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Sunday, October 29, 2006

At last, a CD to look forward to
Posted by Jill | 8:57 PM
Those who know me well know of my affinity for vintage popular music from before the rock 'n' roll era. One of my favorite radio programs is Rich Conaty's The Big Broadcast, which is on WFUV-FM from 8-11 Sunday nights, and which streams here. There are also treasure troves of vintage music on the Web, from the incomparable Red Hot Jazz Archive to the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project to the Antique Phonograph Music Program and Thomas Edison's Attic on WFMU.

But just ten days after the much anticipated opening of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan opens, the work of the forbears of Sacha Baron Cohen is being re-released in the form of a new CD, Jewface.

The New York Times explains:

But probably few of those shocked by the movie realize that long before Mr. Cohen shed his Ali G persona for Borat’s ill-fitting suit — in fact, long before the 1929 stock market crash — Berlin, the songwriter behind “White Christmas” and “God Bless America,” was reeling off satirical songs about Jews that might seem dodgy on the “Borat” soundtrack. One such Berlin number, “Cohen Owes Me Ninety-Seven Dollars,” from 1916, concerns a businessman on his deathbed who cannot stop fretting over his unrepaid i.o.u.’s.

This song and others by long-dead Tin Pan Alley songwriters are featured on a new compact disc, “Jewface,” which is aimed not at the History Channel crowd, but at a hipper audience. The album, to be released Nov. 14, contains 16 songs salvaged from wax cylinder recordings and scratchy 78s, from a century-old genre that is essentially Jewish minstrelsy. Often known as Jewish dialect music, it was performed in vaudeville houses by singers in hooked putty noses, oversize derbies and tattered overcoats. Highly popular, if controversial, in its day, it has been largely lost to history — perhaps justifiably.

“It’s like Hitler’s playlist, but it’s not, because it was actually Fanny Brice’s playlist,” said Jody Rosen, 37, a music critic for the online magazine Slate, who has spent more than a decade researching the genre. (Brice was the Ziegfeld-era singer and comedian played by Barbra Streisand in “Funny Girl.”) “It’s a more complicated and nuanced vision of Jewish history than what you absorb at Hebrew school.”

Mr. Holt pointed out that such dialect music was usually performed by Jews and was popular among Jewish as well as non-Jewish audiences when it was released. For many immigrants, laughing at even newer arrivals from the Old World was a way to make themselves feel more at home in their adopted country.

But even after a century, the music carries the potential to shock. “My Yiddisha Mammy,” a 1922 riff on Al Jolson’s “Mammy,” written by Eddie Cantor and others, may offend contemporary Jews and African-Americans equally with lyrics like these:

I’ve got a mammy,

But she don’t come from Alabammy.

Her heart is filled with love and real sentiment,

Her cabin door is in a Bronx tenement.

The “Jewface” project, however, does have historical as well as musical value, said Jeffrey Magee, an associate professor of musicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“This album is a big step in repossessing this stuff that has been muted for a century,” said Dr. Magee, who explained that this music was generally ignored, except in academic works, by earlier generations of American Jews, who were trying to assimilate and wanted to run from painful stereotypes, not explore them. (Other groups, like the Irish and Italians, had their own vaudeville self-parodies.)

“Some generations had to come and go,” Dr. Magee said, “before younger people could listen with fresh ears, say: ‘Hey, let’s listen to this. It’s not us, but it’s our predecessors.’ ”

Many Jews in the vaudeville era ran from this music. In 1909, Mr. Rosen writes in the album liner notes, a prominent Reform rabbi said that such Hebrew comedy was “the cause of greater prejudice against the Jews as a class than all other causes combined,” and that same year it was denounced by the Central Conference of American Rabbis.

Kenneth Jacobsen, the deputy national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said that a project like this “gets very complicated.” It is on the one hand comedy, and that it was usually performed by Jews softens its impact. Still, he said, “our experience in this kind of thing is that inevitably somebody will probably use this for not such good purposes.”


Forget the shandeh far di goyim factor. I for one can't wait.
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