Academic
Jeremiah Lockwood is a scholar and musician, working in the fields of Jewish studies, performance studies and ethnomusicology. His work engages with issues arising from peering into the archive and imagining the power of “lost” forms of expression to articulate keenly felt needs in the present. Both his music performance and scholarship gravitate towards the Jewish liturgical music and Yiddish expressive culture of the early 20th century and the reverberations of this cultural moment in present day artistic and religious communities. Jeremiah’s research considers the work of cantors as arbiters of social, intellectual and aesthetic change in times of crisis and cultural transformation. Jeremiah received his PhD from the Stanford University Graduate School of Education Concentration in Education and Jewish Studies in 2021. He is currently a Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.
In 2021-22, Jeremiah was a Research Fellow at the UCLA Milken Center for Jewish American life. As part of this fellowship, he wrote a 30-part blog series offering snapshots of his archival and ethnographic research. CLICK HERE TO EXPLORE THE BLOG. Jeremiah is the Lead Researcher for the Cantorial and Synagogue Music Archive (CSMA), an ongoing project of the Cantors Assembly Foundation. In this role, he works with elder cantors to preserve, digitize and disseminate their personal collections of unique 19th and 20th century cantorial musical scores. The archive that is being built is currently available online even as it continues to grow. CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE CSMA ARCHIVE. Jeremiah was a 2022-23 Fellow at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.
Download Jeremiah's Résumé:
Jeremiah_Lockwood_CV2024-25.pdfJeremiah was the 2019-20 recipient of the YIVO Kremen Memorial Fellowship in East European Arts, Music and Theater, the 2020 AJS Women's Caucus innovative scholarship award and the 2021 Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies Award. His writing has been published in Religion and American Culture, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Germanica, and In geveb, as well as in popular publications such as Tablet and the Forward.
Jeremiah’s book, Golden Ages, is an ethnographic study of young singers in the contemporary Brooklyn Hasidic community who base their aesthetic explorations of the culturally intimate space of prayer on the gramophone-era cantorial golden age. Jeremiah Lockwood proposes a view of their work as a nonconforming social practice that calls upon the sounds and structures of Jewish sacred musical heritage to disrupt the aesthetics and power hierarchies of their conservative community, defying institutional authority and pushing at normative boundaries of sacred and secular. Beyond its role as a desirable art form, golden age cantorial music offers aspiring Hasidic singers a form of Jewish cultural productivity in which artistic excellence, maverick outsider status, and sacred authority are aligned.
Projects
Golden Ages – Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era
Golden Ages relates the engaging stories of a group of non-conformist musicians in the New York Chassidic community. I suggest that contemporary Hasidic cantorial revivalists are not only reviving a style of music but are also engaged in a revival of a form of comportment in prayer that foregrounds the role of cantor as arbiter of sacred experience.
Melody Like a Confession — a Cultural History of the Cantorial Gramophone Era
My proposed second book project I am currently at work on, Melody Like a Confession, will constitute the first monograph on the cultural history of the transnational gramophone era cantorial phenomenon. The project is premised on the view of cantorial music as both a form of expressive culture and an intellectual movement within a rapidly evolving period of social change and cultural reinvention.
Live Davenings — technologies of ritual learning and the convening of a Jewish sacred music underground
At the onset of the 21st century, Jewish musicians from across a diverse array of communities have displayed a renewed interest in khazones, an aestheticized version of cantorial prayer leading associated with a mass mediated pop culture phenomenon in the early 20th century. This musical revival of a century old genre of prayer music has been facilitated in part due to a new accessibility of recordings of cantorial prayer performance through the internet. These secret recordings, referred to as “live davenings,” usurp the characteristic ephemerality of prayer to document a 20th century aesthetic concept of cantorial music as an art form beyond its ritual function.
Publications
BOOKS
Lockwood, Jeremiah. Golden Ages: Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era. UC Press in the Jewish Cultures and History Series. 2024.
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520396425/golden-ages
ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS
Lockwood, J. “Live davenings: technologies of ritual learning and the convening of a Jewish sacred music underground.” Jewish Social Studies. 2024.
Lockwood, J. “Jewlia Eisenberg and Queer Piyut.” Contemporary Jewry. 2023.
