january / february 2007:

What Color is Jewish Music?
Jewish musicians are gravitating towards African American music, but the underlying issues aren’t so black and white.

By Molly Beth Martin



As I was scrolling through the songs on my iPod the other day, I came to a personal epiphany. We Jews like African American music. I know this is nothing new. Where was I when jazz and the blues were new and big, or when rock and roll rose out of those jazz and blues cultures with plenty of Jewish musicians in the mix? Well, I wasn’t born yet, so cut me a little slack. But this idea is two-fold: not only do we like black music, but Jewish musicians like playing black music. Sure, we dabble in other musical forms too, but the list of Jewish musicians who play what has traditionally been black music is long and impressive (think the Hip Hop Hoodios, So Called, Y-love, and the Beastie Boys).

Why does African American music appeal to us so much? It’s possible we’re tired of being seen as part of a non-descript white culture, or maybe we just like what we like (hip hop is popular and thriving; why wouldn’t we like it?). But I’d be a disgrace to my Jewish upbringing if I didn’t ask the underlying question: So what does it all mean?

Eric Goldstein, author of The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and the American Identity, has suggested that Jews are now fighting against what they once sought as if it were the Holy Grail. After centuries of trying and succeeding to integrate into the white American majority, we’re now looking for ways to retain some separation by means of borrowing from black culture. Lucky for us, hip-hop is popular with mainstream America while still retaining an aura of the ethnic outsider. It’s a little convenient, and perhaps a little superficial, that we can take our cultural vitamins from black music and then eat our dinner with the white American majority.

But it’s more than that. Jews have a long and complex history with black music tracing back through the blues-infused melodies of Bob Dylan and Billy Joel, to the swing era’s Artie Shaw, to jazz enthusiast and innovator Irving Mills (a big-band era precursor of today’s Jewish hip-hop moguls and managers). Though many times the effects of these musicians have been positive, the road hasn’t always been pretty.

In 1927, Al Jolson (born Al Yoelson) starred in the first “talkie” movie, The Jazz Singer, playing a cantor’s son who wanted to sing jazz. Jews were still struggling then to assimilate and become an accepted part of the white majority, so performers like Jolson happily catered to WASP bigotry using blackface, vaudeville, and humor to entertain whites. Though these methods were certainly crass and insensitive in today’s terms, Jolson was just a performer, doing what performers did at the time. Clearly he is just one example, but the complex issues involved with Jolson’s performances mirror the complexity of the relationship between Jewish musicians and black music.

Jews, as minorities with white skin, have been in a unique situation in America. We’re connected to other minorities because we are a minority, and we’re connected to the majority because we look like them. So when we appropriate black music, we often take it with us into white culture and the music becomes mainstreamed. We walk a bridge of sorts, between white and black cultures, and at points we have helped to broaden that bridge and help others flood across it.

For example, in the early years of swing, Benny Goodman hired black musicians to tour with him when blacks and whites weren’t even allowed to play in the same venues. With Goodman’s white skin and sufficient success, he could afford to boycott the southern states, in which an integrated band would be cause for arrest. Irving Mills also contributed to building that bridge, and was once called the “Abraham Lincoln of music” for his promotion of black musicians. Along the same lines, Leonard and Phil Chess backed many black musicians through Chess Records during the formation of rock and roll. Goodman, Mills, and the Chess brothers (four Jews among many) certainly played a part in mainstreaming black music into white society, whether that was their goal or not.

So what does it mean that Jews still borrow black music? Did the musician So Called create the Hip Hop Haggadah (reviewed in our Jan/Feb ‘06 issue) to form a bridge between our two cultures? Probably not. Benny Goodman may have been trying to attack racial segregation less than he was trying to work with the best musicians in his field, so it’s hardly a crime to simply want to make good music.

But maybe So Called was drawn to the common tones between our communities. There is something in black music and culture, a confidence that might be what we as Jews are craving now as we struggle to form our own musical voice; or maybe we do just want to pass as outsiders without abdicating our white privilege. Whatever the reason, it’s probably unconscious on the part of our culture-crossing musicians, and that unconsciousness is the only real problem here.

Eric Goldstein is right, and he could even afford to take it a step further. Jews should certainly be scared of disappearing into the white majority. The key is to carry out our cultural appropriation consciously as a means to spark our own original musical ideas (there’s a big difference between having influences and being a hack). Until then, I’ll be eagerly awaiting a Kanye/Klezmer fusion to load onto my iPod.


If you'd like to comment on this article, email us a Letter to the Editor.