Introduction
Music and the American West are oft-neglected topics in Jewish studies. Compared to other aspects of the Jewish experience, music is rarely engaged in as a subject unto itself. That which is written tends to be confined either to remote musicological studies and specialized professional journals, or tangential anecdotes in writings on other things. Thus, despite being a central sustaining element of Jewish life, music generally takes a backseat in the social-historical narrative. Reasons for this include the emphasis on text study in Jewish communities, the presumed secondary status of music vis-à-vis text, the requisite skill set for assessing and analyzing music, and the relatively recent historical moment when Jews began notating their music and calling it “Jewish” (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). Musicologist Edwin Seroussi calls music the “Jew” of Jewish studies, referencing its marginalized and “wandering” status in the larger field. He notes the absence of “music” in the indexes of most textbooks on Jewish cultural history. This is true even for books where musical information would make obvious sense.
Jewish life in the American West receives a similar treatment. Until recently, historians of the region paid little attention to the Jewish experience. American Jewish history mostly gazes east of the Mississippi—so much so that Marc Lee Raphael admonished fellow historians to look “beyond New York” and to abandon the distorted view of New York as “typical” for all American Jews. A more profitable generalization came from Mordecai Kaplan, who presented on American Judaism at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, Los Angeles in the late 1950s. Kaplan was asked to identify the fundamental difference between Jews in Los Angeles and on the East Coast. His answer: Jews came west to start a new life, not to repeat the patterns of the past (i.e., not to cling to European folkways). In some sense, Kaplan’s comments are best applied to immigrants. In both East and West the native-born second and subsequent generations were more ambivalent toward Judaism and its historic European center. However, the pioneer spirit that fueled westward migration remained—and still remains—in the landscapes they helped to cultivate.
Only a few general texts mention Jews, music, and the American West together. An example is Lee J. Levinger’s A History of the Jews in the United States, published in the 1930s. The brief chapter on “Jews Who Have Contributed to American Literature, Science, and Art” mentions just three musicians by name: Mischa Elman, a Russian-born prodigy violinist who settled in New York at age sixteen; Yehudi Menuhin, another violin prodigy who was born in New York and raised in San Francisco; and Ernest Bloch, a Swiss-born composer who came to the United States in 1916, directed the San Francisco Conservatory of Music from 1925 to 1930, and spent the final period of his life in Oregon. It is a testament to San Francisco’s preoccupation with the arts that musicians linked to that city occupy the two pages on music in Levinger’s centuries-spanning 570-page book.
A fuller picture of Jewish musical movers and shakers in San Francisco would have to wait for Fred Rosenbaum’s Cosmopolitans: A Social & Cultural History of the Jews of the San Francisco Bay Area (2009). More typical is Max Vorspan’s and Lloyd P. Gardner’s History of the Jews of Los Angeles (1970), which chronicles the development of Jewish communities in Southern California’s metropolis from the 1850s to the date of publication. Music, when acknowledged at all, is an incidental part of a larger story, such as an organist’s involvement in a specific congregation. This approach is remedied indirectly in Kenneth H. Marcus’s Musical Metropolis: Los Angeles and the Creation of a Music Culture (2004), which does not look at Jewish communities per se, but examines the lives and contributions of several musicians who happened to be Jewish.
Furthermore, biographies of Jewish musicians in the West tend to overlook or minimize the musicians’ Jewish identities. This is most apparent in writings on Jewish émigré film composers who fashioned the “Hollywood Sound” beginning in the 1930s. More attention is given to their contributions than to a Jewish backdrop, in part because the majority of composers were “Jews in name only.” Surprisingly, the only scholarly attempt to tease out the Jewish cultural underpinnings of “Golden Age” film music is a short article I wrote at the request of the Western States Jewish History Association.
Western States Jewish History
Scottish historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle observed, “History is the essence of innumerable biographies.” This bottom-up view appreciates the contributions of individuals and local communities, renowned or otherwise, to the composite history of a given period and place. The eclectic stories comprising the early Jewish presence in the American West owe tribute to Dr. Norton Stern (1920-1992), a California-based optometrist, Hebrew school principal, “one-man research center,” and founder of the Western States Jewish Historical Quarterly (est. 1968; now Western States Jewish History). Rabbi William Kramer (1920-2004), Norton’s longtime associate editor, collaborator, and research trip companion, recalled: “Until Norton, records of Jewish life in the early West were scattered, and largely commemorative. He pioneered the documentation and publication of western Jewish history in the quarterly. I occasionally lent him a hand, and his wife Millie helped him with the mailing, but mostly he worked alone, and with minimal equipment. Norton did all his writing on a battered manual typewriter in a corner of his garbage. He even did the photography himself.”
