Re: Mitzvah music and dance

[Gwynne Sigel <gbs...>]

First, A hearty thanks to all of you who sent me suggestions regarding 
sources to read and networking strategies...

Second, this question of folk culture has long been of great interest to 
me.. A number of year s ago I conducted a folk history study of  the 
Detroit (Michigan)  Jewish immigrant-left community from the 1930's. For 
these Jews, group identity was rich and complex, a reflection of their 
identification and involvement as Jews, left wingers and east european 
immigrants. In my study, I looked at the question of how this 
group  preserved and transmitted its sense of  group identity through the 
cultural and political institutions and traditions they created,  as well 
as their political and artistic activities.

While I was,  in part, interested in how the "tradiitonal" east european 
jewish folk culture was preserved in this new environment, what I found to 
be most crucial to this whole process of cultural preservation and 
transmission was how the "new /eastern european-American folk culture" was 
"lived" and "expressed"  every day, through people's activities, work, 
relationships as well as through cultural entities such as choruses, 
theatre troupes, radio program, reastaurants and other institutions.

Yes,  the "Detroit folk culture " became a very different culture from the 
one these Jews had known  in Europe, though was an incredibly rich and 
interesting one, because of how it integrated  the many  strands of their 
"old world" culture with the"new American-immigrant-Jewish-left wing 
culture that they were creating in Detroit.

I think that those of us who are a few generations removed from the lives 
of the immigrant generation are rightly concerned about how we can 
effectively preserve some sense of  substantive  Jewish identity, given the 
absence of  geographically self -contained, relatively autonomous 
communities which lack  the "purity"of  old wold traditions.  Yet, I also 
beleive that we are in fact continuing a kind of folk process through which 
we are creating  and living new forms of jewish folk culture, just as many 
of four immigrant grandparents did more than half a century ago.  That we 
continue to keep these important questions alive suggests that the culture 
will evolve in interesting, dynamic ways.

Gwynne
   political and Jewish into their lives with the new   strands of "old" 
with differnet pieces of  , while integrating political identity
  it was the ways in which the "new" culture was lived and expressed  that 
became my core focus.  And it is this aspect of I  (from East European 
lifeWhile there were many

   At 07:32 AM 7/19/02 -0600, you wrote:
>" I  don't think we musicians and dancers are creating a revised folk
>culture out of wholly new cloth, but we are recreating it from shreds
>and pieces."
>
>There's a quote just like that in Judith Brin Ingber's article "Jewish Dance
>in Poland between World War I and World War II"
>
>In the article, Jacek Luminski, a Polish dancer who took an interest in
>Yiddish dance and conducted fieldwork in Poland with Judith, compared the
>process to  "trying to eat a wedding cake when only crumbs were left on a
>plate from festivities held years before."
>
>Some of the  elderly informants were so feeble that they were
>unable to show the dances to Jacek and Judith.  Instead the researchers had
>to try to reconstruct the movements using verbal  instructions and
>corrections given by the informants.
>
>
>Helen
>


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