Lockwood, J. “Hassidic Cantors ‘Out of Context’: Venues of Contemporary Cantorial Performance.” Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music. 2023.
Lockwood, J. “Prayer and crime: Cantor Elias Zaludkovsky’s concert performance season in 1924 Poland.” In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. 2022. https://ingeveb.org/articles/prayer-and-crime
Lockwood, J. “What is the cantorial ‘Golden Age’? hefker khazones (wanton cantorial music) or ‘the key to the Jewish soul’?” Cantors Assembly 75th Anniversary Journal. 2022. https://www.academia.edu/86287460/What_Is_the_Cantorial_Golden_Age_Hefker_Khazones_or_the_Key_to_the_Jewish_Soul_
Lockwood, J. “Prière et crime dans la Pologne de l’entre-deux guerre: L’agenda musical 1924 du chantre Elias Zaludkovsky.” Translated by Marie Schumacher-Brunhes. Germanica, no. 67. December 2020.
Lockwood, J. and Ari Kelman. "From Aesthetics to Experience: How Changing Conceptions of Prayer Changed the Sound of Jewish Worship." Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation. 2020. https://www.academia.edu/85943555/From_Aesthetics_to_Experience_How_Changing_Conceptions_of_Prayer_Changed_the_Sound_of_Jewish_Worship
Lockwood, J. “A Cantorial Lesson: the lineage of a learning encounter.” Studies in American Jewish Literature, Special Issue, American Jews and Music, 2019. https://www.academia.edu/40580083/A_Cantorial_Lesson_The_Lineage_of_a_Learning_Encounter
Kirzane, J., et al. “Teaching Guide to Erotic Yiddish Poetry.” In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies, 2019. https://ingeveb.org/pedagogy/teaching-guide-to-erotic-yiddish-poetry
Kelman, Ari Y., et al. “Safe and on the Sidelines: Jewish Students and the Israel-Palestine Conflict on Campus.” A study by the Research Group of the Stanford Concentration in Education and Jewish Studies, 2017.
BLOG
Conversations: Words and Music from the American Jewish Experience. Thirty-part series for the UCLA Milken Center for American Jewish Experience. 2021-2. https://schoolofmusic.ucla.edu/resources/conversations-words-music-from-the-american-jewish-experience/
BOOK REVIEWS
Lockwood, J. review of The Lost World of Russia’s Jews: Ethnography and Folklore in the Pale of Settlement. by Abraham Rechtman, Nathaniel Deutsch and Noh Barrera. Ab Imperio, 2022.
Lockwood, J. review of Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth-Century America: Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack. by Judah Cohen. Musica Judaica Online Reviews, 2020. https://mjoreviews.org/2020/10/30/jewish-religious-music-in-nineteenth-century-america-restoring-the-synagogue-soundtrack/
SELECTED JOURNALISM
Lockwood, J. “Performing the High Holidays,“ Tablet, 2021
Lockwood, J. “Golden Ages: Cantors and their Ghosts” Jewish Culture Festival: News, 2020
Lockwood, J. “Blues Man of the Dirt” Satellite Magazine, 2015
Lockwood, J. “Legendary Voices: The Education of the Great Cantors” Jewish Currents, 2014 https://archive.jewishcurrents.org/legendary-voices-the-education-of-the-great-cantors/
Lockwood, J. “Saving Bulgaria's Jews: Church, State and Citizens United” Jewish Currents, 2013
Lockwood, J. “Songs of Desert Wanderers”, Tablet, 2012
Lockwood, J. “Searching the Torah's Seams: A Roundtable” Shm'a, 2012
Lockwood, J. “A Year of Revolutionary Nigunim” The Jewish Daily Forward, 2011 https://forward.com/culture/134799/a-year-of-revolutionary-nigunim/
Lockwood, J. “The Shofar and the Power of Memory” Shm'a, 2010
Lockwood, J. “Out of Africa: Hazanut and the Blues” The Jewish Daily Forward, 2009
Lockwood, J. “What is Jewish Music?,” “What is a Cantor?,” “What is a Shofar?” My Jewish Learning , web video series, 2009