Re: making judaism cool

[Eliezer Kaplan <zelwel...>]

> 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.

That is a theory of Margaret Mead's. I'm not so sure it applies here, unless
you're talking primarily about the descendents of Holocaust survivors whose
families fled to America. I feel as if the 'yishuv' here is for the most
part older than that.
                                EK



----- Original Message -----
From: Rachel Fischer <ruchelk (at) mediaone(dot)net>
To: World music from a Jewish slant <jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 20, 2000 1:14 PM
Subject: re: making judaism cool


> 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
>
>
>

---------------------- jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org ---------------------+