Stern’s methodology was as unique as it was necessary. He traveled throughout California photographing old tombstones in Jewish cemeteries. He searched local newspapers for notices about the deceased. In the process, he stumbled upon references to other local Jews and Jewish organizations. He then sought out descendants for interviews. All of this was done without microfilm and long before the Internet. Together with Kramer, Stern amassed an archive of thousands of documents: photographs, newspaper articles, advertisements, political membership lists, government documents, family records, receipts, letters, diaries, interviews, posters, business cards, and so on. Stern’s painstaking work made him “a father of Jewish history of the American West.” Without his tireless work of compiling, analyzing, and systematizing source materials, we would know much less about the contributions of Jews to the West.
It is somewhat disheartening that academics indebted to Stern’s journal portray it as “quasi-scholarly but useful.” The journal’s eagerness to publish memoirs and short personal pieces (alongside rigorous articles) has greatly assisted professional historians in drawing conclusions about the region. For example, John Livingston, a late history professor and former chair of the academic council of the American Jewish Historical Society, used the “innumerable biographies” to revise the traditional periodization of American Jewish history for the Western States.
The standard outline is divided into four periods: (1) 1654-1820, dominated by Sephardic Jews; (2) 1820-1881, Jewish immigration from German states; (3) 1881-1924, massive influx of Eastern European Jews; (4) 1924-present, end of major immigration and consolidation of a greater American Jewish community. Livingston’s Western revision has three phases: (1) 1848-1890, westward movement and settlement from the Eastern United States and Central Europe; (2) 1890-1941, decline of westward migration and rise of Eastern European populations in the Northeast and Midwest; (3) 1941-present, second westward migration and renewal of the Jewish presence in the West. An additional musical period could be added for European Jewish musicians who came to Southern California in the 1930s and 40s.
Certain factors motivated this demarcated history and the many individual stories it contains. For one thing, Jews who came to the West in the early years were less religious than those who stayed in Europe or the East Coast. Pious Jews needed close-knit communities that provided access to kosher food, a mikvah, and a synagogue within walking distance. Most Western Jewish settlers only attended services during High Holidays (often in a home using a printed Torah), and were more likely to set up cemeteries and burial societies than synagogues. A musical illustration of religious laxity appeared in the Los Angeles Star in 1864: “Los Angeles has acquired a really ‘elegant’ theater: Child’s Opera House. About this time, Al Levy took up his stand in front of the Opera House with his little push cart and his famous California oyster cocktails.”
Historians also cite the relative absence of anti-Semitism in the West compared to elsewhere in the United States, especially in the Northeast. Embracing the ethos of the self-made “Western man,” Jews became successful bankers, merchants, and businessmen. They were elected to public office at nearly every level, despite forming an insignificant part of the electorate. They were welcomed into elite circles in San Francisco at a time when their New York brethren were excluded from high society.
Moreover, Jews engaged in interreligious cooperation much earlier and with more ease than in the rest of the country. Will Herberg’s thesis that Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism provided three paths for becoming “American” did not apply to the West. Ferenc Morton Szasz wrote, “in a number of areas—San Francisco, Portland, Boise, Fargo, Denver, and so forth—the three historic faiths had long been viewed as roughly equal. Even more provincial regions such as Albuquerque, Salt Lake City, and Oklahoma City had witnessed modest Protestant-Catholic-Jewish interaction.”
Civic commitment was another common trait. Jews were often the first in town to create organizations, usually benevolent societies, and helped found charity organizations, hospitals, and fraternal lodges. One exemplar was Abraham Frankum Frankenstein, founding director of the Orpheum Theatre orchestra in Los Angeles (est. 1898) and composer of California’s official state song, “I Love You California” (1913). Frankenstein held leadership posts in a variety of private and municipal organizations, including the Musicians Mutual Protective Association (Local 47), the Los Angeles Fire Commission, and the Knights Templar. He organized bands for the Los Angeles Fire and Police Departments, and led the combined bands in the Rose Parade of 1923.
The West was also characterized by decentralization. In 1877, eighty-four percent of Western Jews resided in California, primarily due to the Gold Rush and the settlement that followed. However, the population was not concentrated in a single spot. According to the United States Census, Jews resided in more communities in California than anywhere else in the Union, including New York. The fledgling towns constituted an “unstructured and totally new society” where Jews were afforded “near instant certification” as Americans.
Similar patterns existed in surrounding states. Kenneth H. Marcus links decentralization to the music culture of Southern California, where geographic dispersion prevented the central city, Los Angeles, from exerting a musical hegemony. Southland orchestras, choral groups, and pageant associations exhibited great diversification, and the “dispersal of the region’s inhabitants, made possible by the automobile and the electric rail line, directly affected both the production and performance of music.” This meant that Jewish commercial musicians were free to invent their own sounds, and that synagogues were not beholden to establishment norms, as they were back East. The situation remained much the same well into the twentieth century and even to today.
Defining the Subject
Music is not well integrated into the Jewish cultural history of the Western States. The forty-year index of Western States Jewish History, published in 2008, shows a preference for entrepreneurs, bankers, business owners, lawyers, doctors, real estate developers, tradespeople, and the like. Of the 750 mostly biographical articles, just twenty concern musicians. Four of these are two-part essays, two others profile the same person, and one only marginally touches on music. My own work as the journal’s historical music editor since the winter of 2011 has yielded a handful of additional articles, but considerable work is still needed.
