re: making judaism cool

[Rachel Fischer <ruchelk...>]

Hi everyone!
    Thanks, Ari, for letting us know about that article.  It's a very
good discussion piece.  I'll introduce myself first, since I don't say
much on the list.  I'm Rachel, 17, and will be going to u. of Hartford
in the fall.  I play flute/piccolo with the Maxwell St. Junior Klezmer
Orchestra.  I've been playing klezmer music on and off for seven years
and hope to continue.  Somehow my mom found out about the band starting
up, when I was in 6th grade, and I thought it would be a good experience
to learn the music of my culture.  At first I thought it would just be
Hava Nagila type of songs, but when I actually started playing it I
realized it was very different and "cool".  I guess I might be
considered one of the Radical Jewish Culture people, although I never
thought about it till recently.  I did go to Sunday school, but my
parents raised me in way that made Judaism my culture and not just a
religion.
    I read that article very carefully and found several points I
disagree with.  I'll just stick with the music subject, though.  To me
the author doesn't like the direction that klezmer music is going in,
and infact doesn't like where it went in the first half of the 20th
cen.  With his use of quotation marks it seems to me that he doesn't
think that that music was truly klezmer music, because it was a little
different than what was played in Europe.  Klezmer music along with this
world is constantly changing.  Music is like a language.  It has to
change with the time, or else people will loose interest and it will be
lost.  People always borrow  words from other languages and music from
other cultures, and I don't think there is anything wrong with that.  In
the latter part of the first half of the 20th cen.  people were loosing
interest in klezmer music because of the popularity of jazz.  Besides
making klezmer music interesting in a different way, historically, it
helped keep people interested in it.
    Today, it's a little different.  I don't know first hand about the
revival, since it happened when I was very young and didn't even know it
was a revival when I started playing klezmer music.  I like literally
all kinds of klezmer.  At the Midwest Klezmer weekend, Avi Hoffman spoke
in a lecture about yiddish culture.  He said that the revival has to do
with the "third generation effect."  That is when the third generation
of a family that immigrated to another country like america becomes
interested in learning about their culture.  The first generation wanted
to asssimilate and didn't pass down much and so the 2nd generation is
very assimilated.  Right now there are many of those third generation
members, like me, trying to find out more about their culture.  A lot of
them feel very connected to american culture, which is a mish mosh of
many cultures around the world.  Reggae, for example, has always been
popular.  To me it's almost a natural occurance that someone Jewish who
likes Reggae would come up with Jewish Reggae.  I personally don't like
the lyrics of the example in the article.  They are just combining two
things they are familiar with.  Kind of like cross polination of a
flower that doesn't happen naturally.
    As for religion being more popular, I don't think it has much to do
with the music.  It's not only Judaism.  There are many people I know,
from unrelilgious families, that have done there own research and have
turned to other religions, particularly Christianity, Budhism, and
Taoism.
    I think I'll stop there for now, since this is the first post about
it.
rachel

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