of American Judaism, 1871-1886.” That session will be moderated by Temple Sinai Rabbi Ed Paul Cohn.
Following a lunch break at the Kosher Cafeteria at Hillel, the final session will be presented on “Jews and Music in New Orleans vis-à-vis European Roots and American Experiences” with Jewish Music Forum executive director Amanda Scherbenske moderating.
Brandeis University historian professor Stephen Whitfield will speak on “The Jewish Experience in New Orleans,” while local architectural and music historian Jack Stewart will speak on “The Jewish Music Experience in New Orleans.” Stewart will have several photos to display of local Jews who assimilated quite readily into the local Jewish musical and, especially, the jazz community. That session will be moderated by local Jewish community leader and Zionist Bill Hess.
All sessions are free and open to the public. A final reception will be held from 4:30 – 5:30 p.m. on Monday at the Department of Jewish Studies, 7301 Freret Street. For more information click here.