As with any responsible book dealing with a broad topic, certain terms need to be defined—specifically, “Jewish music,” “pioneers,” and “American West.” The delimitation of Jewish music, or music of the Jews, takes three standard forms. The first is “Jews in music,” where “Jewishness” is found in a notable musician’s background or affiliation, but not necessarily in the music itself. This approach is sometimes referred to as “ethnic” (although “peoplehood” is perhaps more accurate). Gdal Saleski epitomized the method in his 1949 book, Famous Musicians of Jewish Origin, writing in the third person: “He realizes that a number of those included, though reputed of Jewish origin, are now of a different faith. He is not concerned with their religion, past or present, but solely with their ethnic roots.”
The second approach considers the music itself, or “Jewish in music.” The identifying feature is the thematic content of the music, whether vocal or instrumental. This includes works based on the Hebrew Bible (from a Jewish perspective), liturgical settings, holiday subjects, rabbinic teachings, mystical texts, the Holocaust, Zionism, Jewish life (folksongs), and so forth. More often than not, such listings insist that the composers are Jewish according to halakha (having a Jewish mother or, more liberally, a Jewish parent) and/or self-identify as Jews.
The third approach is functional, or what Curt Sachs famously called “that music which is made by Jews, for Jews, as Jews.” Attention is given to music for Jewish purposes and within Jewish communities. However, despite the appearance of incontestability, this method, as defined by Sachs, has some flaws. Too much stress is placed on the identity of the composer/performer and audience, both of which can be non-Jews. Examples include Max Bruch’s celebrated Kol Nidre, Op. 47, Dmitri Shostakovich’s From Jewish Poetry, Op. 79, and the contemporary klezmer revival in Poland, which largely consists of Gentiles playing for other Gentiles. In light of these and other exceptions, Sachs’s definition might be broadened to include any music that is performed and received as “Jewish,” regardless of who makes it.
The biographical sketches in this book speak to all three of these parameters. There are Jews who occupied themselves with general music, including classical pianist Anna Hertzberg, who founded the Tuesday Musical Club of San Antonio, Rabbi Mendel Silber, who studied the Jews’ involvement in European concert music, and Allie Wrubel, who wrote popular songs for major Hollywood films. Others created, performed, critiqued, or promoted music of expressly Jewish content, including composer Frederick Jacobi, cantors Reuben Rinder, Leib Glantz, and Samuel Fordis, theater director Jerome H. Bayer, synagogue music director Chuck Feldman, and Rabbi Wolli Kaelter. There are also two non-Jews who contributed to Jewish musical life: Margaret Blake Alverson, who sang in Bay Area choirs during the late nineteenth century, and Pearle Irene Odell, a Progressive Era educator who started the Neighborhood Music Settlement in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles.
Each of these individuals was a pioneer—a term not limited to the pioneer period of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather, it is used in the broader sense of blazing trails and weaving significant contributions into the cultural tapestry. Each embodied the pioneer spirit, wherein “integrity, intelligence, hard work, and some good luck” was the self-determined passport to success. Their optimism sprang from the soil they stood upon. What Rabbi Leonard Beerman said about Los Angeles in the early 1950s could apply to the entire West: “This was a place not known for following everybody else. A place where somebody like me could come along, stir things up, and not get kicked out.”
This book adopts the normative regional designation of the American West: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. That being said, eight of the ten chapters are situated in or near Los Angeles and San Francisco, with the remaining two centered in Albuquerque, New Mexico and San Antonio, Texas. Other states, such as Oregon and Washington, are touched upon along the way. The unevenness of geographic distribution is a byproduct of the subject matter: densely populated and resource-rich cities provide many more opportunities in the arts than smaller communities. For example, by the turn of last century, nearly five hundred music teachers had relocated to Los Angeles, making it the music education center of the West. My goal was not to select representatives from each of the Western States. Instead, they represent the wider world of music: singers and instrumentalists, composers and performers, sacred and secular musicians, educators and directors, scholars and enthusiasts.
The resulting picture conforms to patterns of Western history-writing, as historian William Deverell explains:
Our attention as scholars of the Jewish American experience, if it has come West at all, has tended to focus on urban areas: places such as Denver, Salt Lake, and, especially, Los Angeles and San Francisco. There are good reasons for this, of course, with demography leading the way: these were the centers of Jewish life, commerce, and culture, and historians are right to focus on them.
Nevertheless, Jews did settle in “outlying areas,” and there were a few worthy musicians among them.
It is not the purpose nor goal of this book to turn over rocks in remote parts of the West. However, in its own way, the area covered is just as crucial to the understanding of Jewish life in the region. As stated at the beginning of this introduction, music is not given the space it deserves in Jewish studies, and scholarship on the Western States is no exception. To help offset this trend, I offer the following stories of important, yet mostly little-known, musical pioneers.
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